The story is quite thin but coherent. What it lacks in complexity it makes up for in fun, theatre-based gags. Gordon’s woo-woo, seance-conducting, limelight-loving character, Rebecca-Diane, is a welcome departure from Claire, who she plays on one of my favourite shows, The Bear. Claire, the manic pixie dream girl, drove me nuts with lines like “Never apologise” - the most ridiculous thing you could say to someone you’re entering a relationship with. Love means constantly having to say you’re sorry. But I digress. Ayo Edebiri, Gordon’s The Bear co-star, is everything, everywhere all at once right now and very funny in this as the tutor who lied her way into the job and knows little to nothing about theatre.
The film’s rated M and isn’t aimed at children, but I think the adult content is fairly innocuous and probably over their heads anyway, so I would cautiously show my 8- and 10-year-olds.
While I love a film that comes in at a tight 90 minutes, Theatre Camp wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be. I would’ve liked more character development so the story and final resolution had a bit more emotional heft. Which isn’t to say the climactic song’s chorus, “Camp isn’t home, but is it kind of? Kind of it is. I think it kind of is,” didn’t make me well up. But that probably has more to do with my propensity for crying when children sing than anything to do with the film.
HE SAW
Molly Gordon, 27, is so hot right now. This movie, which she co-wrote, co-directed and in which she co-stars, represents the second part of her recent, sudden rise to the A-List, following her starring role in history’s hottest food drama, The Bear, in which she plays Claire, the dream girlfriend of dewy-eyed, sleek-nosed, hotter-than-soup protagonist Carmy.
Claire has caused some controversy for being an overly idealised male fantasy: a spectacularly attractive doctor who hangs out in her undies in her man’s kitchen, telling him never to apologise. That comment was so stupid Zanna paused the show to rant about it, going on for so long I stopped listening; an act for which I will certainly apologise.
But flawed characters are not an actor’s problem. Gordon played the role of Claire pitch-perfectly, and plays this one even better, despite the fact her character Rebecca-Diane is so wildly different from Claire that, were this not her film, no sane casting director would have even considered her for the role. Theatre Camp demonstrates immediately the breadth of Gordon’s talent. She is, at least, a quadruple threat: She can sing, act, direct and write, and she’s apparently equally adept at performing in musicals, drama or comedy.
That is not to say, however, that she necessarily does all those things equally well. Theatre Camp is far from the triumph the movie’s incredible buzz might make you assume it is. A deep understanding of musical theatre’s tropes and personality types is no doubt strongly correlated with an appreciation for this movie: Zanna laughed at least three times more than I did and I assume that much of the buzz has come from people like her, who have grown up with such a love for musical theatre that just the title alone on an otherwise empty screen could keep them happy for 90 minutes.
Gordon has cited the work of pioneering mockumentarist Christopher Guest as an inspiration, but Theatre Camp is no This is Spinal Tap or Best in Show. It doesn’t have the gut-punch humour of those movies and the story is muddy and overly reliant on its humour to get it out of narrative trouble. In good news, the songs are mostly quite funny, and the finale is downright brilliant, but otherwise this feels like a short film that became a feature not because it needed to but because someone understood that musical theatre people wouldn’t be able to help but sing its praises.
Theatre Camp is in cinemas now.
