COOL AT CAMP not a bad show. I’d even call it a good show. An impressive feat considering the eye watering five (count em: Dani Tapper, Steven Blutig, Peter Weidman, Robin Raskin, and
Emily Stummer) writing credits attached to the book. It’s a good score, a good book, a stellar cast, with brilliant choreography and amazing direction from Beth Criscuolo. A complete
package deal to deliver us a show that’s just… good. And offers very little else.
The particular idiosyncrasy that COOL AT CAMP is channeling revolves around the exploits of a fictional north east Jewish Teen Summer Camp. The core ensemble consists of so-called
‘lifers’ who spend 10 months out of the year waiting for the 8 weeks they spend together. As the opening song explains clearly, there are the cool kids, and there are the kids who are (Title Card) cool at camp. For our A story, the hitch this year is that one of our teens is actually a full blown goy, and now finds himself in a classic fish out of water story where he is no longer ‘the cool kid’.
For those who are uninitiated, the “Jewish Summer Camp” (JSC) is a cultural relic of East Coast American Judaism that defines the adolescent years of many jewish kids between the ages of 8 and 16. I went to one many moons ago, and thus was the prime target for COOL AT CAMP, but the show is still otherwise comprehensible enough to an outsider that I wouldn’t immediately write it off. The comedy and pacing are effective enough at setting the tone, with the character
of Will (Thomas Pendergast) filling in as the audience surrogate for any joke that may need a bit more verbiage to understand.
The core of the problem with COOL AT CAMP is that it plays it all so safe that there’s very little there to actually chew on. All rough edges have been sanded down and polished over, and
there’s something unnervingly paternal about how the story approaches many of its characters. I look back fondly at my time at one of the very same camps the show claims to be satirizing, but I also distinctly remember it being a 2 month long hormone fueled nightmare where I got up to
some truly bizarre hijinks. For as much of a love letter as it is, COOL AT CAMP is all rather toothless both in its story and in its setting.
The production definitely claims to be by and for the kids who were once cool at camp, but more often than not I can’t help but feel like the target audience are the parents. Perhaps all once
campers themselves, but who experienced their children’s time at summer camp through the filter of what they’d be willing to discuss in a written letter. The comedy is very effective at
telling the kinds of embarrassing jokes that stick around after the fact, perhaps cleaned up a bit by the passage of time, but other than the occasional cheeky swear there’s hardly anything
particularly “adult” from a musical that bills itself as an Adult Musical Comedy. There’s a whole gratuitously long musical number about getting your period in a bunk, nothing about fucking in the woods or smuggle booze into your cabin. Another key tell is the distinct lack of things like
prank wars or bunk hierarchy that would do well to put a lot more meat on the bones of our camp setting. The fact that there was no “Looser Bunk” at all was especially troubling to me, who
spent my 4380 hours at a JSC trudging up a hill to get to the truly abominable Bunk 49.
The frustrating part about all of this is that I can very clearly see the outlines of where all the ‘dangerous’ jokes were going to be laid out. There’s one girl who’s very clearly coded as going
through a major queer sexual awakening, until she’s suddenly not. The high stakes co-ed intra bunk meetup tees up a steamy meet cute that ultimately just turns into a dull, exposition pushing conversation. Even Will, our goyfilte fish out water is still just as lanky, white, and nebbishy as the rest of his bunk mates, ultimately limiting many of the misunderstanding to rely on niche cultural references. I’m not asking for anything too distasteful or scandalous (although I saw plenty of that during my camp adventures too), but one year at summer camp we kidnapped a kid by stuffing them in a laundry bag during a cross bunk feud. The bar should be somewhere
around there.
COOL AT CAMP is a breezy time, but often too family friendly for its own good. Will it play in Peoria? At the moment its tastes are a little too niche for a general audience, but it would definitely do gangbusters in the Poconos. It’s a brilliant ensemble working through some catchy tunes, but it picks its battles all too well and takes victory laps where it never feels deserved.
COOL AT CAMP is a cool little show, but it’s going to have to really get its hands dirty if it wants to be anything else.
The Independent Artists movement 