Friendship lies behind Sundance comedy ‘Theater Camp’
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — There is quite a bit of history between the team behind “Theater Camp,” a loving satire of musical theater kids and their teachers that premieres Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.
Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin and Nick Lieberman are all, first and foremost, theater kids themselves. They’re also longtime friends. Lieberman has been making things with Platt since they were in high school. Galvin and Gordon are best friends and did a play together about a decade ago. And Galvin and Platt are currently engaged.
It’s Platt and Gordon’s relationship that stretches back the furthest, though. Both children of parents in the entertainment industry, they’ve been friends since they were 3 years old.
“I was deeply in love with him,” Gordon laughed in a recent interview with her collaborators. “He came out to me and didn’t want to be with me, but I still tried for years,”
The ins and outs of all of their collaborations, musical workshops, web series, comedy videos and hours improvising would require a flow chart to process fully. But what it boils down to is when the four found each other, they didn’t want to let go.
About five years ago, they found themselves with a moment between projects and decided that they would finally do something together. So they “stole” some kids from Galvin’s old performing arts high school in Manhattan and put together a short film about a musical theater camp.
“It seemed like the most natural world for us to jump off the ledge into together as this comedy collective for the first time,” Platt said. “We all felt like it really suited us tonally and emotionally. It was exactly the kind of thing we wanted to make. (The short) was a quite a janky, very fast, very, very, very cheap, quick little moment. But it...