Perhaps the happy ending director risked in a robot romance and now has 10 Tony nominations

The director Michael Arden admits to having a good amount of skepticism when he approached him in 2017 to organize the first English iteration of “Perhaps happy ending”, a South Korean musical about a romance between robots.

“I thought, What a nightmare. This sounds horrible“Arden, a 2023 Tony winner for the” Parade “Renaissance led by Ben Platt, reminded News.” And then I read and listened and was completely impressed and launched, and I knew I had to work on it. For me, he felt like a play on human existence and how, when you love someone, you are finally registering to lose them. Happiness only exists due to anguish. “

On Thursday, “maybe Happy Ending” collected 10 Nominations for the Tony Awards, including the best musical, best direction of a Musical for Arden and the best actor in a musical for one of his main stars, Darren Criss. It is tied with “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death becomes it” for most nominations for any show this season.

Evan Zimmerman

With a melancholic score and infused by the jazz of Will Aronson and Hue Park, the musical follows a couple of “helperbot” androids in South Korea of ​​Future Near. The robots, Oliver (played by Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen in her Broadway debut), are found to each other after being discarded by their owners when they approach at the end of their service lives.

“Maybe Happy Ending” marks Arden’s fifth Broadway musical as director, but it is the first that is not a revival. The show had its premiere in the United States at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater in 2020, shortly before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. By translating “maybe Happy Ending” for an American audience, Arden worked with Aronson and Park to add new songs and sharpen the characterization. The core of the program, however, remains mostly intact of its original iteration.

“It was fun to think about how it would be for an audience to have no idea what they were entering,” Arden said. “He was liberating, but a little scary.” His main objective, he added, was to “make it more and more human as he advanced, so that hopefully forget that they are robots. [Oliver and Claire] They become more emotional beings, we had to let the science fiction aspects go. ”

Matthew Murphy

Cross, whose theatrical credits include “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “American Buffalo,” signed to play Oliver once the musical Broadway transfer was announced. Although the casting of the actor “Glee” and “American Crime Story” Drew Buzz, “Maybe Happy Ending” arrived at the Belasco Theater in New York last November for a limited fanfare. Its success six months later can be attributed to the organic mouth, which makes its nominations of Tony and other praise even more rewarding to Arden and the rest of the creative team.

In terms of its staging, “perhaps happy ending” presented a series of challenges. In the course of the show, Oliver and Claire travel from their respective Seoul homes to the island of Jeju and back, contemplating love, loneliness and other emotions that apparently exist beyond their digital limitations along the way.

Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

A particularly chilling moment is “where you belong”, in which Oliver reflects on his early life with his owner, James (Marcus Choi). By pointing out that “half of the landscape in the program is used within 90 seconds” of the song, Arden said: “That is what are the memories, they are fleeting. And I love that we really go there.”

In his Biography of Playbill, Arden dedicates “perhaps a happy ending” to the late actor Gavin Creel, who died last year at 48 years in a rare way of cancer. “If people take something away from this program, we have an expiration date, and while we are here, it is our job to get up,” Arden said. “That is what Gavin did every day of his life. He was the biggest cheerleader for me, and it seemed that his spirit is in tune with what this work is treated.”

Bruce Glikas through Getty Images

Regardless of how the “maybe” rates in Los Tonys on June 8, Arden is already working on two new musicals. The first is a theatrical adaptation of the 2012 documentary “Queen of Versailles”, starring Kristin Chenoweth and will open on Broadway in November. He is also attached to Direct “The Lost Boys”, based on the 1987 horror comedy film and scheduled for a 2026 premiere.

When describing Chenoweth as a “lunatic genius,” Arden said: “She is the most tireless, positive and wonderful collaborator, as intelligent, hysterically fun and worries a lot about the art shape. Explore Jackie Siegel’s really complicated character with her is a true delight.”

As for “The Lost Boys,” he added, “the best thing a musical can do is inspire an audience to think about how they work and move around the world in a new way. And do it in a vampire musical that is also a story about the family and how we break the trauma cycle is quite radical.”