Livingston Film Series: Theater Camp

The Livingston Film Series is delighted to present a free screening of Theater Camp.
This loving chronicle of the on- and offstage shenanigans at a summer drama camp in the Adirondacks is the movie equivalent of a yarn-and-popsicle-stick weaving your kid brought home from crafts class. Theater Camp was co-directed and co-written by one of its stars, The Bear’s Molly Gordon, based in part on remembrances of her own childhood friendship with co-star Ben Platt. The pair’s longtime friend Nick Lieberman co-wrote and co-directed with Gordon, while Platt’s now-fiancé Noah Galvin plays the key role of an overworked production manager. All those crisscrossing real-life connections somehow result not in one of those too-many-cooks comedies that feel like a collection of sketches, but in a cohesive and warmhearted 93-minute tribute to arts pedagogy (think School of Rock, but with Sondheim) and to the self-serious drama teen who lives within us all. Yes, the mockumentary-style framing device is overfamiliar and distracting, but it falls away after the first few scenes, and the camp’s big end-of-summer production, Joan, Still a deranged original musical that achieves the rare trick of creating a fictional work-within-the-work that is supposed to be really good, and actually is.