Two Servos, With Love: Broadway's Maybe Happy Ending and Gypsy

Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending.

The musical Maybe Happy Ending is first surprising, then charming, and finally touching. It’s a romantic musical about robots written by Will Aronson (who composed the music) and Hue Park (who collaborated with Aronson on the book and lyrics), that comes to Broadway by way of Korea. The two protagonists, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), live across the hall from each other in apartments in the Helperbot Yards in Seoul, where they were left after their owners “retired” them – though Oliver is under the impression that his, James (played by Marcus Choi in flashbacks), will be coming by any day to pick him up and ferry him to his home on Jeju Island. It’s been twelve years, but Oliver continues to live in happy expectation, watching the movies James taught him to love and listening to the classic jazz that is his special legacy from James. (James continued Oliver’s subscription to Jazz Monthly when he departed.) Oliver’s only companion is a plant he’s named HwaBoon – another gift from James – until one day Claire knocks on his door and asks him to let her use his recharger. At first, true to the conventional romantic-comedy set-up, they don’t like each other, but they warm up and eventually realize that, in defiance of the way their manufacturer created them, they have begun to have feelings for each other. And since Claire’s owner left her with her old car, the bots are able to embark on the archetypal romantic-comedy journey, to Jeju Island to find the long-gone James.

The blurring of the line between replicants and human beings is the starting point of most stories about robots. Recently we’ve had a lovely movie version of Peter Brown’s children’s book The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders, in which Roz, the only robot to survive a shipwreck, discovers she has the capacity to mother a baby bird. Maybe Happy Ending works the same way as The Wild Robot: in suggesting that a robot might be capable of emotion, it explores what makes us human. But Brown’s story is a fable that teaches kids to transcend the differences that divide us (Roz has to win over the animals of the forest where she finds herself, and succeeds in bringing them together in a crisis, prey and predator alike), whereas Aronson and Park’s musical isn’t didactic. It’s closer to some of the Pixar movies, especially the Toy Story series, which also touches on the sorrow of creatures that have lost their connection to their human owners and thus their purpose, and WALL-E.

The creatives who produced this show have found a distinctive style – synthetic but warm, with a jewel-case look. Dane Laffrey’s scenic design carves out rectangles for Oliver’s and Claire’s apartment that are like the cut-outs in an advent calendar, and later, when the set expands to capture their journey to Jeju Island and video (designed by George Reeve and Laffrey) adds another component, the stage is suddenly alive with inventive visual ideas. The robots’ access to their memories – and later to each other’s – and their discovery that they have imaginations widens the visual range of the production in delightful ways. En route to the island, they play a game in which they devise a scenario about how they might have met if they were human, and Oliver draws on the tropes in the movie romances and especially the ballads he adores. This is one of the show’s high points; the other is a musical number about fireflies, which Claire introduces him to on Jeju Island. Fireflies are a motif in Maybe Happy Ending that symbolizes the spark of emotion that, unlike Oliver and Claire, doesn’t need artificial recharging but, as it turns out, is somewhere present inside them as it is inside all of us.

Shen is very likable as Claire, but Criss is dazzling as Oliver. This is one of those performances that defies categorization, like Andy Serkis’s work in the Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes movies or John Lone’s in the title role of Iceman, where the role calls on the actor to suggest a presence for which there are no models. It’s an inspired piece of acting and perhaps the most unusual example of musical-comedy showmanship I’ve ever seen.

This is a small production but all of its elements work, including Ben Stanton’s intimate lighting and Aronson’s tuneful music, with its elusive wisps of melancholy, which has been supervised by Deborah Abramson and is beautifully supported by a combo under John Yun’s musical direction. This little marvel of a musical was directed by Michael Arden, whose résumé includes two other shows that rank among the most unorthodox theatregoing pleasures I’ve had over the last decade, the 2015 revival of the musical Spring Awakening performed by Deaf West and Jefferson Mays’s one-man Christmas Carol. This man is one of the fireflies of the theatre.

Danny Burstein, Joy Woods and Audra McDonald in Gypsy. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.)

Not even the most talented performer can play every role in the repertoire. Audra McDonald was a luminous Bess in the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, the best I’ve ever seen, but no power on earth can turn her into Mama Rose, the terrifying stage mother at the center of Gypsy, whom she’s playing in George C. Wolfe’s current remounting of the 1959 Arthur Laurents-Jule Styne-Stephen Sondhiem musical. To begin with, her voice is dead wrong for it: she starts all of Rose’s big setpiece numbers by belting and then drifts into her operatic soprano, and musically you don’t know where the hell you are. And her acting is just awful. She shouts down the house (like Rosalind Russell in the disastrous 1962 movie version) and sashays around the stage – in costumes, designed by Toni-Leslie James, that seem to have been created in order to make her look like a crone – but she never comes close to playing a character. Her Mama Rose isn’t charismatic; she’s unavoidable, like a runaway train.

This Gypsy is a disgrace. It’s ugly to look at; Santo Loquasto is credited with the sets and Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer with the lighting, but it’s hard to believe that either of them signed off on it. Camille A. Brown’s choreography is imposed on the material, not derived organically from it: the Garden of Eden burlesque number toward the end is as ill-fitting in its way as the dancing road signs early in the first act. And though I’ve never been a fan of Wolfe’s direction, he’s generally highly skilled, so I was baffled by the clumsiness of the staging, especially in the scene where Rose persuades her daughter Louise (Joy Woods) to go on for an absentee stripper and Rose’s agent and paramour Herbie (Danny Burstein) is so appalled he rushes offstage to throw up. Wolfe has placed the three principals upstage of an empty clothes rack for some reason, and when Herbie disappears upstage right we barely see him leave. A grad student director would be unlikely to make this kind of blunder.

McDonald isn’t the only shouter in the cast; that seems to have been Wolfe’s fallback direction to the actors. He overdoes everything – the “Have an Egg Roll, Mr. Goldstone” number is so busy and chaotic it’s exhausting, and he makes the strippers such wearisome caricatures that you’re tired of them before the orchestra even strikes up the generally surefire “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” I liked Kevin Csolak as Tulsa, the chorus boy who elopes with Rose’s would-be vaudeville-vedette daughter June, but Brown has embellished his solo, “All I Need Is the Girl,” as if it were a star turn; the choreography is distracting. As June, Jordan Tyson is a bundle of nerves with a compulsive vibrato; by the time she runs off with Tulsa she seems to be on the road to a breakdown. Joy Woods is fine as Louise – her rendition of “Little Lamb” is a little oasis of sanity and restraint – until she turns into Gypsy Rose Lee, a persona she can’t get near. The only enduring bright spot in the production is the unassailable Burstein, who holds onto the character’s humanity with the rooted strength of an oak in a thunderstorm. Burstein is always praiseworthy; this time he deserves the Croix de Guerre.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.