Maybe Happy Ending Broadway Reviews

What “Maybe Happy Ending” asks, even in its ambivalent title, is whether that’s a good thing, for them and for us, their mirror images. When Oliver fully realizes that Claire’s “shelf life” will end before his, he asks in real pain, “How can people do this?” — meaning survive the death of others. If the start of love is the start of loss, is it perhaps better to erase one’s memories (which these Helperbots can do because they have their own passwords) or even to avoid the journey altogether? A good question for robots and, as posed by this astonishing musical, maybe the most deeply human one of all.

Can a show as strange and special as Maybe Happy Ending find a place for itself on Broadway today? I like to think that maybe it can. But as the show reminds us, everything is ephemeral: “We have a shelf life, you know that,” says Claire. “It’s the way that it has to be.” The fact that this show is casting its firefly glow on Broadway at all feels like a gift. In its gentle robot way, it helps us see ourselves through freshly brushed eyes.

Alas, charm goes a long way. Criss is often his most compelling when given a character with edge (his stint as the titular East German rocker in Hedwig and the Angry Inch or his Emmy-winning turn in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story) but here he is charming, spirited and wonderfully funny. Meanwhile, the show around him is grasping at many bubbling themes and carrying only a select few over the finish line. But Maybe Happy Ending dazzles with its love story and astounds with its visual accomplishments. There’s nothing robotic about this production: it wears its heart on its sleeve and on charm alone, succeeds.

“Maybe Happy Ending” is an undeniably moving, well-made, adorable musical, and it is a pleasant surprise to see an audience weep at a show about two robots in love. The musical makes the bold claim that maybe we are not that different from robots after all, or that they are not that different from us. Just as robots have much to learn from humans, we in turn can learn from them, especially how to care for each other and for ourselves. It’s crucial to know when you need to charge your battery, but likewise it’s important to be willing to share that charger with someone in need.

After the amazing firefly scene, and even more spectacularly, a scene in which our lovers’ inner circuits reveals themselves in a heart-stopping, full-stage display of light and sound that explodes from the set’s early, more constricted (if still lovely) aperture approach, Maybe Happy Ending could happily end, and if Arden and his team can’t quite restrain themselves from stretching things a bit, well, it’s hard to blame them: There still a delight or two, not to mention a lump in the throat, that demand to be experienced. Maybe Happy Ending deserves no less.

There is no “maybe” about it when it comes to the brilliance and winning charm of Maybe Happy Ending (Belasco Theatre, booking to May 25, 2025). Visually, theatrically, and musically, Maybe Happy Ending, directed by Michael Arden with a nuanced delicacy and lightness of touch, is the most original and innovative show on New York’s main theatrical drag this autumn—and it dazzles with subtlety rather than bombast.

“Maybe Happy Ending” is undoubtedly the most original musical to grace Broadway since 2022’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” another small story with big ideas and even bigger emotions. With gentle humor and pathos, Park and Aronson manage to tap into the most human of questions: Is it still worthwhile to love, knowing that pain and loss are inevitable?

“Maybe Happy Ending” opens Tuesday at the Belasco Theatre, and it is downright peaceful, as well as charming and beautiful and poignant. The irony of over-amplification is that while one can be swept away by the sheer sound, if not bludgeoned, that loudness makes it often impossible to decipher lyrics. The lyrics by Hue Park and Will Aronson for “Maybe Happy Ending” are both simple and very smart, and adding to their allure is that they’re written for two characters that are not people.

Lately there’s been audience complaint – if chat boards can be believed – how some recent Broadway musicals blast out hellishly loud, banging music. Maybe Happy Ending is surely the balm for any such feelings, since its sometimes jazz-inflected score is orchestrated gently for mostly strings, keyboard and woodwinds with exceptional grace by the composer.

Maybe the musical takes a few too many tries to reach its (maybe) happy ending. But this is a 100-minute future-set show about robots, bursting with genuine feeling. If you need something to lift you out of your post-election depression, Maybe Happy Ending is your emotional upper.

Director Michael Arden’s gorgeous staging makes the most of Dane Laffrey’s multilevel sets behind sliding panels and George Reeve’s floor-to-ceiling videos. As Oliver and Claire fall, it’s easy to do the same for the show. No maybe about it — Maybe Happy Ending has theatrical magic.

Here, two robot characters, for goodness sake, are carrying on that age-old Broadway declaration that love, and only love, is the existential necessity we cannot live without. Only here it’s manifested in ways that even Stephen Sondheim could not have dreamed.

Every now and then, if you’re lucky, you’ll leave a theater with bittersweet but ultimately joyful tears streaming down your face, perhaps wishing you’d worn waterproof mascara. That was my predicament, at least, after catching a preview of “Maybe Happy Ending,” the most original and enchanting new musical to arrive on Broadway in years.