Since May 19, Zachary Noah Piser and Hannah Kevitt have been playing the leads, a pair of obsolete robots who develop human-like feelings for one another, in the long-running, Tony Award–winning musical Maybe Happy Ending. But the young performers’ relationships with the show, and each other, go back further.
While making her Broadway debut in Back to the Future: The Musical a few years ago, Kevitt recalls, she wound up doing a workshop with Piser. “I was singing ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ in the background and Zach was playing one of the lead roles, and I remember just thinking, my gosh, this guy is so good.” Kevitt consequently saw Piser in another original musical, Redwood, and watched a video of his solo performance in that show when it went viral, “but we really didn’t know each other.”
Piser, whose other Broadway credits include KPOP, Dear Evan Hansen (as a replacement in the title role), and Wicked, also wound up taking part in a workshop for Maybe Happy Ending while it was in development, while Kevitt, purely on the strength of an audition video, was hired to serve as understudy/standby for Claire before the show opened to rapturous reviews in the fall of 2024.
The two were reunited when Piser signed on to play Oliver, the lovable “Helperbot” who, having been discarded by his owner, James, lives in a housing complex in South Korea circa 2064, with only a plant as a companion. There he meets Claire, a newer model who has nonetheless also been judged no longer fit for service. The relationship that develops between them explores how love, loss, mortality, and moral responsibility are being impacted in the digital age and, at the same time, what is enduring about them.
Kevitt’s journey with Claire took a turn back in February, when Helen J Shen, who had originated the role, departed the production. Darren Criss, who had left for just a couple of months last fall after winning a Tony Award for his performance as Oliver, “wanted to stay a little longer,” so she and Claire Kwon, who had been a vacation understudy and is now starring in the national tour, were each given two-week residencies.
View this post on Instagram
“It’s one of those roles where you do a huge trust fall,” Kevitt notes of her character, “because you can’t go offstage and check your notes or take a breather. There are four water breaks total for me in the show, and no going to the bathroom…It was really nice to go on with Darren, because he looked at me like, ‘I got you.’ So I try to do that with Zach – although he doesn’t need it, he’s so amazing.”
Piser was nonetheless nervous at first: “I’m Asian and Jewish, so I’m very anxious,” he quips. He and Kevitt had done minimal scene work before going onstage together, “and we were commiserating about that, and we realized it was a little bit of a secret weapon for us. Because Oliver and Claire, when they first meet, are complete strangers to each other, so we decided to use something that other actors might see as a disadvantage and see it as an advantage…Now it’s been a couple of months and we’re getting to know each other, but honestly, that made the beginning, middle, and end of their journey that much richer.”
Piser adds, “This team gave us so much grace—especially me, stepping in new to the production—and creative license, within reason; they were open to conversations like, what does this feel like for me, what do I think this moment is? Painting broader strokes, whereas (other) shows may be more prescriptive. That has made this experience so much more exciting.”
Kevitt agrees: “As a standby your job is to fill in and make sure the show goes on without a hitch. You’re encouraged to have your own takes a little bit, but you also try to fit into somebody else’s show. But this is our version, so that’s exciting.”
Maybe Happy Ending’s study of the changes and potential conflicts posed by advancing technology resonates with both performers, who are in their twenties. “I try to stay away from AI as much as I can,” Piser notes. “I have a couple of friends, because I’m from the Bay Area, who are deep into tech and never thought they would have to worry about job stability, and I’m the actor in the group, and now they’re coming to me saying, ‘I’m about to be freelance, what am I going to do?’ I’m like, join the club!”
Kevitt says, “I won’t speak for my whole generation, but something I’ve seen a lot and talked about a lot with my peers is this kind of desire, because we grew up with so much technology, for this more analog life. Like, so many of my friends and I have picked up coloring as a hobby, because we’re on our phones all the time, looking at screens all the time. Or we’re like, do you want to come over and we’ll just sit and talk?”
For Piser, the musical also has meaning in representing his Asian heritage in an inclusive fashion. “It’s one of my dreams to do shows that integrate pieces of my identity but don’t always have to be 100 percent about my identity,” he says. “With this show, I get to look the way that I look, be the way that I am, and also play this beautiful, messy, funny, goofy character.”
Piser adds, “This is the show in which I’ve learned the most about humanity…You start out thinking, I’m going to watch these two robots fall in love, and you end up seeing a younger version of yourself or relearning the basics of what it means to be human. It’s a rom-com and it’s hilarious, but at the end it’s asking these deep, deep questions of, if you have a relationship with someone, how would you act if you knew there was a deadline? How do you interact with people? How do you interact with the world? It’s an all-encompassing and surprising piece.”
Kevitt muses, “I feel like Claire and my journey with Maybe Happy Ending are the gift that keeps on giving in a lot of ways. I never thought that I would be a standby for a principal role; I never thought that I would be leading a show, or that they would ask me to do it full time…I just feel lucky that we’re still here, and that I get to do it with Zach, who is someone I admire and who challenges me. I feel really, really grateful.”
