Theater Camp

AdirondACTS, a theatre camp in upstate New York that never has enough money. Joan, one of its founders, has a seizure and falls into a coma, and the place passes to her son Troy, a business influencer who understands nothing about theatre. To keep the camp alive the counsellors put together an original musical for her: Joan, Still. It is shot as a mockumentary. It is the first feature by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, expanded from a short film they made in 2020. Noah Galvin, Ben Platt, Molly Gordon and Jimmy Tatro are in the cast. It premiered at Sundance on 21 January 2023 and went wide on 14 July 2023 through Searchlight Pictures. It took 4.6 million dollars. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 86 percent. Critics wrote that its depiction of the theatre experience is authentic and lands hardest with theatre people, while the comedy reaches further than that. The National Board of Review named it one of the ten best independent films of 2023 and Noah Galvin was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Who it is for: people who know stage culture and like mockumentary comedy. Who it is not for: anyone outside the theatre world. Most of the jokes belong to that culture and from the outside they read as in-jokes.