Stop. Have you watched Original Cast Album: Co-Op?

Will you watch Original Cast Album: Co-Op?

When will you watch Original Cast Album: Co-Op? Here, watch Original Cast Album: Co-Op. ( 1 , 2 )

The world is a question This room is an answer And the answer is no

🤍 welcome to my blog 🤍

♤ you can call me Lynnea

♡ i'm a minor

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♧ if i ever say something harmful or incredibly stupid, please correct me

🤍my interests🤍

op is a swiftie lol. i love taylor swift, she is mother. my favorite albums are fearless and evermore

you can tell from my popular posts i love the grishaverse. my favorite ships are kanej and zoyalai. my favorite characters are also kanej and zoyalai. let's talk about kanej and zoyalai. i love the sab cast but i do not love the show

those are my two main fandoms that you'll see on here. if you're part of both, we should definitely be mutuals!

i've also read all the riordanverse books and am a casual fan. but you can bet that this blog will have more pjo once tsats releases. my favorite character is reyna, my favorite book is the last olympian. and i'd be glad to have more riordanverse mutuals and talk about any of the books too

have you read the lunar chronicles? you should read the lunar chronicles. it was honestly my favorite book series before i read six of crows. there's an animated movie coming and you should really, really read it. i recommend it so much

i am currently, impatienly waiting for the 3rd book in the once upon a broken heart trilogy and i really need more people to read this. it's so good and the 2nd book is so heartbreaking, you will love it, please read it

sometimes i'll also reblog stuff about marvel, willow, and lockwood & co. other fandoms i'm a part of are super casual

i won't tell you to stream shadow and bone, but i will tell you to watch lockwood & co because it deserves another season so much more

🤍my favorite authors🤍

leigh bardugo – i love the grishaverse so much. i haven't read ninth house or that wonder woman thing she wrote. but i have read sab, soc, and kos. and i am just in love with her characters, her stories, and her writing. i could talk days and days about how much i love her books. i really recommend the grishaverse to anyone and everyone

marissa meyer – i have read all of her books except one i am still reading. i've read the lunar chronicles, renegades, heartless, instant karma, and gilded (minus the second book because i'm still reading it). i really recommend reading any of her books, i just love each and every single series or standalone she writes, regardless of the genre. you can ask me for recommendations if you want! my personal favorite is the lunar chronicles, next is probably heartless. i just fall in love with whatever she writes, no matter the genre, just like i do with taylor lol. please read her books, they're so, so good

rick riordan – i've read all novels in the riordanverse, there are too many side books that i'm not sure if i've read all books. i really, really love his books, and i'd recommend them to anyone regardless of age. my favorite series is the original percy jackson & the olympians series. next is probably magnus chase & the gods of asgard. my favorite character is reyna and i'm so excited for the sun and the star

I just moments ago was scrolling through the podcast's episodes list, and I saw the Company episode, which reminded me of Documentary Now! Specifically the episode that I think was called Co-op about the cast recording of a (fictional) musical in the 70s that never staged a single performance about a co-op residential building in New York. I think it's pretty clearly a lovingly homage-ing send-up of Company.

But it's been ages sense I've seen it. So I may well be way off base & misremembering a number of things which I'm conflating in my mentally ill mind. You guys are the musicals & Sondheim experts. DN! pretty much always is riffing on something, so if it's not a reference to Company, it'd be interesting to know which 70s musical it's a reference to.

Have you boys seen Documentary Now! and that episode in particular?

Your brain was right, it is referencing Company! Specifically, D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of the recording of the Company cast album (it's called "Original Cast Album: Company" and is available most places, so, if you haven't seen it, we HIGHLY recommend checking it out). I (A.J.) am a huge fan of documentary now! and that episode in particular. Richard Kind saying "Tell me, am I bad at singing and acting?" is one of the greatest line deliveries in the medium.

Have you seen the Documentary Now! episode “Original Cast Album: Co-Op” (S3E3) that’s a spoof on Company? I want to know what you think of it 😂

oh my god HYSTERICAL. and so specific. it really nailed it. its such an out of left field thing to have a parody of.

Watched Today: Documentary Now!: Original Cast Album: Co-Op (2019)

The Company original cast album documentary is on HBO Max so I can now retroactively laugh even harder at Co-op the Musical.

how am I just now finding out about the Documentary Now episode Original Cast Album: Co-Op. this was made for me.

Grief cinema

My mom died at the end of 2019, right before lockdown. When covid hit, I was still in a foggy state. My reaction to everything delayed. I am supposed to stay home? Not go outside? Fine! Those were precisely what my plans were for the next mumblemumble years anyway.

My brightest, most vivid memories would have been of the movies that I saw anyway, because movies are special to me and I am always watching them. But the way they informed my grieving process surprised me. One does not necessarily expect, in the moment, for anything to really make it better.

But the day of my mom's death—maybe the day of, maybe the last day that I saw my mom—I watched MIDSOMMAR for the first time. I didn't know the plot and was a little concerned about it but a lot unable to do anything about the way that I felt; the DVD was already in the DVD player, and I knew my mother was dying/dead. Florence Pugh's portrayal of grief was a real gift. I felt held by it. It was miraculous to me, frankly, how much it lifted me into a state of feeling able to engage with what was going on and how I was feeling. There is a rant in me—and it is in there pretty shallow; you can get at it easily—about how acting is a vital service. I feel about actors the way that THE OFFICE's Dwight Schrute feels about his urologist. It is something I cannot do myself all the time, validate my own feelings about life; I need someone to do it for me, and I am grateful.

Also right around the same proximity to my mom's death, I saw the "Original Cast Album: Co-op" episode of DOCUMENTARY NOW! in the midst of watching that season. It was funny, I loved it, it took me out of my troubles, and the milieu was so novel and fascinating to me—this is how a cast recording (something I had never thought about) is/was made?—that I looked up which real documentary the episode was based on.

Before addressing ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY and all it's done for me, a word on Stephen Sondheim:

I will pick up practically any biography of an artist. An all-time choice was the biography of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon. I didn't know her or her work, and it was such an absorbing book, I think about returning to it all the time. Ditto Michael Schulman's Meryl Streep biography. I love to get a feeling of people in time. The choice to buy Stephen Sondheim's biography was not totally random, but it happened to be on my person when, immediately after my mother's death, I was hit by a car! It wasn't fatal—here I am—it just tipped me over. But I was in a fragile state, I did cry a lot, and I explained to the driver that my mother had just died, and that was why I was crying, and that would be the only reason I cry about anything for a while, regardless of what it seemed like I ought to be crying about. Eventually, I got to a hospital that night to make sure nothing had happened to me, and I was stranded in a room for more than an hour, and all I had was this book about Stephen Sondheim.

I can't remember—I'm sure I could figure it out—whether I had the book before I saw the documentary, whether I'd already seen it by the time I started reading it—but it all feels like it happened more or less at once that I went from not knowing* who Stephen Sondheim was to knowing, you know, the reams of tedious details that a fan knows (how many lines he preferred to have on his yellow legal pads; his go-to chord structure).

As all of this is going on, I've been writing a novel about musicians since 2018, and I made a promise to myself that, once I finished the first draft, I would prioritize learning about music. I never did when I was in school, I always wanted to, and the novel would never be done if I did not understand what my characters are supposed to be doing. I finished the first draft at the very end of 2019, and how fortuitous for this guide to show up, again, more or less all at once (just in time for me to be truly knocked out when he died two years later, more or less exactly from the time of all of this).

The extent to which I've clung to that gift as a life raft during this time is best demonstrated by the fact that, at the end of 2019, I had no knowledge of anything pertaining to music other than liking it, and now I have been composing music since the spring of 2022 (composing was the very long goal, and I still can't get over the fact that I met it). Have I neglected other parts of my life? Big time. But this is still impressive to me considering I would have liked very much to simply pull a blanket over myself and be sad quite ongoingly.

(*- On the subject of "not knowing who Stephen Sondheim was," my only frame of reference was seeing his name in the credits, mostly on item descriptions online, for, like, CDs of the WEST SIDE STORY, INTO THE WOODS, and ASSASSINS cast recordings, all of which I happened to see randomly over the years, but it is the kind of coincidence that would leave one who doesn't know anything about musical theatre to wonder if, maybe, Stephen Sondheim has written every single musical ever.)

Back to the documentary:

Between my discovery of ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY and now, the Criterion Collection has issued an edition of it on DVD and Blu-ray that is beautiful, a dream come true, and it features the DOCUMENTARY NOW! parody episode—magnificent. At the end of 2019, though, my only option for owning it was as a Quicktime file. This is fine—whether or not I have internet access, I have access to ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY.

I have so much to express about ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY, but I will restrict myself only to how it has intermingled with my grieving process. It is, of course, a pleasure to see people lost in work that is demanding but, compared to grieving a loved one's death, a load of cake. In the moment, the first many times I saw it, it came with a fresh, invigorating spray of curiosity-provocation. I love to be curious. Curiosity can do a lot for me. And there is a lot to be curious about for the completely uninitiated when it comes to the byzantine, idiosyncratic, union-forged business practices of Broadway theatre. Knowing how much he loved rules, watching him in this documentary, I am so moved and so happy for Stephen Sondheim that he was from and dwelled in a land that loved rules so much.

I could go on and on and on about how cathartic it is to watch someone be difficult, a ruthless artist, rigid, upholding a high standard as a method of care. I could introduce the subject of Stephen Sondheim and mother issues and we would be here all day. One of the conditions of my loving a thing is that I just go on about it. But when I first saw ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY right around the time that my mother died, the big thing that it did for me was show me, in case I felt like allowing my grief to interfere with my plans, that working on music was going to be good, nice, and right, which in this case were all the same thing.

It's been comforting to rewatch MIDSOMMAR since the end of 2019 and, to be honest with you, I rewatch ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY on a basis so routine that, on second thought, to be honest with you about it would embarrass me too greatly, but the other movie that did something for me in the bewildering swirl that was right-around-the-time-my-mother died, maybe the day it happened, isn't one I revisit, but it is worth noting. I was not going to prepare any food that day, which I barely incentivize myself to do when I'm not pulverized by the cruelty of fate, so I bought, I think, a poké bowl (spicy tuna, etc.) and a Mediterranean-style grain bowl (ancient grains, spicy feta cheese, etc.), and ate them both promptly and simultaneously. I felt sick. I could not do anything lest I risk throwing up. I watched SPACE JAM (I did not throw up! A small miracle).

I am I-saw-SPACE-JAM-in-the-theatre-and-it-was-age-appropriate years old. The soundtrack was a presence in my home. I have no tender feelings about it, but, watching it for the first time as an adult, its ludicrousness did completely take me out of what was happening to my soul and body. That's not nothing!

Maybe more happened then and it isn't coming to me now, but this is how I remember it.

2019: D.A. Pennebaker"s documentary, Original Cast Album: Company, is spoofed on the Netflix series Documentary Now! as Original Cast Album: Co-Op. Sondheim said the episode was "fine" and that John Mulaney was "really funny."

the only episode of ‘documentary now!’ that ive watched is when they spoofed ‘original cast album: company’ and invented a whole fake 70s musical and im obsessed with it

i love this so much!!!

John Mulaney loves musical theatre and loves Sondheim so much his parodies are filled with such love

John Mulaney as Simon Sawyer in Documentary Now! Original Cast Album: Co-Op