There’s a specific audience for the movie Theater Camp. It’s a demographic who prays every morning in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Patti LuPone for the most important things in life: that the high school theater director will finally listen and produce Songs of a New World instead of Footloose for the spring musical; that they’ll transfer that West End production of Dreamgirls already; and, of course, that they’ll find their community, the people who understand these priorities.
That audience was abundantly present at the film’s , shows off new shades of confident kookiness. Galvin has a unique ability to portray a vulnerability that invites an immediate audience impulse to protect and empathize, and then subvert that with an almost menacing unpredictability. There are also hilarious turns by Ayo Edebiri, Patti Harrison, Nathan Lee Graham, Owen Thiele, and Caroline Aaron.
Theater Camp is shrewd about the world it is sending up (though it feels so real, you could just as truthfully say “it is documenting”). The kids need the validation of the adults, and the adults need the adulation of the kids. And everybody needs the healing power of the arts, as bizarre as those arts might be. (In this case, an original musical number called “Women Can’t Read” performed by a cast of children.)
The standing ovations at Sundance prove its appeal to the people who know this world, because they’re a part of that world. When someone who is uninitiated watches, will they be so tickled or charmed? Who knows. And who cares. This is one for us.
As the screening let out on Saturday night, there was a cacophony of conversations with everyone swapping their own war stories about their theatrical backgrounds: Rizzo in Grease in 11th grade! Went to a camp just like AdirondACTS! Have seen Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway six times!
It makes sense that its creative team is a quartet of best friends, two of whom (Gordon and Platt) have known each other since they were three years old, and two of whom (Platt and Galvin) are engaged to be married. Theater Camp is about a lifetime of loving theater. And it’s about the people you have the privilege to love it with.
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