When Robots Meet Cute: Maybe Happy Ending

Darren Criss and Helen J Shen in Maybe Happy Ending. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman/Polk & Co.

If you thought that at this point in our relationship with the algorithm, any new story about robots, androids, or AI would be more likely to lean toward Terminator or Battlestar Galactica than Wall-E, Will Aronson and Hue Park are here to very sweetly disagree. Their new musical, Maybe Happy Ending, about two obsolete robots who fall for each other in near-future Seoul, is roughly as apocalyptic as While You Were Sleeping. Michael Arden’s slick production — with a set made up of irising LED frames and spick-and-span sliding interiors by Dane Laffrey — might feel like 2064 on the surface, but in its nostalgic, rechargeable heart, the show parties like it’s 1999.

What’s more ’90s, after all, than a road-trip rom-com, especially one where you’ve got to whip out the tissues at the end? That’s the genre Maybe Happy Ending is going for, and it’s got the formula pegged. Our protagonists can’t like each other too much at the start: Oliver (Darren Criss, as shellacked as a brunette Ken doll, with similarly hinged joints) is a Helperbot 3, an older model of a popular line of humanoid robots that are essentially Jeeves powered by battery. Oliver used to work for a human called James (Marcus Choi), a wealthy, kindhearted man with a fondness for all things retro, especially old jazz records, who bequeathed them both — the fondness and the records — to Oliver. These days, Oliver lives in a compound of efficiency apartments reserved for decommissioned Helperbots, listening to James’s favorite mid-century big-band leader, the fictional Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), and regularly spritzing his best friend and only conversation partner, Hwaboon, who happens to be a succulent. Programmed for optimism, Oliver believes (though it’s been 12 years) that he’s just waiting for James to come pick him up. “Let’s enjoy the day!” he sings to Hwaboon. “I never need more from / The world within my room.”

But wait: a knock at the door! Enter Claire (Helen J Shen, who couldn’t be cuter), a Helperbot 5 who lives across the hall. Oliver is frazzled (“I really hate to be surprised,” he stammers) and also immediately supercilious: Of course Claire needs to borrow his charger. “It’s a well-known fact,” he rattles off to her primly, “that Three still has the best durability among Helperbots because the charger has the ‘classic design’” whereas the Five series, designed to be “sleeker” and “more fashionable … ended up losing durability.” Ugh, Fives.

So we’ve got our not-yet-a-couple, and they are, as the form requires, annoyed with each other. Park and Aronson get a lot of mileage out of the pair trading barbs over their different model types — one of the most genuinely funny bits involves Claire recalling a function by which the Helperbot 3 must respond with “You’re welcome” any time someone says “Thank you” — and it’s all very Threes Are From Mars and Fives Are From Venus. It’s a little easy, but the show’s not trying to be hard, and Shen and Criss are the ones who make it work. Shen especially is a delight to watch, with an open, emotive face full of quicksilver expressions and a tartness that can turn explosive when she needs it to. “You just said it was my turn!” she roars at one point during a shared song in which Oliver keeps blithely noodling over her. It is — another requisite of the genre — #relatable.

Claire and Oliver end up singing together, and riding in Claire’s car together, because she suggests a spontaneous adventure. It turns out that both of them have been dreaming of Jeju Island, an idyll about 50 miles off the tip of the Korean peninsula. Oliver wants to reunite with James, who moved to Jeju to live with his son (also played by Choi) after letting Oliver go 12 years ago. Claire wants to see the fireflies. “There’s a complex chemical reaction in their abdomen,” she informs Oliver, touching her fingers to his temple to give him the download on the insect, Matrix–style. (George Reeves and Laffrey flood the surfaces of Laffrey’s set with whorls of cyberspace video every time the robots info-share this way.) “Because of this chemical process, they can produce light by themselves — without ever being plugged in,” she continues. Oliver is in awe. “Little forest robots,” he says.

It’s in moments like this one that Maybe Happy Ending shows hints of something beyond the purely cozy. Oliver has never heard of fireflies because Jeju Island is now the only place where they haven’t died out. And, though she’s keeping it a secret, Claire wants to see them as a kind of good-bye: Not only is her charger busted, but her ability to hold a charge is steadily diminishing, and there are no replacement parts coming. Now it’s a terminal-illness romance!

If it sounds like I’m equivocating, it’s because I am a bit. On the one hand, Maybe Happy Ending does what it sets out to do, and the question is whether that’s what you come to theater for, or even just whether it’s what you’re craving on a given day. It’s sweet, it’s charming, it’s got jokes (“Okay, baby,” says Oliver loudly to Claire as they attempt to masquerade as a human couple at a cheap motel, quickly following it up with the helpful tip, “Human couples call each other babies”). If its songs are tuneful without being particularly revelatory, it’s no great loss, because neither do they feel like the true engine of the show, which is more driven by plot and character than by music. There are sparks of wit throughout — as when the robots open their mouths and let out a dial tone, or a stored recording of someone else’s voice, or that three-note progression that always precedes disappointing news. There are also moments of beauty: The sequence in which Claire and Oliver finally encounter the fireflies on Jeju unites set, video, and lights (by Ben Stanton) in a luscious swirl while also bringing a section of the production’s orchestra onstage to striking effect.

Then there are also the places your mind might wander. Humans still seem pretty empowered in this future, where robots are advanced enough to do everything — including developing complex emotions — but have remained a docile servant class. Perhaps even more dubiously, humanity seems … nice? I kept having to tell myself to just accept the premise: that a huge corporation like Helperbot Inc. would install its old models in fairly pleasant retirement homes at its own expense rather than trash-compacting them. There’s also the question of security. When Claire and Oliver decide to hit the road, they sing about it, pack up, and go. No cameras? No guards? Robots are apparently not supposed to do things like “have money” or travel alone, but what’s actually the risk? We never get much sense that the world outside the bots’ little rooms has really suffered significant change or decay, despite the near-extinction of fireflies. Whether it’s an intentional nod or not, Oliver’s sunny listen-to-old-human-tunes morning routine feels downright cribbed from Wall-E, and that movie packed more world-building, and more melancholy, into its opening two minutes than Maybe Happy Ending generates.

Still, Park and Aronson have set out to grapple not with the singularity but with the risks and rewards of stepping beyond singledom. “Why, love?” croons Gil Brentley from Oliver’s record player. “Why did we bother to try love? … When all things end in good-bye, love, / Why did we dream that this fate would not be ours?” If you find yourself cruising the streamers at night, sipping chamomile tea and searching for Sliding Doors and Sweet November and French Kiss, then Maybe Happy Ending is waiting for you.

Maybe Happy Ending is at the Belasco Theatre.