‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Review: Broadway’s Deeply Moving Robot Musical, Starring Darren Criss, Teaches Us How to Be Human

Are we human, or are we… robots?

“Maybe Happy Ending,” a Korean musical now making its Broadway debut, asks this exact question — or in some ways, asks the inverse. It examines what it means to be human, what makes us human, and what it is that separates us from robots — but instead of doing this from a human angle, it takes the robot perspective. The musical by Will Aronson and Hue Park is set in a near-future Seoul, and concerns Oliver (Darren Criss of “Glee” and “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”) and Claire (Helen J Shen in her Broadway debut), two human-like robot “HelperBots” who have now been “retired.” Just like an old iPhone, they are doomed to planned obsolescence, abandoned by former owners and left to toil in the “HelperBot Yards,” a sort of robot purgatory. They meet when Claire has to borrow a charger (her cable is faulty and her battery life is shrinking; sound familiar?) and they form an unexpected bond. 

In our current moment, with self-driving cars and ever-present AI, robots are becoming rapidly sophisticated. They are also getting more human, and this musical asks not if they will take over the human race (Oliver and Claire watch “Terminator” and mock its violent robots), but if they might be a source of connection: Can a robot be a surrogate son or a potential girlfriend? Can robots fall in love with each other?  

It’s sci-fi meets rom-com: “Her,” “The Last Five Years,” “50 First Dates,” and “Hadestown” combined, with some hints of “Black Mirror.” Plus, there’s a classic road trip and some great “robots confused in the real world” situational comedy. In some ways fresh and modern, in others formulaic, the musical plays with the tropes, beats, and genre conventions of romantic comedies with a knowing self-awareness.  

“Maybe Happy Ending” cleverly uses its sci-fi depiction of the interior life of robots to explore a whole host of deeply human themes. Oliver and Claire are different models — Oliver is a HelperBot 3: classic, durable, a bit limited in scope, and Claire is a HelperBot 5 with advanced features, but flimsily made and quick to fall apart. This becomes a commentary on generational divides and animosities, and the fact that both characters have been cast aside by their owners brings up feelings of uselessness and questions of labor ethics. Oliver holds a deep fondness for his former owner James (Marcus Choi, wonderful in a slew of human roles), refusing to let go and highlighting the dangers of nostalgia. While Oliver is endlessly optimistic and always imagining possible futures, Claire is fatalistic and coldly rational, with “that’s the way it has to be” as her motto. She accepts that her hardware is failing, that there are no replacement parts, that soon she’ll have to stay plugged into the wall, and that her days are numbered. Using the language of robotics, Park and Aronson subtly explore aging, disability, and end-of-life care. 

The most explicit theme is the nature of love, which is foreign to robots but Oliver and Claire decide to give it a try. The musical asks why we let ourselves fall in love knowing that it may likely not produce a happy ending. In giving Oliver and Claire rich psyches full of anxieties, yearnings, frustrations over limitations, and desires for companionship, Aronson and Park have made these robots feel anything but robotic, and have made their musical feel as much about the human condition as it is about technological advancements. 

Both Criss and Shen give excellent, very different performances. As an older model, Criss is purposefully more robotic: angled arms, stiff neck, straight spine, minimal facial expressions. His commitment to the physicality is remarkable and impressive — you might only fully appreciate it during curtain call, when he walks and emotes normally. He is the stronger singer of the pair, but his roboticness, though true to character, can make him slightly harder to connect to. (His silent-film star makeup, by Suki Tsujimoto, is also distracting.) Shen, on the other hand, feels practically human, and there’s more pathos to her pained performance, especially in her awareness of her own impending mortality.  

Aronson’s score eschews electronic, futuristic sounds, and is instead inspired by Oliver and his former owner Josh’s love of jazz records. In place of theramins and synthesizers we have piano and the needle of a record player crackling. The musical features a fictional jazz singer, Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), with some spot-on pastiche songs that perfectly match the style of Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington, but sneakily include lyrics that, while having the veneer of a generic jazz standard, are uncannily topical to Claire and Oliver’s story, as in the opening/finale, “Why Love?” 

One of the achievements of the production is the very complete world that director Michael Arden has created. The sleek, futuristic set (by Dane Laffrey) draws on Korean design, provides a clear sense of time and place, and utilizes neon lighting (by Ben Stanton) in strategic and fitting ways. The stage is almost always framed in moving scrims lined in neon, forming tight boxes, a tidy touch that is highly effective. Appropriate for the high-tech society, the production seamlessly incorporates video (by George Reeve and Laffrey) to depict off-stage moments and flashbacks. In a nice twist, it is often the human characters that exist as digital avatars, whereas the robots are live human actors.  

In another move decentering humans, Oliver and Claire maintain strong relationships with non-humans, each with symbolic resonance. Like his plant HwaBoon, Oliver requires attention, and like the now-rare lightning bug (which “produce light without even being plugged in” like “little forest robots”), Claire tries to make something beautiful with her short lifespan. 

The musical has too many endings, but perhaps this is part of the point. Worried about their impending technological demise, the lovers debate erasing their memories, a robot version of a clean, mutual break up. They end up making different decisions, which can come off as the writers being noncommittal, but also gets at the heart of the piece: There is no one clear route to a happy ending, and what’s good and healthy and happy for one, may not be for someone else. 

“Maybe Happy Ending” is an undeniably moving, well-made, adorable musical, and it is a pleasant surprise to see an audience weep at a show about two robots in love. The musical makes the bold claim that maybe we are not that different from robots after all, or that they are not that different from us. Just as robots have much to learn from humans, we in turn can learn from them, especially how to care for each other and for ourselves. It’s crucial to know when you need to charge your battery, but likewise it’s important to be willing to share that charger with someone in need.