DANIEL Letterle? Joanna Chilcoat? Robin de Jesus? Alana Allen? Never heard of them, but oh how desperate they are for Camp to be their 15-minute calling card.

Imagine a whole cast as eager to grasp the greasy pole of stardom as Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, but like Berkley, they are nothing but hamsters spinning around someone else's wheel. Indeed they may not even notice the ambivalent tone of first-time writer-director Todd Graff, who swings between knowing loathing and conformist American dreaming.

As with Showgirls, audience pleasure can be attained best by observing the gory mess with a combination of British irony, sang froid and ill-hidden love of the camp.

Yet the 'Camp' here is supposed to refer to Camp Ovation, the performing arts holiday camp for adolescent misfits and malcontents. Graff's musical is Pop Idol and Fame Academy without the weekly ejection, dejection and elation, but with all that American coming-of-age emoting from the old Fame! days.

Watch the problem kids with angst and acne spat, scrap and fall in and out of love before the big group hug of a finale. Whether fat, gay, unsure, insecure or cocksure, all stereotypes are here, and no teen trauma is left unresolved.

Yet everywhere you turn, Graff is contradictory, never more so than in the character of Bert (Don Dixon), an alcoholic, washed-up songwriter who belittles his students' starry-eyed hopes, only to decide that singing is the ultimate group therapy.

Maybe it is the hyperactive songs, or maybe the bitchy humour and Stephen Sondheim cameo, or maybe the sheer amateur egomaniac enthusiasm of it all, but treat Camp as kitsch pulp and you can almost forgive the twisted cynicism of it all. Almost.

Updated: 14:49 Friday, September 05, 2003