Ben Platt didn’t grow up singing Britney Spears and ‘N Sync.
“I was listening to ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ and doing (musicals) in my backyard,” he says. “I asked for a fog machine for my birthday when I was 7 or 8, and for clip-on microphones. I was slowly upping the production value of my shows, which were almost always my little brother and I playing all the characters. We did ‘Cats’ with some overturned furniture and garbage cans – it gets pretty bad.”
Like Mistoffelees himself, Platt has now conjured up a big-screen ode to theater-kid magic with “Theater Camp” (in theaters Friday), playing a frazzled counselor at a cash-strapped performing arts camp in upstate New York. When the program’s founder (Amy Sedaris) has a strobe-induced seizure during a middle-school production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” the instructors rally together to put on a show and save the camp.
Ben Platt recalls the ‘pleasant surprise’ of making ‘Theater Camp’ with fiancé Noah Galvin
“Theater Camp” is directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Platt and his fiancé, actor Noah Galvin. The sweetly offbeat film is “an amalgam of all our collective teachers and experiences,” says Platt, 29, who grew up doing musical theater in Los Angeles with Gordon, his childhood friend.
“Some of the things that happened at theater camp, you would tell somebody and they would never believe,” Gordon says. “But if you’re a theater person, you know, ‘Oh, I’ve had the teacher who had us all pretend we’re in a tsunami, or use your parents’ divorce.’”
Like 1996 mockumentary “Waiting for Guffman,” the movie is largely improvised, with the script serving as a detailed outline of potential jokes and scenes. One of Platt’s favorite parts of the process was getting to collaborate with Galvin, also 29, whom he proposed to last November after nearly three years of dating.
Weeks before shooting, “we were locked together in this strange, smelly camp office, just writing and making each other laugh,” Platt recalls. “That’s a scary thing when you’re with your partner in such close quarters, working on something creatively with such high stakes. And it was a pleasant surprise that it was such a joyful and easy thing.”
Galvin also appears in “Theater Camp” as timid stage manager Glenn, who eventually cuts loose with a splashy production number.
“Watching people discover him in (the film) is one of the great joys of sitting through it,” Platt says. “I never get sick of watching to the end, because I love people seeing his arc.”
The ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ star took ‘meaningful’ lessons from Broadway’s ‘Parade’
The movie arrives in theaters just as “Parade” gets ready to end its limited Broadway run Aug. 6. Platt stars as the real-life Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Atlanta who was wrongly accused of murder and lynched by a mob in 1915. The intense and emotional production won Tony Awards for best musical revival and best director (Michael Arden), and landed Platt his second best-actor nomination after winning for “Dear Evan Hansen” in 2017.
“He was made to be on the stage. It’s like watching someone do exactly what they’re meant to,” Gordon says. “With this film, too, it feels like this new chapter of him continuing to surprise us as an artist.”
For Platt, the show “gave me a new perspective on my own identity as a Jew: not putting pressure on myself to judge my Judaism based on observance or devoutness, but rather just accept that it’s in my blood and part of my culture, and to be proud of that.”
After adopting a monk-like existence to preserve his mental and vocal health for “Evan Hansen,” he has also learned to have more of a work-life balance with “Parade.”
“It can’t always be a year of pausing the rest of my life to do something,” Platt says. “Having Noah has been a really helpful, beautiful thing in terms of finding space for myself, and also realizing there are things that can be just as fulfilling and meaningful outside of the 2½ hours onstage.”
‘Agreed to hang out forever’: Ben Platt is engaged to former ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ star Noah Galvin
Along with wedding planning, Platt intends to devote the coming months to writing his third album, which will diverge from the pop escapism of 2021’s “Reverie” and lean into the more “intimate” storytelling of artists such as Paul Simon and Carole King. As his birthday approaches in September, he says he’s ready for his 30s.
“There’s a lot of clarity in this moment,” Platt says. “It feels really lucky and validating to be doing the things that feel closest to me, rather than maybe the things that I should be reaching for ‘industry-wise.’ As different as ‘Parade’ and ‘Theater Camp’ are, both are representative of me following my heart.”
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