Nine years ago, writer Hue Park was sitting in a Brooklyn café when Damon Albarn’s song “Everyday Robots” came on. “We are everyday robots on our phones / In the process of getting home,” Albarn sings. Park and his writing partner Will Aronson had been reflecting on alienation exacerbated by technology, specifically hikikomori, a form of extreme protracted social withdrawal first identified in Japan that leaves young people unable to leave their homes. They’d observed a similar affliction among their peers. “It was a trend among people our age of becoming more withdrawn and living only in your own space, where you can control everything and get what you want digitally,” recalls Aronson, 43.
What if, the duo thought, you could make a musical about the phenomenon? Maybe Happy Ending—which first opened in Seoul in 2016 and has been charming New York audiences since November—was the result: a show about solitary robots facing obsolescence that, paradoxically, has the most heart of anything on Broadway.
Set in near-future Seoul, it follows two discarded androids (dubbed Helperbots) on an odyssey across South Korea to track down one of their beloved owners. There are scenes of instant aversion that gradually becomes affection and screwball-comedy conversational sparring, but underneath it all are weightier themes: grief, loss, living and loving boldly in the face of our own finite shelf lives. “We wanted to write about being isolated but eventually taking the risk of leaving your little safe zone—and all the possible joys that come with that,” Aronson says.
Maybe Happy Ending seemed poised for an English-language iteration, and came to the attention of the Tony-winning director Michael Arden. He was captivated by the score, which Park and Aronson describe as a stew of indie music, modern classical orchestration, jazz chords, film scores, and minimalist motor rhythms, with a few jazz-standard pastiche songs mixed in. “The score was so listenable, intricate, and complex,” Arden remembers, “vacillating between Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Sufjan Stevens.” But he admits being skeptical initially about the premise. “I thought, Robots? I’m interested in human stories. But this was one of the most human musicals I’ve ever encountered.”
“It’s about the truth that when you commit to loving someone, you commit to losing them too,” Arden continues. “The show is life flashing before your eyes in 100 minutes—both a meet-cute and On Golden Pond. By the time I finished reading the script, tears were streaming down my face.” He’s observed Broadway audiences reacting similarly. “As with any new musical, they’re coming in blind, and they’re leaving exhilarated, devastated, and overwhelmed. They walk in thinking, These robots are nothing like me, and by the end, they feel like they’ve seen a musical about themselves.”
Bringing the androids to life, as it were, are stage veteran Darren Criss and Broadway newcomer Helen J Shen. Backstage in his dressing room before curtain, Criss, 37, is bursting with chattiness, hazel eyes flashing and ring-laden fingers aflutter. He credits much of Maybe Happy Ending’s success to its extensive Korean incubation, comparing it to a nearly decade-long out-of-town tryout. “The level of nuance we focused on from the beginning is stuff that you don’t typically get until months in the weeds,” he says.
“The trial and error has been happening long before us,” says Shen, who’s 24 but could easily pass for far younger, sitting serenely in a Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt. A classically trained pianist who competed internationally before studying theater performance at the University of Michigan (where Criss is also an alum), Shen has had a busy 2024, starring off-Broadway in The Lonely Few and Teeth.
Meanwhile Criss is best known for the five seasons he spent as the endearingly charming, openly gay Blaine Anderson on Fox’s Glee. For this performance as an android with creakier movements than Shen’s, he drew on something he’d never put to use professionally: his college semester spent studying commedia dell’arte in Italy.
“Stereotypical modern acting is about what you don’t see, and what I’m doing here is what you do see,” Criss says. His robot had been programmed to display unsubtle emotions: happy face, sad face, surprised face. These expressions and Criss’s faintly wooden physicality, inspired by the harlequin figure, “immediately make people more willing to connect to the show’s nonrealness,” he says. In rehearsals, he kept top of mind a note from Arden: “Just because it doesn’t feel real doesn’t make it not true.”
Underscoring that feeling of unreality is the shape-shifting set, involving a rotating turntable, proscenium LED tiles, and hologram-like projections. “The backstage mechanics are so unbelievably intricate,” Arden says. “My hope is that it’s working so well the audience doesn’t even notice.”
The set was inspired by how we consume media on our phones; Arden estimates that the show spends more time in a vertical orientation than horizontal. Likewise, switching between sliding rooms on tracks emulates the effect of swiping on a personal device, and simple theatrical techniques like irising, created with black panels and neon, mimic how we pinch and zoom.
Another influence was manga, which can tell big stories briskly, gracefully pushing readers from one image to another. The emphasis was on containing and focusing the audience’s point of view, Arden explains. “I wanted to take the audience on an adventure, leaving more to their imagination rather than trying to show everything.”
Within those silently whizzing frames is a comforting, retro future-scape that the director compares to 2001: A Space Odyssey. “There’s this mix of cold futurism with warm sentimentality that’s also present in the score,” Arden says of the set. “You’re watching a classic Burt Bacharach musical, even though we’re driving a
flying car.”
The team has been floored by the rabid army of fans. Dubbed Fireflies, after a magical moment in the show, they range from repeat viewers dressing up as their favorite characters to those creating art inspired by HwaBoon, the emotional-support potted plant that many find the production’s low-key true star. (Arden calls her “a fabulous silent diva” who appeals to wallflowers in the audience.)
A significant portion of those waiting by the stage door to meet the cast are Asian American, and while nearly all the actors in this production are also of Asian American descent, Shen shies from labeling the show narrowly. “It’s important to mark accomplishments, but whenever we put that pressure on to be a mouthpiece for any group of people that is multifaceted and contradictory and complicated, it’s going to fail.”
Although actors of various races and ethnicities have previously portrayed the robots, almost every production has been set in Seoul. Yet Criss maintains “the show is as distinctly Korean as Romeo and Juliet is distinctly Italian...It’s where we set our scene, and some aspects of the show might spring from the culture.” (South Korea has the world’s highest density of robot workers.) “But it’s a story with universal themes: We all live, we all end, we all, hopefully, at some point, love or are loved.”
The offbeat premise and ingenious staging prove that no algorithm can yet prescribe a hit Broadway musical. “As we enter into this world of AI, theater is one of the last completely human-made, -operated, -performed, and -received art forms,” Arden notes. “And that’s why we go to the theater—to learn something new about what it is to be alive.” How delightful that it’s possible in a musical about robots.
In this story: Jacqui Bennett at Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Produced by BOOM PRODUCTIONS INC.
