Arts

Beautiful songs, stunning design, and brilliant performances by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen: “Maybe Happy Ending” makes the love story of two robots Broadway’s hottest ticket.

Meet Claire (Helen J Shen) and Oliver (Darren Criss), two isolated and retired robots who have come not to save us, but to teach—or perhaps to remind—us what it is to love and be human.

There is no “maybe” about it when it comes to the brilliance and winning charm of Maybe Happy Ending (Belasco Theatre, booking to May 25, 2025). Visually, theatrically, and musically, Maybe Happy Ending, directed by Michael Arden with a nuanced delicacy and lightness of touch, is the most original and innovative show on New York’s main theatrical drag this autumn—and it dazzles with subtlety rather than bombast.

Broadway’s best new musical is set on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea in 2064. With book, music, and lyrics by former New York University classmates Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending—which premiered in Seoul in 2016—follows the story of two “helperbots” who may look young and hip, but who are now out of service, living out lives of uncherished uselessness.

As well as its actors, Dane Laffrey‘s stunningly executed visual design and Ben Stanton’s lighting rise to being equal stars of the show. The stage under their creative ingenuity becomes a thrilling, technical jewel box, of lights and lines expanding and contracting to open up and shrink performing spaces.

One moment we are in the restricted cubes of Claire and Oliver’s one-room apartments, the next in a neon-lit cityscape, and then sylvan, open countryside. These on-stage apertures, as they open and close to create what we can see, are their own artworks.

The show begins with Claire requiring a battery recharge, so knocks on the door of neighboring retired robot Oliver. He takes so long opening the door when he does so it is to her frozen, temporarily without-power figure. A nervy, very particular robot himself (whose most intimate relationship is with his houseplant HwaBoon), Oliver doesn’t know what to do. Criss plays him with the coiffed handsomeness of a K-pop star and the stiff gait and easily-rattled manner of C-3PO (he has the added skill of really knowing how to decorate a small studio space).

Claire, when her power is restored, is younger than him, and feels more human. She may needs his recharger, but is far from his junior, or in his thrall; Shen gives her a spiky independence, and Oliver wilts more than once under a perfectly timed eye-roll or zinger of hers. The moment she suddenly broke into a rap dance raised a collective audience cheer.

If Claire’s electronic lifespan seems tenuous, Oliver is hiding his own sadness—pining for a human owner, James (Marcus Choi), who has left him behind; and so the two robots head off on an adventure to find out what happened to James, and whether Oliver can be reunited with the master he so delighted in serving.

Their past story—of perfect cocktails being mixed, the right jazz music being chosen—is told through flickering, theater-filling video designed by George Reeve. Helen’s past experiences are relayed similarly, a finger to each character’s forehead seems to release memories. Her employment experience was different; party to a couple’s relationship breakdown, she becomes a victim of abuse, a trauma she imbibes even if she is not technically constructed to do so.

This is the tug of the whole show—machines feeling things, even if they are not supposed to, and emotions fizzing unexpectedly out of tightly coiled wires. Criss erupts with puppyish excitement and panicked worry, while Shen gives Claire a defiant edge that co-exists with a resigned fatalism.

An added, and sensitively told sub-plot concerns James’ son Junseo (also played by Choi), and his own feelings of displacement and rejection given his father’s closeness with his robot.

The show forms a perfect, but far-from-predictable, always-surprising arc—starting slow, and then building through moments of mischief, wit, and moving self-discovery, towards something grander and more profound. Beautifully written and sung songs like Oliver’s “World Within My Room” and Claire’s “The Way It Has to Be” underline the restricted vistas both characters occupy at the outset. This makes the later songs of lives and hearts opening up—“Hitting the Road,” “How Not to Be Alone,” “When You’re in Love,” and title song, “Maybe Happy Ending”—that much more touching.

The show doesn‘t dwell in the shock of the new, or varnished, robots-among-us postmodernity of 2064: periodically Dez Duron will appear as a jazz singer, Gil Brentley, to transport us back to Oliver and James’ choice of crooners and swing—a musical nudge that, despite the show’s setting and robot leads, reminds us that its storytelling remains in the realm of human familiarities and frailties.

Park told the New York Times that the robots’ disconnection spoke to a human audience watching in 2024 living out the human and consequences of the COVID pandemic, blinking into an unfamiliar world, feeling set apart yet desiring of connection.

Oliver and Claire both look differently befuddled as their feelings for each other grow; and as we are human and know these feelings, and the rollercoaster territories of experiencing them, we are happy to see them begin to feel even as we fear how they will make sense out of it.

Indeed, their sense of being completely freaked out by falling in love leads to a cavalcade of twists at the end of the show, which will give both your musing mind (Maybe Happy Ending is truly clever and thought-provoking) and tear ducts an added, late-in-show workout.

In the end, you are not only rooting for Claire and Oliver, but also for them recognizing the intricately weird routes we take to figure out what and who we love, and what and how we feel as we do so. For a musical about robots, Maybe Happy Ending is a very human show about not just the value of connection, but also the life-saving, heart-expanding importance of us recognizing that value.

Yes, there is a “happy ending” in Maybe Happy Ending; clever, wry, and unexpected, it blooms in a narrative-whiplash-filled final seconds—underlining both the equality of Claire and Oliver and the wisdom of two retired robots who, it turns out, are far from past it.