In need of a warm hug? How about from a robot? It doesn’t get cozier than the utterly lovely Maybe Happy Ending, the cyborg-centric musical with a miniature cast and a gigantic heart now playing at the Belasco Theatre. And if you find yourself melting with just a few flourishes from the strings section, blame Will Aronson, the composer of what’s surely the lushest score to reach Broadway since Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza nearly 20 years ago. Maybe Happy Ending is a throwback, in a sense, laced with croony jazz touches to boot, but it induces a toasty nostalgia through the lens of a colder vision of the future.
In 2060s Seoul, retired humanoid HelperBots Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J. Shen) repeat the same tasks day after day in neighboring apartments: They’ve been abandoned by their owners, their critical parts no longer manufactured, and they know that eventually their batteries will fail. Oliver, certain that he’ll be reunited with his owner, James (Marcus Choi), spends his time listening to James’s favorite jazz records and taking care of James’s houseplant Hwaboon. When Claire’s charger breaks, she knocks at Oliver’s door, launching a reluctant alliance that beep-bloops toward robot love, even in the face of inevitable robot ruination.
As sparks fly, Hue Park’s refreshingly crisp lyrics float in singable simplicity on Aronson’s quirkily soaring melodies that suggest Guettel as video game composer. While Aronson and Park, who collaborate on the book, penned the show in English, Park also translated the lyrics for the Korean version of the show that’s received four revivals in Seoul since its 2016 premiere.
Like a gently unassuming lyric that blossoms when set to music, Maybe Happy Ending’s superpower rests in the shared commitment of all collaborators to make the very small seem very large. Michael Arden, the director of three stellar Broadway revivals (Parade, Once on This Island, and Deaf West’s Spring Awakening), stages this new musical with similar precision, revealing the show’s world piece by piece through Dane Laffrey’s sliding sets exposed like comic book panels. And though the digital elements, with video design by George Reeve, are often spellbinding as Claire and Oliver revisit the memories stored in their hardware, Maybe Happy Ending, in its most glorious moment, celebrates the world beyond WiFi.
Claire, cognizant of her limited warranty, dreams of seeing fireflies in real life, and, when she finally does, Arden deploys a series of theatrical gestures too breathtaking to spoil here. It’s stagecraft that illuminates the musical’s messages about the value of looking up and outward from our devices while simultaneously pointing towards theater’s unique ability to transcend technological bells and whistles in the service of a more natural, unadorned beauty.
Criss and Shen, too, turn the slightest of touches into electric connection. Criss, expert at gluing a not-quite-human grin to his face and circling Oliver’s apartment with mechanical grace, lets his rigid, aloof character gradually thaw out. He inherits a century-spanning tradition of musical theater characters, from Marian Paroo to Henry Higgins, slowly shedding their tough exteriors, unleashing a bottled-up potential for passion, though Oliver just happens to be a literal robot. Shen, charmingly kooky off-Broadway in Teeth and The Lonely Few earlier this year, makes an explosive Broadway debut as Claire: Only 24, she has a preternatural gift for marrying the tender and the deadpan. Both do Aronson’s music, which he orchestrates himself with a richness that deliberately belies the HelperBots’s artificialness, full justice.
“You know you only last so long/You know you’re only made so well/And you’ll be gone eventually,” Claire sings early on as she confronts her unavoidable descent into disrepair. But a musical made as well as Maybe Happy Ending deserves to be with us for some time to come.
Maybe Happy Ending is now running at the Belasco Theatre.
If you can, please consider supporting Slant Magazine.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
