If you thought that at this point in our relationship with the algorithm, any new story about robots, androids, or AI would be more likely to lean toward Terminator or Battlestar Galactica than Wall-E , Will Aronson and Hue Park are here to very sweetly disagree. Their new musical, Maybe Happy Ending , about two obsolete robots who fall for each other in near-future Seoul, is roughly as apocalyptic as While You Were Sleeping. Michael Arden’s slick production — with a set made up of irising LED frames and spick-and-span sliding interiors by Dane Laffrey — might feel like 2064 on the surface, but in its nostalgic, rechargeable heart, the show parties like it’s 1999.
What’s more ’90s, after all, than a road-trip rom-com, especially one where you’ve got to whip out the tissues at the end? That’s the genre Maybe Happy Ending is going for, and it’s got the formula pegged. Our protagonists can’t like each other too much at the start: Oliver (Darren Criss, as shellacked as a brunette Ken doll, with similarly hinged joints) is a Helperbot 3, an older model of a popular line of humanoid robots that are essentially Jeeves powered by battery. Oliver used to work for a human called James (Marcus Choi), a wealthy, kindhearted man with a fondness for all things retro, especially old jazz records, who bequeathed them both — the fondness and the records — to Oliver.
These days, Oliver lives in a compound of efficiency apartments reserved for decommissioned Helperbots, .
