GRAMOPHONE Review: Maybe Happy Ending – Original Broadway Cast

At a time when A.I. is all over the news and robotic ‘helpers’ are seen as both progressive and downright scary is it any wonder that Maybe Happy Ending – a super-smart new musical from Korean-American writers Will Aronson and Hue Park – is a Broadway smash hit. Having not yet seen it but been instantly captivated by its songs and sentiment I also have in mind a much-lauded play by Alan Ayckbourn called Comic Potential where a robot longs for mortality in order to experience and grapple with real human feelings – not far removed from another music theatre masterpiece Dvorak’s Rusalka.

So here we have a Sci-Fi romantic comedy where two obsolete robots in the HelperBot3 range – Oliver and Claire, out of warranty, out of favour – fall hopelessly in love but true to their emotional limitations don’t know what to do with it. The show has a very Far Eastern ethos and the Korean language version was premiered in Seoul as long ago as 2016. In the States the musical was honoured with the prestigious Richard Rodger Award. That’s a big deal.

How to describe Will Aronson’s captivating score? There is, of course, a nod to its hero Oliver’s love of vintage Jazz given on occasion to a crooning coolness – but its easy lyricism and catchy hooks have their own momentum borne on the smart kinetic rhythms of now. There are a couple of ballet sequences like ‘Chasing Fireflies’ which has a gorgeous kind of Michel Legrand lushness; ‘James’ Piano Solo’ (James is Oliver’s human owner with whom he longs to be reunited) morphs into the warmest of embraces in strings; and there’s a ‘Memory Sequence’ which warmly hints at everything Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen) may never have.

My favourite song ‘Where You Belong’ is a cracker whose rangy melody is wistful and then some; ‘The Rainy Day We Met’ has an aspirational longing; and there are the duets ‘When You’re in Love’ and the title song where the melding of the two voices in the former is more than a little suggestive of discovering harmony in every sense of the word.

I can pay no higher compliment to Aronson and Park than to say that the charm of what they have created conveys both innocence and sophistication in equal measure but more than that all the melodic and rhythmic quirkiness of a Burt Bacharach. Coming from me that is praise indeed.