Courtesy of Sundance
There’s a specific audience for the movie Theater Camp. It’s 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 Sundance Film Festival premiere Saturday night in Park City, a crowd clearly reared on ritualistic rosary sequences of Our Sondheims followed by three Hail Audras. Directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, who co-wrote the largely improvised story with their best friends Ben Platt and Noah Galvin, Theater Camp isn’t so much a love letter to theater geeks as it is the diary of one.
It still can feel like a revelation to learn that the diary isn’t a personal one, but a shared one; that there is a passionate, unabashed population that understands every reference in the film, from the self-important drama club acting techniques to each musical theater song a camper sang in their audition—and why it was an embarrassing choice. We have been every kid at that camp, and, at times, every adult working there.