Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Oliver (Darren Criss) is a Helperbot, and he can’t help himself. A shut-in at his residence for retired androids in a near-future Korea, he functions in a chipper loop of programmatic behavior; every day, he brushes his teeth and eyes, tends to his plant and listens to the retro jazz favored by his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), who he is confident will someday arrive to take him back. More than a decade goes by before his solitary routine is disrupted by Claire (Helen J Shen), a fellow Helperbot from across the hall, who is looking to literally connect and recharge. Will these two droids somehow make a Seoul connection? Can they feel their hearts beep?
That is the premise of Will Aronson and Hue Park’s new musical Maybe Happy Ending, and it’s a risky one. The notion of robots discovering love—in a world where nothing lasts forever, including their own obsolescent technologies—could easily fall into preciousness or tweedom. Instead, it is utterly enchanting. As staged by Michael Arden (Parade), Maybe Happy Ending is an adorable and bittersweet exploration of what it is to be human, cleverly channeled through characters who are only just learning what that entails.
Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
In a Broadway landscape dominated by loud adaptations of pre-existing IP, Maybe Happy Ending stands out for both its intimacy and its originality. Arden and his actors approach the material with a delicate touch; they trust the romantic comedy to be charming, which it is, and let the wistfulness emerge naturally. In the faint artificiality of both his movement and his appearance–pale face, neat dark hair, red lips, high-waisted pants—Criss’s Oliver endearingly evokes the silent-film clown Buster Keaton. (He also sometimes suggests a neurodivergent adult.) Shen’s more naturalistic Claire—she’s a Helperbot Five; he’s just a Helpbot Three—has a winsome, Eponine-y combination of pluck, resignation and piercing pop-vocal emotion.
Maybe Happy Ending premiered abroad in a 2016 Korean-language production, but nothing about it feels translated; Hue and Aronson’s lyrics are well-crafted and direct. (When they have a trace of stiffness, that seems right for the characters singing them.) Although the story is set in the future, their score is purposefully old-fashioned. On a surface level, that aspect is especially evident in the pastiche jazz-standard numbers sung by a 1950s crooner named Gil Brentley (handsome smoothie Dez Duron), which comment obliquely on the androids’ emotional journey—and inform it, since Oliver has been tutored by them. But it is also present in the way the score’s more modern-sounding earworms serve moments in the story (rather than grind it to a retrospective halt like too many songs in musicals these days).
Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
As Oliver and Claire’s interior and exterior horizons expand, and they leave their seclusion for a road trip, Dane Laffrey’s superb set opens up right along with them, progressing from geometric enclosures to larger worlds of space and possibility. As in their previous collaborations, such as their splendid 2022 account of A Christmas Carol, Arden and Laffrey build the design inextricably into the storytelling; key sequences involving memories—some of which feature cameos by Arden Cho and Young Mazino as the couple that once owned Claire—are conjured in ghostly projections by George Reeves and Laffrey. (Projection is not only the form of these videos but also their content: Humans can wind up overinvesting in Helpbots, we learn, or resenting them as too-perfect rivals.)
Can a show as strange and special as Maybe Happy Ending find a place for itself on Broadway today? I like to think that maybe it can. But as the show reminds us, everything is ephemeral: “We have a shelf life, you know that,” says Claire. “It’s the way that it has to be.” The fact that this show is casting its firefly glow on Broadway at all feels like a gift. In its gentle robot way, it helps us see ourselves through freshly brushed eyes.
Maybe Happy Ending. Belasco Theatre (Broadway). Book by Will Aronson and Hue Park. Music by Aronson. Lyrics by Park and Aronson. Directed by Michael Arden. With Darren Criss, Helen J Shen, Dez Duron, Marcus Choi. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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Maybe Happy Ending | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
