I’m not too proud or ashamed to say I wasn’t a theater camp kid when I was young. My parents never sent me or my siblings to any camp for that matter. This just wasn’t what we did. I did sing a song in the production of Yankee Doodle Dandy when I was briefly in Catholic school, which wasn’t for very long. Suffice it to say this isn’t my jam even though I do love musicals quite a bit. Theater Camp premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January and is getting released on Hulu from Searchlight Pictures.

The synopsis of this film is this.  A bunch of talented kids get recruited to come to a special camp each summer. Specifically theater camp in the picturesque Adirondack mountains. The title of the camp is actually a play on that.  The kids are very talented. They already know how to sing and dance and do dramatic acting at a young age. The camp is here to hone their abilities. The camp counselors on the other hand are a bit eccentric. Ben Platt and Molly Gordon play Amos and Rebecca Diane, two counselors who’ve worked at the camp for a while. They have an on-again-off-again relationship. They are just a couple of many funny characters in this film.

This film is for a specific audience the filmmakers Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman filled the cast with talented people from the kids to adults, but there is a major contrivance in the plot. Something has to happen to one character so the rest of the story can move forward. That is all fine and good but the film has to be funny and entertaining for all audiences. This movie is geared especially for the theater crowd. It’s filled with a lot of theater references and mentions of Bob Fosse and other theater notables people who follow this sort of thing will know.

I tried enjoying this film as much as I could but I just wasn’t laughing at all the jokes like others in my theater were. I’m just not the audience for this movie. That being said I understand what it was going for and who it was made for. The cast was filled with talented kids such as Alan Kim from Minari who played an agent. I liked whenever he popped up on the screen. Also, Ayo Edebiri from the Bear showed up and she was like me in a way. Completely out of her depth. The real find for me was Noah Galvin who played Glenn. He shined in his role and I was glad to see him in this in whatever role he played. 

I felt like everybody was winking at the camera though. Even though this was a film within a film it felt like these people knew they were making fun of theater camp instead of making a film celebrating theater camp and all its eccentricities. The documentary-style filmmaking within the structure of the movie was a bit off-putting to me. It would have made more sense to tell a straightforward story exactly the way this film unfolded to me. There was a lot of room for improvisation within the structure of the story and that could have made the film funnier all the way around. 

The cast are going for all the gusto, especially a few of the kids Platt, Gordon and Galvin. The structure of a film within a film didn’t work so well for me. The humor was there for those who understood this world of theater camp and camps like this in general. The story had a major contrivance that made it move forward. Without it it wouldn’t exist. There were too many jokes and funny moments that fell flat as far as I was concerned. I just didn’t laugh or enjoy this movie as much as others who were in the theater I was in. The fact of the matter is I am not the audience for this movie and that’s more or less why I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen