Broadway Reviews Theatre Review by Howard Miller - November 12, 2024 Maybe Happy Ending by Will Aronson and Hue Park. Director Michael Arden. Scenic and additional video design by Dane Laffrey. Costume design by Clint Ramos. Lighting Design by Ben Stanton. Sound design by Peter Hylenski. Video design by George Reeve. Hair and wig design by Craig Franklin Miller. Makeup design by Suki Tsujimoto. Orchestrations by Will Aronson. Music director John Yun. Music coordinator Kimberlee Wertz Music supervisor Deborah Abramson.
The one-act, 100-minute show, with book and lyrics by Hue Park and Will Aronson and music by Aronson, co-stars Darren Criss and Helen J Shen as "helperbots" who separately have been sent to an apartment complex in Seoul, South Korea, established to house the outdated and discarded. There they are expected to remain, alone in their small single rooms, until their batteries can no longer be recharged, at which point they presumably will be scrapped for parts. Criss plays a "HelperBot 3" named Oliver, who is fairly content with the routines that mark the passage of time. In a series of repetitive small scenes, we observe Oliver as the days, the weeks, the months, the years go by. He spends his time looking out the window, awaiting his mail delivery of jazz magazines and the occasional replacement part, and taking care of his plant, which he has named Hwaboon (who has his own cute little bio in the Playbill, as well as an Instagram account). Oliver has but one dream, that his former owner, James (Marcus Choi), will retrieve him and take him back home. Robo-life goes on unchanged, until one day there is a knock at the door. It is Claire (Ms. Shen), the more advanced HelperBot 5 from across the hall. She wonders if Oliver would help her to recharge her battery. Claire, a later bot model and subsequently more human-like than Oliver in her appearance and demeanor, has her own dream, which is to visit Jeju Island once again and observe the fireflies for which it is famous. Before you can say "road trip," the pair is off on an adventure; she in search of fireflies, he in search of James.
Still, this string of simple moments manages to sneak up on us and begins to add up to a delicate little love story, held together by a perfect scenic design made up of Dane Laffrey's appearing and disappearing sets and George Reeve's video projections. But more than this, Maybe Happy Ending can also be seen as a parable about planned obsolescence and disposable lives, say of the elderly, in a world that holds neither in great esteem. The show was a big hit in South Korea, where it originated; word-of-mouth and the wonders of social media may well do the trick here.
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