Theater Camp knows musicals are cringey – but it still shows the artform the respect it deserves

Insect bites. Morning alarms. Ricky Gervais’s laugh. There are things that more or less everyone agrees are annoying. Another one, if less understandably, is musical theatre – both the quasi-religious art form itself and the skin-crawlingly earnest disciples we call “musical theatre kids”.

Theater Camp, a new mockumentary out in cinemas last Friday, draws enthusiastically from the works of Christopher Guest (This is Spinal Tap; Waiting for Guffman). It’s a very funny and often quite incisive look at the foibles of the musical theatre world, revolving around co-dependent teachers (played by Ben Platt and Molly Gordon) who must stage an original musical while the camp’s founder (Amy Sedaris) is in a coma. We’re also introduced to a raft of other well-established musical theatre types: the flaky, hippyish music teacher (Gordon), the caustic dance instructor (Nathan Lee Graham), the diligent, put-upon stagehand (Noah Galvin), and so forth. There are, too, a number of outsiders: American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro plays a bro-y wannabe influencer who takes charge of the titular camp, while comedian Patti Harrison (I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson) is a nefarious power player looking to buy out the camp for big business.

There is a montage early on in the film in which children audition for roles in the camp’s summer production. Most people will be familiar with this sort of scene – the “quirky audition montage” has featured in everything from Mel Brooks’s The Producers to Pitch Perfect to Lady Bird to The Simpsons. (The trope has even featured on the stage – for instance, the quick sequence of auditions interpolated into “Opening Doors” in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.) Often in these montages, the joke is on the performer: we see terrible act after terrible act warble their way through a few lines of whatever popular hit, before, eventually, at the end of the line, the despondent casting group reaches our star-in-waiting.

In Theater Camp, however, this is not the joke. As we watch the adolescent hopefuls perform, it’s clear that they are talented – some of them in the rough-edged, clearly ceilinged way of young amateurs, others to a flamboyant, precocious degree. Rather we laugh at the peculiarities of the teachers, as well as the incongruous confidence of some of the pre-teens. The art form itself is spared from mockery. It helps that the movie’s writers – Gordon and Nick Liberman (who also co-directed it), plus Galvin and former Dear Evan Hansen star Platt – have a strong background in musical theatre. These are people launching their lampoon from a place of deep love, and, even more importantly, understanding – cringe factor notwithstanding.

It’s not hard to see why musicals are so widely disparaged. They are often wrenchingly sincere and ostentatious – qualities that do not exactly scream conventional cool. Furthermore, many musicals, even successful ones, are simply not very good. It’s a particularly brutal tainting-by-association, because the best musicals, on the other hand, are among the finest works of theatre to have graced the stage. There’s a strong argument to be made that Sondheim was the finest creative mind of the last century. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the de facto poster boy for “annoying musical theatre enthusiast” after the success of his Broadway musical Hamilton, is still a songwriter of prodigious talent. Few people in the world could do what he does.

It also bears mentioning, of course, that musical theatre is one of our queerest popular art forms; it’s not a stretch to say that many people’s aversion to it may be rooted in homophobia or some form of gay panic. But this queer specificity is what has made it richer. It is an art form that has been shaped by outsiderdom, and struggled against it. Musical theatre is, and has been historically, a means for many queer people to defy the idea that you should live in the shadows. It is about being loud, audacious, and seen.

Above all, Theater Camp is interested in laughs; it doesn’t require too much of an appreciation for musical theatre to enjoy. But for those of a performative disposition, there’s no overstating just how well it pitches its parody. Yes, these people are cringey as all hell. But you just can’t look away.

‘Theater Camp’ is in cinemas now