Co-Op: The Musical
A new American musical about student loan debt and affordable co-ops gone bad.
Oh, so bad.
the brief
What’s so terrifying about student loans and affordable co-op buildings in New York City? A lot, it turns out. This darkly funny musical is about money, hope, betrayal, and the city we call home.
The musical tackles seemingly dry topics of compounding interest rates and real estate prices on the open market, revealing the true horror of untold numbers of futures stolen by predatory financial structures in the United States today. The imagery for the musical needed to communicate all of this.
some early concepts
These are concepts I had explored initially before we decided to go with what ultimately became the look for the show.
These takes convey nostalgia for a future that could never happen, a millennial childhood, and a sense of dreams deferred.
Ultimately, we chose to lean on traditional visual horror tropes, with tongue-in-cheek details to communicate the dark humor.
In the main imagery, a spiky New York City under a menacing red sky tilts precariously, held up (barely) by the tiny struggling figures in the lower left. Meanwhile, the two main characters meet in a deadly standoff in the surreptitiously opened door. Lightning bolts flash over all, resembling cracks in the wall of a building in desperate need of renovation—or a skeletal hand reaching down to pluck Fleur de Lease from her one chance at financial and personal freedom.
A secondary look draws inspiration from Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book art and the early days of spot process printing, hearkening back to an idealized “golden age” past that never was, and the future they imagined then that could never be. The character sneaks into and out of the frame, clearly either up to no good or escaping from it—or both.
Learn more, and support this amazing musical through production, at the New York Foundation for the Arts.