The Sundance Movie Pageant raised the curtain on Theater Camp Saturday afternoon, presenting the world premiere of the feel-good mockumentary made by 4 finest associates, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman.

The viewers inside Park Metropolis’s Eccles Theatre gifted the exhibiting with a beneficiant and heartfelt standing ovation and saved one other for the shock musical efficiency that adopted the ultimate credit, a rarity for a fest screening. The temporary musical ditty featured eight younger actors belting out a medley of tunes written for the film’s musical finale titled Joan, Nonetheless. Once they had taken their last bow, the group cheered and applauded like one would for a Broadway efficiency.

Theater Camp opens with a scene that units up the remainder of the movie: the beloved founding father of a run-down theater camp, performed by Amy Sedaris, suffers a seizure as a consequence of a strobe gentle in a highschool manufacturing of Bye, Bye Birdie. As summer time rolls round once more, children are gathering from throughout to attend her scrappy camp in upstate New York, amusingly referred to as AdirondACTS.

Her clueless “crypto-bro” son Troy, performed by Jimmy Tatro, is tasked with holding the thespian paradise operating whereas being pressured to navigate the drama with the camp’s workers, performed by Platt, Gordon, Galvin, Ayo Edebiri, Nathan Lee Graham and Owen Thiele, as they mount a manufacturing in Joan’s honor. Minari breakout Alan Kim additionally has a scene-stealing position as a wannabe expertise agent, and Patti Harrison performs a enterprise improvement exec with ulterior motives.

The movie additionally boasts big-name producers from Gloria Sanchez Prods., Picturestart and Matter Studios, together with Will Ferrell, Jessica Elbaum, Erik Feig, Samie Kim Falvey, Julia Hammer, Ryan Heller, Maria Zuckerman, Galvin, Gordon, Lieberman and Platt. Theater Camp is without doubt one of the titles up for distribution so right this moment’s debut will doubtless gas gross sales discuss because of the viewers’s heat embrace.

Gordon and Lieberman teamed to make their characteristic directorial debut on the movie and throughout the temporary Q&A that adopted the premiere (and efficiency), she defined how that got here to be.

“It actually got here out of us simply desirous to make one thing with our associates. I met Ben after I was 3 years outdated. I’m going to cry as a result of that is very overwhelming. I used to be in love with him, and he was so homosexual and didn’t like me,” she mentioned to huge laughs from her lifelong finest buddy who simply so occurs to now be engaged to Galvin. “We simply all the time needed to make one thing as a collective, and we’re so impressed by all these those who simply made issues with their associates and introduced in a better neighborhood. We introduced in Owen, Patty and Jimmy and all these wonderful individuals and needed to create a sandbox the place they might actually personal their roles and have company and simply get to have enjoyable.”

It’s based mostly on their brief movie and Lieberman mentioned once they had been pitching it round city, they mentioned their imaginative and prescient was akin to 1993’s The Battle Room, a documentary about Invoice Clinton’s 1992 presidential marketing campaign. “They had been like, what the hell? Insane. However we simply needed to do it in a extra cinema verité manner and make it our personal in that manner,” Lieberman mentioned, including that the opposite supply of inspiration was Christopher Visitor’s iconic mockumentaries like Greatest in Present, A Mighty Wind and Ready for Guffman.

For this half, Tony Award-winning performer Platt singled out the largest “deal with and shock” of the expertise. It “was how unimaginable the younger actors had been at improvising and bringing themselves to the movie and being in completely in their very own pores and skin, which is what theater camp’s all about. They actually obtained the guts of the movie and I’m so comfortable they got here and sang for you guys as a result of that was like the largest deal with on the planet.”