Theater Camp review, American mockumentary is laugh out loud funny
This is an entertaining comedy that pokes fun at the whole business of acting. It’s no surprise that it received a standing ovation when it premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Theater Camp (M)
In cinemas
★★★½
The American satirical comedy Theater Camp has an engaging start, an amusing middle and an amazing ending. This 90-minute movie is worth watching for the final third, thanks to larger-than-life performances by a group of young actors (and one of their older peers), but the lead-up to this spectacular finale is quite good, too.
The filmmakers take a mockumentary approach and it works well. The notes that pop up on the screen to explain the background, and later future, of the characters are believably funny.
The setting is a theatre camp for school-aged children in upstate New York. When its founder, Joan (Amy Sedaris), has a stroke (in wryly theatrical circumstances), the bank calls in the debt and threatens to close the camp.
It’s up to her decidedly non-theatrical son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), to stop them. He fancies himself as a business brain even though he can’t pronounce the word entrepreneurial. When the stage manager, Glenn (Noah Galvin), talks about straight plays versus musicals, Troy asks what then is a “gay” play. Glenn’s answer is funny to think about.
The two main teachers are the head of drama, Amos (Ben Platt), and the head of music, Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon from the now-streaming TV series The Bear). They have taught at the camp for a decade. They want to be performers, not teachers, and this tension becomes important. Each year, they write and compose an original play that the students perform at the end of camp. Previous efforts include The Briefcase, the Door and the Salad.
Yes, they are not going to put mere money before artistic integrity.
They decide to honour their founder with a play titled Joan, Still. There’s a riff on the 2014 film Still Alice, for which Julianne Moore won an Oscar. When one of the kids says he can’t channel being a father, Amos asks him, “Did Julianne Moore have dementia?”
There are a lot of in-jokes about acting technique that are all the funnier because it’s kids on the other end of them. I was reminded of Henry Winkler’s wonderful performance as the acting coach in the recently-concluded TV series Barry.
The support cast includes another star of The Bear, Ayo Edebiri, as a fake acting teacher (She Lied On Her Resume, the mockumentary note tells us), Owen Thiele as the head of costume and Nathan Lee Graham as head of dance. They’re all fun to watch.
With the bank circling, the kids have to somehow make Joan, Still such a success that the camp can pay its debts and stay afloat. This takes us to that final third, the play itself.
The young actors knock it out of the park, especially Alexander Bello and Bailee Bonick. As mentioned, one of the adult actors also pulls out some surprises, but I won’t spoil who it is.
They are remarkable to watch, but whether that’s because they are incredible or terrible performers and Still, Joan is a hit or a flop is also something for viewers to find out.
Like the camp itself, this movie is all-hands-on-deck. It is the directorial debut of one of the stars, Gordon, alongside writer Nick Lieberman. They wrote the script with two of the other stars, Galvin and Platt.
And just about all of them wrote the soundtrack.
This is an entertaining observational comedy that pokes fun at the whole business of acting. It’s no surprise that it received a standing ovation when it premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
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Sitting in Bars with Cake (PG-13)
Prime Video
★★★½
The two main characters in the American drama-comedy Sitting in Bars with Cake, Jane (Yara Shahidi), and Corinne (Odessa A’Zion), are an introvert and extrovert respectively.
They are 24 and share an apartment in Los Angeles and have been best friends for most of their lives.
When they go to a party, Corinne belts out Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and returns home with her boyfriend, while Jane drinks little and returns home to bake a cake.
That cake – for Corinne’s birthday – becomes a pivotal confection. It’s taken to the next party, shared around and the men like it.
Corrine comes up with a plan. Jane will bake cakes and they will take them to bars so she can find a boyfriend.
“Because that won’t be weird, sitting in bars with cakes,’’ Jane says in response. “It’s Los Angeles,’’ her friend replies, “Everyone here is weird.”
They plot a course on a map of the city, using red string and pins. It looks like a police map of a manhunt.
The two friends work at a talent agency run by black fedora-wearing Benita (a wonderful if underused Bette Midler). Corinne hopes to become an agent while Jane, studying law to follow her parents into that profession, delivers the mail.
They plan a year – 50 cakes – of “cake-barring”. Their initial attempts have unexpected results. A spiced rum cake, for example, is fancied by a handsome young man in an eye-patch. He could be Jane’s pirate, until he messages her a photograph the next day.
As an aside, there’s no CGI here. The cakes are real and the actors eat them. Indeed, several versions of each cake had to be made, as some of the actors would not eat dairy and some would not eat gluten.
While this idea – baking, bars, blokes – is humorous enough, it’s hard to see how it can sustain a two-hour film. Fortunately it doesn’t have to.
About 30 minutes in, Corinne has a seizure and is taken to hospital. “I just thought they were headaches,’’ she says when the doctors deliver the diagnosis.
This shifts the story to one of two friends being there for each other when it matters most. “We’ll look back on this,’’ Jane says, “as that really weird year we spent in hospitals and bars.”
That weirdness is added to by the arrival of Corinne’s loving parents (terrific performances by Ron Livingston and Martha Kelly). Her dad is a Mr Fix-It, a spanner or screwdriver never far from hand. But there are some problems no-one can fix.
The two leads capture the deep, almost conditional, love of true friendship. They have fallings out, as friends do, such as when Corinne describes Jane’s underwear drawer as the “chastity collection from the von Trapp family”.
That is just part of being friends, of trusting, understanding and believing in each other. The moment where Jane says she sometimes wishes she was Corinne, and Corinne says she sometimes wishes she was Jane, is moving.
This movie is drawn from real life. It’s based on the 2015 book of the same name by Audrey Shulman, who wrote the script. It’s directed by Trish Sie (The Sleepover, Pitch Perfect 3). It shows how a weird idea can turn into something that is at times quite beautiful.
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