It was wise of directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman to hire mostly unknown actors for their mockumentary about a summer camp for “theater brats” in the Adirondacks. Except for Amy Sedaris, who plays the founder of the camp but is only in the movie briefly, and Ayo Edebiri, who probably wasn’t famous yet for The Bear when she did this, the performers don’t carry with them any extraneous identifications for the audience, and thus their playacting of people who are smitten with the performance bug seems more natural than it would be otherwise, even if the broad comedy indicates that they are very much acting. Reportedly, much of the movie was improvised, and while the hit-and-miss nature of such a gambit results in a lot of uneven humor, it also keeps the viewer off balance. Maybe these people really are into Broadway that ridiculously.

The framing situation is that the camp, called AdirondACTS, is on the verge of bankruptcy, and when its CEO, Joan Rubinsky (Sedaris) suffers a seizure due to an errant strobe light, she is hospitalized and her business school-educated son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), takes over, charged with learning the whole theater camp culture from scratch. Being a rational businessman, he lays off some of the instructors to balance the books and puts in their place one clearly unqualified instructor (Edebiri) who is quickly overwhelmed. This framework of desperation allows Gordon and Lieberman to study a rainbow of student types as they maneuver for choice parts in the big musical that the camp will present for their summer project. There are would-be divas and drama queens and macho pretenders and singers who can’t tell when they’re off-key, but for the most part the enthusiasm you would expect from theater brats—adolescents who already knew what Sondheim was about when they were in elementary school—is tempered with a sweetness that keeps any extreme snark at bay. On top of this cohort you have the camp’s staff—professionals who could not actually make it big in New York, and while the associated resentments linger just below the surface, they aren’t portrayed as being anything less than capable in their chosen field. 

There are so many examples of cliches that none of the characters except maybe Troy has a chance to develop into anything beyond their cliche. Tension is injected into the story when the owners of a neighboring camp for rich kids decides it wants to buy AdirondACTS for an expansion scheme, so the production—an original musical based on Joan’s life—has to be better than ever in order to fight off this threat from the evils of commerce, which Troy realizes he represents to many of his new employees. And if the ending is predictable, it makes up for the gentility of its early humor with a sufficiently squirm-inducing performance of the play-within-the-movie, which feels more realistic than most of what preceded it. You don’t need to be a theater brat to appreciate Theater Camp, but if you are one (or were one in the past) you’re likely to see yourself in someone up there on the stage. 

Opens Oct. 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Theater Camp home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 20th Century Studios