(Bloomberg) -- In the future, if you believe the new Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending, many of us will have in-home robots helping us with our daily tasks, mixing drinks and chatting with us about everything from music to our hopes and dreams in an eerie simulacrum of genuine companionship.
It’s a world that’s at once intimate, slick and deceptively cold. Or at least it could be. But, in a visually formidable and technically precise production starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen that opens on Nov. 12, the environment that’s created by scenic designer Dane Laffrey is expansive, imaginative and bursting with warmth.
“We’re not going to be able to cinematically create a future world on a Broadway stage in a way that you can do in a film,” director Michael Arden says, speaking a few weeks before previews. “And so we wanted to kind of let it be more mystical and a bit more magical than literal futurism.”
The musical centers on Oliver (Criss), a “Helperbot” robot whose owner has put him out to proverbial pasture, which in this case means a single-room apartment in a retirement home for obsolete robots. There, a perennially sunny Oliver spends his days listening to jazz, talking to his plant, ordering replacement parts for himself and waiting for his owner James (Marcus Choi) to return. But Oliver’s carefully ordered world is upended when Claire (Shen), another Helperbot in the complex, knocks on his door in desperate need of a battery charge.
Soon, the two robots strike up a wary friendship and begin to contemplate what the future might hold for them both. The plot owes much to two beloved novels by Kazuo Ishiguro—The Remains of the Day, where a retired butler reflects on his life of service and acclimates himself to a future without a master; and Never Let Me Go, which follows a group of young people who’ve been raised specifically as organ donors. But despite the fairly heavy undertones of the plot, the action is upbeat, the songs catchy and the characters bubbly. Their apartments have small futuristic touches, like robot-charging docks, but there are also LPs and comfy couches with cheery poufs.
“We’re mixing fabrics and textures from the 1960s with holograms and neon,” Arden says. “And incredible LED technologies.”
Conceiving the Design
The musical, which has music by Will Aronson and lyrics by Hue Park (the book is by both of them), originated in South Korea in 2016 and quickly became a sensation. Laffrey, the set designer, recalls seeing the play in a rehearsal room a few years before the English-language production made its debut in Atlanta in 2020.
What he saw presented a series of unique challenges: The musical exists in the relatively constrained spaces of the Helperbot retirement home; but there’s also a series of flashbacks to Oliver’s time working with James in his house, as well as Claire’s time working for her owner. Then, when the two robots eventually leave their apartments, there’s an entirely new landscape and horizon to contend with. And all of this takes place in a single unbroken act.
Laffrey’s solution was to create a “machine that moved us through this world,” he says. “And, in doing so, captured the feeling of these characters caught up in a world in which they kind of lack agency.”
Laffrey is referring to an actual giant mechanicsm that encompasses the whole stage and fills it with moving pieces. For most of the show, the audience’s view is comprised of one or two boxes, one for each of the robot’s rooms—those boxes can slide horizontally, meaning there’s occasionally a single room and, more often, two side-by-side. The stage also has a central turntable, upon which some sets (James’ house, for instance) rotate. Simultaneously, Laffrey designed four huge black panels trimmed with neon. These panels, which are positioned in front of the stage where a curtain would be, slide up and down and side-to-side in order to act like a camera lens’s iris, opening wide to show the whole stage or narrowing to focus on a single piece of action. It’s a tool that occasionally makes the musical feel more like cinema than theater—the audience is seemingly viewing the play through a giant lens.
The Showstopper
But the real showstopper is the LED tiles, which are wrapped around the proscenium arch—that’s the entire frame of the stage—and look like normal black scenery, until, at various points in the play, they explode with a series of animations and sophisticated graphics. Sometimes the graphics merely animate a scene; sometimes the characters engage with them as part of the action. Laffrey says the material wasn’t easy to come by, to put it mildly. “It was certainly not something that the vendors were stocking,” he says. (In fact, the tiles were made in China, and their production delays led to the play deferring previews by nearly a month.)
The combination of sophisticated graphics and old-fashioned furniture was carefully calibrated, Arden says, to evoke a world beyond the robots’ lives without necessarily spelling it out. “Given that we were dealing with something set in the future, we wanted to leave much to the audience’s imagination,” he adds, “but also giving them firmly grounded realities to exist in. We kind of wanted to play with that dichotomy.”
The success of that delicate balance is on vivid display as the musical unfolds. “It wants to feel both incredibly handmade, tactile and textured and, in a way, retro-practical, because it’s about a character who’s obsessed with the mid-20th century,” Arden says. “And so we want it to feel like all the textures and all the places could be incredibly literal, and yet juxtaposed with electronic neon suggestive darkness, allowing the audience to imagine a future that we’ll never be able to achieve on stage.”
Sophisticated as the set might be, Laffrey says, the goal isn’t to blow audiences away with its complexity.
“It should just feel elegiac and beautiful and simple, and it should draw you into the story,” he says. “So it’s a really complex thing to make that hopefully then results in a totally seamless, beautiful, cinematic experience that the audience just falls headfirst into and comes out the end and goes ‘Oh my God.’”
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