Broadway musicals can be about anything, from leprechauns to Mormon missionaries to presidential assassins. And they can take many forms: meta-theatrical revues, sung-through operettas, rock cabarets. Most of them, though, are adaptations of popular movies, books or plays—hardly a new trend for an art form whose pillars include “Show Boat” and “My Fair Lady,” but one that seems to have accelerated in recent years.
The originality of “Maybe Happy Ending” is not the only thing that makes this gorgeous new musical a breath of fresh air on Broadway, where it’s currently running and deserves to stay for a while. But it is indeed heartening to see two first-time Broadway writers, composer Will Aronson and lyricist Hue Park, who co-wrote the show’s book, take such a big swing and, with the help of a consistently deft and resourceful production by director Michael Arden, hit a home run.
The form this new musical takes is also thoroughly disarming, keeping its focus tight on the quirky tale of two humanoid robots—“helper bots,” in the show’s parlance—before zooming out in time and space and plumbing unexpected depths of feeling. Oliver (Darren Criss) is a crisply attired young bot, a “model 3,” living in a kind of perpetual loop across the hall from a “model 5,” Claire (Helen J. Shen), who is having trouble with her charger. Oliver lives in chirpy faith that his former owner, who gave him a taste for vintage jazz and a remarkably durable potted plant, is coming to retrieve him any day; the sadder but wiser Claire knows better, having been put out to pasture for complicated personal reasons after serving a couple with marital troubles.
We eventually learn that these two, though they retain their eternally youthful looks, are living in a kind of robot retirement home in Seoul. Both are out of warranty, and replacement parts aren’t being made for them anymore, though only Claire seems to understand the mortal gravity of their situation. It is she who proposes a road trip to Jeju Island to see the fireflies there, essentially as a kind of bucket-list item before her battery dies, while Oliver tags along in hopes of reuniting with his beloved former owner (Marcus Choi).
The intermission-less show has the storytelling confidence to let the plot unfold on a need-to-know basis, and to let its rich thematic implications—about the isolating effects of technology, the passage of time and the fragility of memory, the difficult but never entirely doomed pathways of human connection—ripple out, swell and splash back. (That must be where the water in my eyes came from.) It is here that the show earns its status as a musical rather than, say, a Pixar film or a “Black Mirror” episode. The smart, lovely songs by Aronson and Park delineate the bots’ contrasting feelings well and occasionally turn to winning pastiche, as a silky-voiced mid-century jazz singer, Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), emerges to comment on the action, like an old record come to life.
Arden’s staging also marshals exquisite design elements to put the story across. Dane Laffrey’s impressively modular sets frame and reframe the action in surprising, occasionally eye-boggling ways, and while the show pulls off a few memorable coups de théâtre, it never feels overly tech-heavy. From Clint Ramos’s retro costumes to Ben Stanton’s textured lighting, “Maybe Happy Ending” has one of the more cohesive and distinctive stylistic profiles of any Broadway show in memory.
Crucially, all this style is in support of a show of real substance, and the emotional high points hit all the harder for being so elegantly presented. As with many narratives featuring robots or artificial intelligence, “Maybe Happy Ending” is less about the technology we have made in our image than about what it says about us. And to watch two robots enact some rudiments of the human condition—learning to get along, falling in love, facing decline—is to shine the uncanny, defamiliarizing light of metaphor on our own behavior, the better to see it anew.
When Oliver and Claire stay overnight at a motel mid-trip and happen to see that “Terminator 2” is playing on the TV in their room, they smile indulgently at its fantastic depiction of shape-shifting robots. Then they sing the funny and touching “How to Be Not Alone,” which works as both an entry in the classic I’m-not-in-love-with-you-yet genre of romantic showtunes and a wise, universal rumination on the timeless difficulty of sharing space with other people, let alone loving them.
That odd, engaging cocktail of low-key sci-fi, romcom banter and soulful wisdom is “Maybe Happy Ending” in a nutshell. We may live in a world where we sometimes feel more atomized and separate than ever. But we also still live in a world where, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Those things, as “Maybe Happy Ending” shows us, can include not only the wonders of the natural world but of human construction as well. We rightly marvel not only at fireflies but at record players—and at robots. And definitely at musicals.
Read next: “Three new musicals about funny and fabulous women”
