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

It’s easy to belittle musical theatre: it’s earnest, showy and often ridiculous. New mockumentary ‘Theater Camp’ understands this acutely, but also knows the power it can hold, writes Louis Chilton

This sing of ours: ‘Theater Camp’ follows the staff and pupils at a summer camp for musical theatre devotees (Searchlight)

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.