You can't fit in when you stand out.
At Camp Ovation - based on an actual summer camp for young actors, singers and dancers - an offbeat group of outcasts train in pursuit of professional dreams. The competition is tough and the relationship dramas tougher but it's the plain, old-fashioned hard work - the classes, rehearsals and performing before live audiences - that makes the experience as magical as it is bruising.
Bert Hanley (Don Dixon), a burnt-out, once-successful Broadway songwriter, has reached the career low of teaching and directing at Ovation for the summer. Through the kids' passion and commitment, however, he rekindles his own sense of joy and creativity.
At Camp Ovation, there are backstabbing 12-year-old understudies, fat girls in love with gay boys, gay boys in love with straight boys, straight boys in love with themselves and, most importantly, absolutely, positively no sports.
Crammed full of production numbers, and even more crammed with the pubescent angst and confused sexuality of a hundred misfit kids, Camp is a comedic exploration of the need for acceptance in a world where the definition of normal gets blurrier every day.
Special Agent Matti
Camp is a film for the theatre geeks among us, the musical theatre queens, the Thespians and those who like a bit of heart-warming fun. There's nothing about the film that you can't see at the Australian Theatre for Young People (except maybe some of the relationship stuff - but you can see all that at any high school) but if you can't hang around a youth group or a high school without looking suspicious then Camp is a good way to learn what your kids are up to.
And if you're a kid you can watch people your own age getting into things that are important to people your own age.
And Daniel Letterle is a spunk rat.
M (Low level coarse language)
110 minutes (1:50 hours)
Film: 4 March 2004
DVD rental: 21 July 2004
VHS rental: 21 July 2004
