Wondering what to do with your rugrats for the summer? According to musical satire Your Camp, Mein Kamp, set just two years (or maybe 20 minutes) in the future, the GOP-controlled government will establish DOGE-run MAGA re-education camps to corral kids across our collapsing country, and teach them eugenics and anti-intellectualism. Creators Vulva Va-Voom and Shane Mayforth star as a pair of Democratic detainees desperate to Hogan’s Heroes their way home, and hopefully rescue a child or two along the way (if it isn’t inconvenient).
While they plot their getaway, they are forced to participate in patriotic pageants of right-wing show tunes with Elon Musk, whom Clinton Hughes convincingly interprets as a ketamine-popping, goose-stepping Frank Booth with a book-burning fetish and oddly Eastern European accent. Caught in the middle is a puppeteer Nurse (Beth Hall) who plays an Avenue Q-style puppet stricken with polio, thanks to flat-Earth anti-vaxxers.
There will be swastika arm choreography aplenty in the best Mel Brooks tradition as the progressive pair use their camp talent show as cover for a Trojan horse operation to undermine the fascist regime. Grim gallows humor grinds uncomfortably against real-life documentary footage of Nazi concentration camps, and the bad guys are paradoxically evil and lazy, while the heroes are hypocritical navel-gazers; the script saves its sharpest stings not for the white supremacists, but for the pacifist pushovers, who virtue-signal in the face of racist violence.
Desperate times call for extreme forms of art, but as much as I applaud this show’s intentions, the press preview showed areas that need improvement. The story briefly loses focus midway by aiming at too broad a range of targets — getting distracted by issues like cannabis commercialization and Nestle’s exploitation of native populations for chocolate — which might be emblematic of liberal activists’ consistent inability to concentrate on one coherent goal.
Since I’m descended from Holocaust survivors, I’ve always halfway expected to someday be rounded up and shoved into an oven, so there’s a touch of schadenfreude in seeing other liberal Americans finally awaken to the approaching horrors thanks to a Fringe show. Call it preaching to the choir if you want, but if we don’t all start singing loudly, there soon may be nobody left to say “amen.”
Your Camp, Mein Kamp: The Musical Political Satire
Pink Venue, Lowndes Shakespeare Center
60 minutes; 18 & up
$15
Get tickets
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This article appears in May 7-13, 2025.