Theater Camp Review
A whip smart, hilarious piece that sends up the theater community in a way that only one who loves it dearly ever could.
A rundown theater camp in upstate New York is thrown into turmoil when its founder is hospitalised only a few weeks out from the start of camp. The camp is on the edge of financial ruin, and the owner’s bro-y son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), steps into a minefield when it comes to big companies trying to poach the land, and the bank trying to foreclose on the camp. He finds little help in the theater camp leads, however - Amos (Ben Platt), Rebecca Dianne (Molly Gordon), Clive (Nathan Lee Graham), Gigi (Owen Thiele), Rita (Caroline Aaron) and Janet (Ayo Edebiri) are all more interested in the kids and the theater they are working on, along with their own interpersonal issues, than saving the camp.
Directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, Theater Camp is an out of control train of nonstop theater satire, completely entrenched and deep in its subject matter, while throwing jokes at you a mile a minute. It’s deeply funny, engaging and beautifully shot.
The cast is uniformly great, with Platt and Gordon believable in their theater obsessed roles. Noah Galvin as stagehand Glenn is a bit of a wunderkind discovery in the film and outside it. Tatro is absolutely hilarious as the bro culture obsessed Troy, and steals the show with every scene he’s in.
Visually, there’s a grit and a grain to the cinematography here that makes the film seem a particular level of artsy. While perhaps it doesn’t work quite as well in the long form as it did in the trailer, you can’t deny that this is a beautifully shot movie.
Ultimately, the story drags ever so slightly and does little to break the mould in terms of where you expect this to go. The start and the end throw up interesting little breaks in the formula, but ultimately this is a fairly standard formulaic story. Luckily, there’s enough here that feels fresh and new in the way of banter, in the freshness of the situation, and the occasional shift to the formula, to make it feel like a little bit of a revelation. And a really funny one at that.
