MAYBE HAPPY ENDING: A Visionary Ode to Emotion — Review

In style, story, and staging, there has never been anything like Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway. An intimate tale of two discarded robots falling in love, musically inspired by the aching blues of Chet Baker, and sharing strains of cyber-ennui DNA with films like Her and the video for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love,” it is staged with awe-inspiring panache by Michael Arden, who balances the production’s cutting-edge technology with perfect emotional attunement.

This perfectly calibrated production, with a book by Will Aronson and Hue Park, who handled the music and lyrics respectively, focuses on a type of hushed emotion that is atypical, almost antithetical, to the Broadway musical. It’s a courageous (and successful) gambit, honing in on the quietness of its characters’ feelings – ones that subtly well up in your eyes rather than gush out in melodramatic spurts.

The story concerns Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), two “helper-bots” residing in a sort of purgatorial dorm for obsolete technology in near-future Seoul. Oliver is all bright smiles, perfectly gelled hair, and a ‘50s sense of politeness, which gives Criss a chance to play into his own squeaky-clean persona, and wring humanity out of a Kabuki-level performance of surface sheen. (Clint Ramos did costumes; Craig Franklin Miller hair; Suki Tsujimoto makeup.) He’s spent the past decade or so mindlessly amassing stuff he gets delivered, poring over the Jazz Monthly subscription his owner left him, and hoping he’ll one day return for him. 

His routine is interrupted when Claire crosses their shared hallway to borrow a charger, after hers breaks. She’s a newer model, the Sophia to his C-3PO (and Shen offsets Criss’ motorization with refreshing humanity), but he doesn’t miss an opportunity to say that the older series, despite their wonkier Wi-Fi services, are sturdier. They (un)naturally begin to develop feelings for each other, and Claire’s failing systems – aside from providing poignant commentary on both technology’s wastefulness and our own limited time – prompt her to encourage them to venture out to Jeju Island, where Oliver’s owner James (Marcus Choi) resides.

A road trip rom-com would be enough for most musicals, but Aronson and Park’s book, which premiered in a Korean version in 2016, zags past that and explores what happens to the helper-bots beyond their journey, once their attraction throws a wrench in the proverbial machine. (Their excursion, by the way, is one of the most breathtaking scenes in a production wall-to-wall with astonishing scenography.) This is all the while underscored by nightclub crooning by Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), Oliver’s favorite jazz singer who occasionally pops up with fourth-wall-breaking ditties.

Aronson’s score is made up of lovely, lowkey lullabies appropriate to the robots’ bottled-firefly style of emotion. Despite some fun queer notes – courtesy of ballads sung by Oliver and Claire to their same-gender owners (think “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2) – and the instant standard “Goodbye, My Room,” a too-real prayer that one might be able to return home whenever leaving it, a sameness (and sleepiness) begins to set in. The score, make no mistake, is never less than genuine, tuneful, and admirably committed to its characters’ interiority, but the unstifled bursts of vocalization from Brentley’s Bublé-ish vocal performance become too much of a saving grace.

While remaining faithful to its essential hush, Arden jolts the score to life with his impeccable direction, which allows both leads to find their way into, if not the hugeness of their emotions, then the earth-shaking capacity for it. In what may become his crowning achievement, he harnesses each production element with a masterful directorial hand, creating elegantly framed tableaux.

Dane Laffrey’s set is a miracle unto itself, anchored by the helper-bots’ small studios but often encased within movable scrims that create panoramas with cinematic smoothness, tracking the characters throughout their building and offering constant surprises, from smaller vistas upstage to a cleverly revealed turntable. Their quarters are appointed in an eye-catching modern style, and a nautical window in Claire’s room is particularly gorgeous. George Reeve’s neat video and projection design introduces the robots’ past through POV-driven memories.

Lit by Ben Stanton, the production’s overall effect is similar to the surreal appeal of the most haunting Vaporwave creations, which create a hypnotic aesthetic siren call that promises eternal, impossible warmth, and instant isolation once the reality of its cold technology is in our grasp.

I wondered if Oliver and Claire’s attraction would climax in a majestic wail of cyborg horniness, as in Björk’s seminal video but, though they both howl for humanity amid a barren emotional landscape, Maybe Happy Ending is a different, quieter beast. One becomes aware, throughout its lush 100 minutes, of what a humbly groundbreaking experience is unfolding onstage. This is a very special show; a tender, visionary ode to the space we’re able to create and hold for feeling, and the hope that it may continue.

‍Maybe Happy Ending is in performance at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.