Like the glowing logos on its all-important battery chargers, Maybe Happy Ending, a new Broadway musical from Hue Park and Will Aronson, is an overall bright affair, though you could forgive viewers of the first full number, World Within My Room, for shuddering with a thought of the pandemic. Oliver (Darren Criss) is much more sanguine about isolation than we were – he’s programmed to be. A humanoid personal assistant/maid/companion known as a Helperbot, Oliver was designed to serve one person and one person only – his owner, James (Marcus Choi) – and to eventually succumb to the obsolescence that devours all things. By the time we meet him, somewhere in Seoul’s not-so-distant future, Helperbot Inc has ceased production of his generation’s replacement parts.
In his interim retirement, Oliver keeps his space spick and span: daily cleaning, talking to his plant HwaBoon, reading James’s copy of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, listening to jazz records by the fictional Gil Brentley (played as a daydream alongside Oliver by a dashing Dez Duron).
This refreshingly original musical, first staged in Seoul in 2016 and directed here by Michael Arden (most recently of Broadway’s excellent Parade revival), makes swift work of time and space; sheer layers of digital displays (video design by George Reeve), impressively constructed modular sets (scenic design and additional video design by Dane Laffrey) and Criss’s rote movements succinctly illustrate the patter and (robot) heartbreak of Oliver’s daily routine over 12 years in the Helperbot Yards, waiting for an owner who never comes back.
That is, until girlbot meets boybot. A broken charger and lagging battery capacity brings Oliver’s across-the-hall neighbor Claire (a luminous Helen J Shen) into his meticulously kept space. Shen’s Claire, a more advanced Helperbot series 5 to Oliver’s series 3 (one of a few effectively funny recurring bits), provides a much-needed counter to Oliver’s more angular ways.
She is more graceful, more contemplative, with a better grasp on human humor and fallibilities (and with a lovely, crystalline singing voice to boot). He is more prone to binaries, routine and relentless optimism; Criss’s at first overtly physical performance – the startled, staccato movements and jerkiness of a machine – settles along with Clarie’s scorn into beloved familiarity over the course of the show’s 1 hour and 45 minutes. Both robots struggle with their obsolescence and hard drive memories of past humans, and the strange tale kicks into gear once they hit the road as reluctant buddies in a quest for answers.
You do not have to understand the particulars of robot logic and emotion – the show doesn’t really bother with it, anyway – to know the broad strokes of where this goes. There are shades of darkness to this humanoid future (humans preferring the smooth compliance of robots to their disappointing children or needy partners, for example) that are briefly mentioned in relatively seamless, for Broadway, video-montage flashback. But Maybe Happy Ending, as suggested by the title, is a predominantly bright love story, with clear echoes of Pixar: a Toy Story-esque plot of abandoned Helperbots who fall in love in what is essentially an island of misfit toys.
And told through a truly stunning, full-spectrum use of the stage, the set harmoniously transformed from sterile apartment to Korean sex motel to forest and back again with aplomb. The power of this doomed love story – all batteries must die eventually – is only slightly dampened by somewhat pedestrian, indistinct musical theater songs, sans a major showstopper. The most trenchant emotional moments, as Oliver and Claire learn to love and maybe, eventually, leave each other as robots can do, belong not to the singers, but a swelling, occasionally onstage orchestra and digital evocations of hard drives.
Which may hit one’s hardened soul – it did mine, a bit – while still pulling some punches. You will likely leave without a song stuck in your head, but with a lump in your throat nonetheless.
