Back in 2017, the year after Will Aronson and Hue Park’s musical Maybe Happy Ending had its world premiere in Seoul, the capitol of Park’s native South Korea, it received six Korea Musical Awards. “We call them Konys,” notes Aronson, who along with Park collected three more for their most recent effort, called Il Tenore.
This spring, the duo, both Broadway newbies, are poised to add Tonys® to their Konys: Maybe Happy Ending is up for ten of the industry’s biggest prizes for the past season—tying Buena Vista Social Club and Death Becomes Her for the most nods—including best musical, score and book, with director Michael Arden and leading actor Darren Criss also nominated. The show has already won this year’s New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for best musical, and the production is also a contender for nine Drama Desk Awards and four Drama League Awards—all including outstanding musical.
Maybe Happy Ending, which opened in New York to rave reviews last fall, is that rarest of birds: a new musical with an entirely original story and score. Set several decades into the future, it introduces us to Criss’s Oliver and Helen J Shen’s Claire, a pair of robots who walk and talk—Claire, a newer model, does both more fluidly—and look and, most importantly, feel emotions like human beings.
Both “helperbots” have nonetheless been deemed obsolete and discarded by their owners, and are living in separate rooms in a warehouse. When the two meet, the inevitable happens, and questions are raised about mortality and morality in the digital age, along with timeless reflections on love and loss, and the unavoidable connection between them.
The musical’s first seed was planted while Park was sitting in a coffee shop one day, and heard the song “Everyday Robots,” by British singer/songwriter Damon Albarn. “I started paying attention to the lyrics, which compare us with robots; we’re becoming more and more isolated, fixated on our phones.”
Park had met Aronson while studying visual arts at New York University, where the latter was a graduate student in musical theater. Earlier, Park had pursued creative writing and been a K-pop songwriter. “He was a true multi-media artist,” Aronson quips, “and I tried to convince him that musical theater was what he was really looking for; it’s got the music, the lyrics, the story, the visuals.”
After having initial success with a musical called Bungee Jump, adapted from a South Korean film, Aronson and Park set about working on Maybe Happy Ending; the show had its first reading in the United States shortly before arriving in Seoul, and “continued to develop on this American track,” Aronson points out; an English-language version first landed at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2020, for which Aronson adapted Park’s lyrics.
Both men describe their creative process as highly collaborative in every respect, and “very story-driven,” Aronson notes. “The first thing is building the story while sharing musical influences—like putting on playlists with different artists while we’re writing, trying to create a sort of story structure and musical vibe. Then we build the script with all the musical moments in sequence, and Hue writes the lyrics.”
Aronson serves as composer, but stresses, “Even though I sit down and write the music alone, it’s based on intense discussions of what the music should be, and then after the fact I’ll present Hue with different sketches for the same mood or moment. I’m creating the music, but it’s completely guided by Hue’s taste and sensibility.”
While crafting Maybe Happy Ending, Aronson and Park found themselves listening to the classical composer John Adams, along with “a lot of American songbook and jazz standards—Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, some Duke Ellington,” Park reports. Oliver is an aficionado of this kind of music, associating it with his beloved former owner, and another character who pops up in the show is a crooner named Gil Brentley, played by Dez Duron.
Sufjan Stevens, a singer/songwriter whose texturally eclectic fare was heard on Broadway in last season’s Illinoise, was also an inspiration: “We were trying to find a sound for the robots that has this mellow contemporary sensibility, a little muted,” Aronson notes. “That found its way in, though not on the surface; there’s no guitar in our pit orchestra.”
When Arden was suggested to helm the English-language production of Maybe Happy Ending, Aronson had already seen the director’s 2015 revival of Spring Awakening, and was moved by his ability to “marry stagecraft to emotion and storytelling.” Aronson had the same reaction when he and Park then attended Arden’s 2017 staging of Once on This Island: “Once again, it was filled with theatrical magic—things that can only be done in a live theater.”
Park, too, observed “something very tactile about Michael’s staging for Once on This Island, that I thought could make a very nice marriage with our future sci-fi world.” Aronson agrees that “even though there are video projections” in Maybe Happy Ending, “it’s done in this very tactile, interactive way, so it never feels purely digital.”
Asked about feedback they’ve gotten from audiences, and why they think the show has resonated so powerfully, Aronson says, “We’ve noticed a lot of people come with extremely personal stories, like, ‘I have a family member’s who sick,’ or, ‘I had this pet I loved for so long,’” Aronson says. “One theory I’ve had—and Hue, tell me if you think I’m wrong—is that part of our motivation for writing is that a lot of shows we were seeing were full of big, dramatic events, where part of our aesthetic was to scale things back. I wonder if that provides more space for the audience to bring themselves into it.”
Park is quiet for just a moment. “That’s a great answer, Will—but can I also pitch my idea? The characters in our show are not super-cynical, not jaded, and I think that’s becoming more and more rare. They’re not hiding any tricks; they’re putting their hearts on their sleeves.”
They are, in other words—however they’re technically wired—palpably human, “and I think people like to see that,” Park proposes. “Even though we are becoming more and more isolated, sticking to our sides, fighting with each other, we’re reminded by Oliver and Claire that we can still connect with each other. So maybe people are finding comfort in our story and our music.”