Review: MTV's "Camp'd Out: I'm Going to Performing Arts Camp"

MTV, the youth-oriented reality network that occasionally plays music videos, has broadcast its share of trash, yet somewhere within its corporate neural net abides a real sense of responsibility toward its still-maturing kiddie demographic. And whereas VH1, its older-skewing younger cousin, is a haven for the celebrity living dead, MTV celebrates the young and hopeful in shows such as "The Paper" (high school journalists), the anything-is-possible makeover show "Made" and even the back-from-the-brink "T.I.'s Road to Redemption." There is drama enough whenever you watch kids being kids, rocketing as they do between dead certainty and utter confusion.

"Camp'd Out: I'm Going to Performing Arts Camp," which premieres today at noon (with subsequent airings Sunday at 7 a.m., Monday at 2 p.m. and Thursday at 9 a.m.) is a subset of the network's "True Life" documentary series, which in the past has covered subjects including "I Have Acne," "I Have Schizophrenia" and "I Work in the Sex Industry." (Other episodes of "Camp'd Out," have been set at a snowboarding camp and a rock camp.) It covers some of the same dramatic ground as the current MTV series "Taking the Stage" (about a performing arts high school) but with a lake and everyone in shorts.

It spans nine weeks at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts, a sprawling Catskills compound that offers courses in music, dance, theater, art, circus and magic. But theater is the focus here, specifically musical theater, because that sort of stuff works well on TV, and because the dream of Broadway burns as bright among the emerging generations as it once did for Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in the world according to Busby Berkeley. It may be a Broadway dominated by adaptations of Disney princess films, but it is Broadway all the same. And they don't kid around at French Woods: Productions include "Les Miserables," "The Producers," "Carousel," "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" and "Aida" (the Elton John musical, not the Verdi opera).

The film follows three girls in whose eyes the lights of the Great White Way glitter brightly: Lauren is the outsider, relatively new to the camp and desperate to break out of the chorus. ("I'm Prostitute Number One," Lauren writes home of her part in "Les Miz.") Alana is the sort-of middle child: a seven-year veteran, hard-working and talented but overshadowed by star camper Mia, who likes making it look easy.

Even at two hours (minus half an hour or so for commercials), it doesn't quite jell into drama; it's more like a mosaic suggesting a drama or one of those yearbook pages full of crazy cut-up pictures. And its flow is hindered rather than helped by the steady stream of pop songs that line the program from end to end. These may have been scientifically proven to stimulate pleasure centers in the teenage brain, but it is not what camp sounds like.

Not surprisingly, much of the show has to do with girls and boys and who likes whom, as fluid a state of affairs as the setting would lead you to expect. (When we meet Mia, she is being kept apart from her last year's love, who has graduated from student to counselor and is now off limits. "It's a little bit Shakespearean I guess the way forces out of our control are holding us sort of apart," she says.) But the best parts concern the work, its demands and its rewards.

Though these kids are all equally dedicated, they are not equally talented, and "Camp'd Out," in contradistinction to what parents and teachers like to say, does not suggest that hard work will ever compensate for that. Quite the reverse: We see that, as in high school, there are impenetrable hierarchies, drawn here along lines of natural ability, physical beauty and inborn sparkle.

"You don't understand," Lauren sobs to her mother at the end of the summer; she has finally been given a moment to shine, and now camp is over.

"I know," coos her mother, like a mother. "You've got a lot more lifetime to live. Promise."

-- Robert Lloyd

Comments

[Brian]

Hey there,

I'm a camper at French Woods (actually, I'm in the episode during one particular sequence), and seeing the final product of this episode as a product of my summer has shown me the true "reality" of reality television. I can attest that about 95% of what you see here is not staged (after all, we can use the bunk computers for email as opposed to sending postcards), but MTV has done an extreme amount of editing work and reorganizing to format it for television.

This show is a rear-view mirror view of performing arts camp - things may appear more drama-filled than they actually are. Though everyone is fairly aware of the hierarchy and where you fit into it, the truth is that those at the top are really not as primadonna as MTV's one-dimensional character structure would like you to believe. Furthermore, as the article talks about hard work paying off, the camera does not show Mia and the other top-rank kids studying year-round at performing arts high schools and honing their skills in such a way that the summer is a way to use those skills for some gratification. Kids that come to French Woods are usually big fish in the small ponds of their school systems, but if those ponds are devoting half of a school day to theatre training, you had better bet the kids coming out of them would be better-suited to auditioning and holding good parts.

Take this show for what it is - it is not a slice of life of performing arts camp, it is a highly sensationalized program intended for entertainment, not for education.

Thanks,
Brian

[todd]

great show

[riley]

was one of the kids on this show on a different mtv show??? laurens friend?

[Grace]

Yes!
That's what I'm trying to figure out - I think he was on MADE.

[Lauren]

Yeah! Corey. he was on true Life: I'm a high school freshman.

[Carla]

I agree with Brian. While some of the show does adequately show off French Woods - such as the demands of the shows and the hard work of the performers - most of the show is about the little things which don't make French Woods French Woods. Boy/girl drama happens at any camp, and at any high school. Everyone at FWF this summer was told that MTV was making a documentary about French Woods. This was not a documentary about the fabulous camp, but more like a less-scripted Laguna Beach. It portrayed people as different than they truly are and totally made French Woods look like trash. This summer we kept saying "imagine how popular French Woods will become because of this show," but now its more along the lines of "I can't imagine why anyone would send their kids to French Woods after seeing that..."

And yes, Corey was on True Life: I'm a High School Freshman.

[sue d]

Not sure I would let my 17 year old daughter attend this camp.