Inside 'Theater Camp,' the funniest movie you'll see all summer

Places, everyone! The curtain is going up on the funniest film you'll see this summer — the Sundance Film Festival sensation Theater Camp. Cross the summer camp comedy of Wet Hot American Summer with the musical theater hilarity of Waiting for Guffman and you'll have the general vibe that the movie's four-person creative team of Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman and Ben Platt is going for.

"Our movie has flavors of both, but it probably lives more in the world of Guffman," Platt tells Yahoo Entertainment. "We wanted to catch all of the humor and story by being a fly on the wall, and then head to a big performance piece as the finale." (These interviews were conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.)

That big performance piece marks the culmination of the audience's too-brief time at AdirondACTS, a fictional camp for theater kids nestled in the Catskills. Platt and Gordon play the pair of codependent counselors tasked with writing and directing the camp's annual original musical. The duo's latest would-be masterwork is Joan Still — a retelling of the life and times of AdirondACTS founder Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), who is spending her summer in the hospital after suffering a stroke. In Joan's absence, her aspiring internet influencer son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), has taken charge of the camp with mere weeks to save it from financial ruin... a tall order for someone whose self-styled brand of "EnTROYpreneurship" has so far racked up more losses than wins.

Watch our interview with Theater Camp co-writer and star, Ben Platt

Just like Guffman — or Wet Hot American Summer for that matter — Theater Camp hits the audience in the funny bone scene after scene. But those laughs reach a thundering crescendo when Joan Still has its one-night-only premiere. It's an instant classic of an amateur production, with songs that would make Red, White & Blaine creator Corky St. Clair bite his pillow with envy. "I remember watching Guffman as a kid and wanting to see that entire musical," Lieberman — who directed the film with Gordon — confesses. "You leave the movie wanting more, and we wanted to give audiences a similar feeling."

Moviegoers won't be the only people coming to Joan Still fresh. Tatro says that he didn't know exactly what the filmmakers had in store until he sat down with the rest of the live audience that would be watching the production for the cameras. "None of that was in the script I read," the American Vandal scene-stealer reveals. "It just said, 'The kids do a performance of Joan Still.' The whole time I was just sitting there watching this incredible musical they had written for the kids to perform and at the end I was like, 'Am I crying right now?'"

"I think the movie would have worked even if the musical wasn't that good," Tatro adds. "But the fact that it's actually great is incredible. I've head the songs stuck in my head for weeks!"

To mitigate symptoms of "earworm-itis," Lieberman says that a companion soundtrack is coming that will feature full versions of the songs heard in the film. "There's no fuller filmed version of what's seen in the movie," he explains. "But the songs on the soundtrack are written as full musical numbers with a lot more pieces to them."

"There's a lot more on the soundtrack," Platt teases, shouting out "Wall Street Noise" as one of his favorite Joan Still numbers. "We just loved the idea of imagining Joan's life and taking liberties with the falsehoods and the truths. And then we parodied as many real Broadway shows as we could, from Fiddler on the Roof to Thoroughly Modern Millie. The version that's in the movie captures that balls-to-the-wall feeling where it's your only chance to perform each song and you only have four or five takes to do it. It's that ephemeral camp show quality where you spend all your time preparing for something and then in a blink, it's done."

Before he became the seasoned Broadway star of Tony-winning shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Parade, Platt was one of the bright-eyed, toe-tapping theater kids depicted in Theater Camp. And he was still part of the pre-Hamilton generation where being a drama nerd wasn't cool. "It's a dream come true," he says of how the musical theater crowd has miraculously become the in crowd. "Our aim with this film was to make a movie that lives in this cooler alt-comedy space. It's still pretty nerdy, but at the end of the day, it's a love letter to the [theater] community and a thank you to all the teachers that we had."

And it takes a nerd to make fun of nerds. Platt says that the makers of Theater Camp felt emboldened to spare no punches when it came to their portrayal of theater diva excesses. "There's no such thing as too far," he laughs. "We knew the messaging was in the right place, and we were going to tell the story we wanted to tell. So we felt we could be as brutal as we wanted to be."

Besides, Platt saw right away that the current generation of theater kids are OK with being the butt of jokes. "There's a lot more confidence and comfortability in their own skin, particularly some of our queer campers," he notes. "There's a lot of self-acceptance earlier on and that's really exciting to see. I certainly didn't feel like I had nearly as much of a handle on myself as some of these kids do! That's where we are and where we have to continue to be as a community."

Theater Camp is playing in theaters now.