“Some of the greatest stories that cultures around the world have created are, on paper, ridiculous,” posits stage and screen star Darren Criss. For example: Two obsolete robots, both discarded by their human owners, meet in a housing complex several decades from now, and they become friends and embark on a road trip — during which, naturally, they fall in love.
That is the basic plot of Maybe Happy Ending, the critically celebrated work now up for 10 Tony Awards, including best musical, book, score, and leading actor for Criss. In the production, directed by Michael Arden, also a nominee, Criss plays Oliver, a “Helperbot” who contents himself talking to a plant and listening to old jazz recordings while waiting in vain for his former owner to reclaim him.
Helen J Shen is Claire, the slightly newer model with whom Oliver embarks on a grand adventure. It’s captured in almost cinematic splendor by Arden — a Tony winner two years ago for his stunning revival of Parade, and a nominee before that for acclaimed stagings of Once on This Island and Spring Awakening — and his team, led by scenic designer Dane Laffrey, Arden’s longtime collaborator.
But spectacle never overshadows substance in Maybe Happy Ending. “There’s a trap when you’re designing the future to think too much about futurism,” Arden notes. “With this show, we were guided by the wonderful script” — by Broadway newbies Will Aronson and Hue Park, who also collaborated on the lyrics, with Aronson composing — “which wanted to have a sense of nostalgia to it. So I assembled this team, including a lighting designer I had worked with [Ben Stanton, also nominated] and a new video designer, George Reeve,” who shares a nomination with Laffrey.
In casting, Arden thought immediately of Criss: “Darren is an old friend; he actually went to college with my husband. We’d always been saying we’d love to do something together, and from the first moment I read this I knew it was a perfect role for him. Darren is so talented at so many things, and he has such a facility for physical work.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, in fact, Criss studied commedia dell’arte and other physical performance traditions while studying at the Accademia Dell’Arte in Tuscany. “It was like an accidental bag of tricks,” the actor muses. “I didn’t even think about how I could use any of that training in the show until Michael had me speak to Moni Yakim,” credited as Maybe Happy Ending’s movement consultant. “I was thrilled to get to have a Zoom meeting with him. Even though we only spoke for about a total of two hours, it unlocked this dormant chamber in my brain and body that I got to dust off and wash over everything Oliver was going to become.”
Criss muses of Maybe Happy Ending’s success, “It’s an acknowledgment of a singularity and an originality and a sense of risk that you don’t see often, because it’s hard. If we all knew how to put the lightning in the bottle, we’d have jars and jars of it.” In this case, the actor gives “enormous credit to both the lightning and the bottle — the lightning being Will Aronson and Hue Park, who understand dramaturgy and music and form in a very studied and precise and fun way, and then Michael Arden and Dane Laffrey and their team being this really sharp receptacle and vessel for this supercharged — pun intended — creativity.”
For Arden, who had never helmed an original musical on Broadway before — let alone one this original, with an entirely new story and songs not inspired by any movie, book, or other preexisting brand — it was “a challenge and a joy. I had to approach the work with a kind of childlike wonder. A lot of times you’re building a boat for people to get on; here, not only were we building the boat, but we were kind of filling the ocean as well. The writers had done such a beautiful job of making sure the audience understands the concept of this world without being overprescriptive, and I wanted to make sure the audience could enter that world unafraid of having missed out on something.”
Of Maybe Happy Ending’s simultaneous focus on technology and human emotion, Criss says, “Computers are such an excellent, if not too perfect, metaphor for human life: You have battery life, obsolescence, programming, glitching out.” He adds, “Nonhumans have always been used to putting up a mirror to human behavior — we’ve had Greek mythology, gods, spirits, animals. It makes you lean in a little more, dilates your heart a little more, and you open yourself up. Helperbots, as far as I can see them in the show, are somewhere between a child, a servant, a pet, and an elderly person. They have different points on the board for each of these attributes, depending on what kind of model they are.”
Arden notes that the response to Maybe Happy Ending has been “unlike any I’ve seen for any other show I’ve worked on, in that people want to come back over and over. We have audience members who’ve come back 30-plus times. There’s an inspiration toward hope in this piece — that if we have nothing else, we have the opportunity to walk across a hallway and knock on the door of someone who’s different, and ask if they need help. I’ve heard people say, ‘After I left your show, I called my mom and talked with her for an hour,’ or ‘I reached out to someone I hadn’t thought about in a while.’”
Overall, the director says, “I’ve noticed that people have said this show makes them think about their own mortality, and it makes them think about why we often choose to close ourselves off to love, and how we have to fight against that kind of pessimism. And that has been really rewarding.”