Rapturously romantic robots, incongruously finding a way to fall in love despite supposedly lacking such emotions, is the simple premise of ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ – and somehow it’s precisely what the world needs right now. A modern-day treatise on romance in a technologically-overwhelming world, where safety is found only in one’s own room, but the quest for finding somewhere we might belong forces us to depart our comfort zones, it’s a musical adventure unlike anything else on Broadway right now.
Directed by Michael Arden, with a book, music and lyrics by Will Aronson and Hue Park, ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ manages to be as light and wistful as it is haunting and touching. Lead performances by Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen ground the work in glorious voices and winsome longing – while Marcus Choi provides the stark emotional reality of the piece. Weaving his way through the standards sung by Gil Brentley, Dez Duron gives slick crooning a lovesick tenor. Together, they speak to a generation raised on cel phones and living their lives through screens, communicating through truncated words in a text, this same generation unable to connect in the most basic ways, trying to figure out how to not be alone.
‘Maybe Happy Ending’ illuminates the larger question of how much of love is real and how much is merely an act of going through romantic motions, with its interchangeable ideas of Paris or New York cliches. Such things are trite and cliche for all the truth in them. The inexplicable pull of love, and how to convey and create that for the journey they are making, becomes an exercise in figuring out what love might be – and by the end they seem to have come close to figuring out the mystery, at one point wondering why humans put themselves through it.
Studied and precise, Criss and Chen capture the inherent robotic nature of the situation, while managing to break through the ominous possibilities and limits of an AI world by approximating the love pattern of humans. The essential longing of finding somewhere we might belong is expressed profoundly throughout the evening, and while robots may not fall entirely in love, this show manages to illuminate what happens when humans do – and it’s not something that can be defined or scientifically reproduced.
At turns rapturously romantic, with a couple of winsome waltzes, some breezy breaks with jazzy inflections, and a standard or two, ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ is very much an old-fashioned romance framed by a fantastically-futuristic setting and atmosphere. Rather than being cold or removed from the human experience, it exemplifies the basic construction of love, thanks to the charming performances of Criss, and particularly Shen, who absolutely shines in a role that runs the gamut from uproariously hilarious to stoically poignant.
Near the end, the title song puts forth its greatest and most comforting notion – that none of life is ever worth regretting, none of it is ever a waste – it all matters in the moment, and when it was good it is the goodness that runs on, in a perpetual loop, that one can dip into whenever they need comfort, a place where they belong.
