Director Michael Arden admits to having a fair amount of skepticism when he was approached in 2017 to stage the first English-language iteration of “Maybe Happy Ending,” a South Korean musical about a romance between robots.
“I thought, What a nightmare. This sounds horrible,” Arden, a 2023 Tony winner for the Ben Platt-led revival of “Parade,” recalled to HuffPost. “And then I read and listened to it and was completely blown away and bowled over, and knew that I had to work on it. To me, it just felt like a play about human existence and how, when you love someone, you are ultimately signing up to lose them. Happiness only exists because of heartache.”
On Thursday, “Maybe Happy Ending” picked up 10 Tony Award nominations ― including Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical for Arden and Best Actor in a Musical for its principal star,
Darren Criss. It’s tied with “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her” for the most nominations of any show this season.
Featuring a wistful, jazz-infused score by Will Aronson and Hue Park, the musical follows a pair of “Helperbot” androids in near-future South Korea. The robots, Oliver (played by Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen in her Broadway debut), find one another after they’ve been discarded by their owners as they approach the end of their service lives.
“Maybe Happy Ending” marks Arden’s fifth Broadway musical as a director, but it’s his first that isn’t a revival. The show had its U.S. premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2020, shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In translating “Maybe Happy Ending” for an American audience, Arden worked with Aronson and Park to add new songs and sharpen the characterization. The show’s core, however, remains mostly intact from its original iteration.
“It was fun to think about what it would be like for an audience to have no idea what they were walking into,” Arden said. “It was freeing, but a little scary.” His main goal, he added, was to “make it more and more human as it went along, so that we hopefully forget they’re robots. As [Oliver and Claire] become more emotional beings, we had to let the sci-fi aspects go.”
Criss, whose theater credits include “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “American Buffalo,” signed on to play Oliver once the musical’s Broadway transfer was announced. Though the “Glee” and “American Crime Story” actor’s casting drew buzz, “Maybe Happy Ending” arrived at New York’s Belasco Theatre last November to limited fanfare. Its success six months later can be attributed to organic word-of-mouth, making its Tony nominations and other accolades all the more rewarding for Arden and the rest of the creative team.
In terms of its staging, “Maybe Happy Ending” presented a number of challenges. Over the course of the show, Oliver and Claire travel from their respective Seoul dwellings to Jeju Island and back again, contemplating love, loneliness and other emotions that seemingly exist beyond their digital constraints along the way.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
A particularly chilling moment is “Where You Belong,” in which Oliver reflects on his early life with his owner, James (Marcus Choi). Noting that “half the scenery in the show is used within 90 seconds” of the song, Arden said, “That’s what memories are ― they’re fleeting. And I love that we get to really go there.”
In his Playbill bio, Arden dedicates “Maybe Happy Ending” to late actor Gavin Creel, who died last year at age 48 from a rare form of cancer. “If people take anything away from this show, it’s that we have an expiration date, and while we’re here, it’s our job to lift each other up,” Arden said. “That’s what Gavin did every day of his life. He was the biggest cheerleader for me, and it seemed his spirit is in tune with what this play is about.”
Bruce Glikas via Getty Images
Regardless of how “Maybe Happy Ending” fares at the Tonys on June 8, Arden is already at work on two new musicals. The first is a stage adaptation of the 2012 documentary “Queen of Versailles,” starring Kristin Chenoweth and set to open on Broadway in November. He’s also attached to direct “The Lost Boys,” based on the 1987 horror-comedy film and slated for a 2026 premiere.
Describing Chenoweth as a “lunatic genius,” Arden said, “She’s the most tireless, positive, wonderful collaborator ― so smart, hysterically funny and cares so much about the art form. To get to explore the really complicated character of Jackie Siegel with her is a real delight.”
As for “The Lost Boys,” he added, “The greatest thing a musical can do is inspire an audience to think about how they function and move through the world in a new way. And to do that in a vampire musical that’s also a story about family and how we break the cycle of trauma is pretty rad.”
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