Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's our Tony special. Next we are talking about the new original musical, Maybe Happy Ending. It's an unconventional love story because the couple at the center is a pair of robots. The setting is Seoul, Korea, in 2064. Oliver and Claire are two retired helper bots designed to help people with their household tasks. They're both living in kind of an apartment complex for obsolete robots.

Oliver, a Series 3 robot, believes that his former owner is coming back for him. He and his beloved plant, HwaBoon, stay inside, listen to jazz, and wait for a note from James for 12 years. Claire comes knocking on his door. Claire is a Series 5 robot, but her charger has broken and she wants to borrow his. It's a meet-cute robot style. When Oliver decides he wants to go find his former owner, Claire decides to go with him. The problem is humans are tricky things, as they discover.

Maybe Happy Ending has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including best musical, and a nomination for star Darren Criss. He's one of 63 nominees who are first-timers. Recently, it was announced that Darren Criss has extended his run with the show through August 31st. I began my conversation with Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen by asking Darren how he would describe his character, Oliver. At the beginning of the show.

Darren Criss: Oliver would be something of an iPhone 3, iPhone 4. I'm. I play a robot who is probably at the beginning of this new technology. He's a little more, for lack of a better adjective, robotic. He's less human. Michelle can talk more about her character, but she is certainly more human. Like she's running on iOS 97, and my character is definitely still in Windows 98.

Alison Stewart: Helen, how would you describe Claire if I'd just met Claire?

Helen J. Shen: I would describe her as having-- I really enjoy and resonate with the sarcasm and the cutting, biting edge that she has to offset Oliver's more matter-of-factedness. She has more nuance. As the audience meets Oliver for the first time, meeting Claire becomes the way that we can meet the world in an easier way than his such black and white things.

Claire is already much more comfortable with the gray area, and pain, and the more painful parts of life. Not in a sad way, not in a pessimistic way, but just kind of in a-- She's accepted the reality of life, which is that there is a. There is an expiration date for everybody.

Alison Stewart: Darren, how did you go about embodying this robot because he is an older model? [chuckles] He definitely moves differently.

Darren Criss: Yes, well Oliver takes life a little bit. Physically, that was the main way I could paint a difference between these two characters, and certainly for an audience to understand that we were in an alternate kind of universe. I was quite keen on making sure that the physical characterization of this was very clearly not human, which is a fun journey for me because I have a background in physical theater. I employ a lot of things that I studied in drama school.

There's a lot of very nerdy theater things, names I could drop. Let's just say there's a lot of-

Alison Stewart: Oh, you can drop them.

Darren Criss: -physical theater training. Well, there's a lot of historical theater traditions around the world. I would say Commedia dell'Arte from Italy, Kabuki from Japan. There's people like Lecoq, who's a wonderful teacher of movement out of France, and Marcel Marceau. There's a lot of great physical theater acting that finds its way into what I'm doing.

It really is a tool to, again, telegraph to the audience that this is not a human being and, in so doing, allows the audience to kind of fill in the emotions where he cannot. For me, it's funny that I'm kind of choreographing this thing's lines in between his lines by way of how he expresses himself physically.

Alison Stewart: Helen, here we see Oliver, his posture is very sort of stiff and forward leaning. You resemble a human a little bit more. How did you think about your physicality of Claire?

Helen J. Shen: If Oliver is straight lines, Claire has kind of taken those straight lines and curved them a little bit. There's a little bit more fluidity to it. There's more the in-betweens, the transitional moments. Normalizing is a lot easier for Claire in those moments of tension and figuring out-- Yes, physically was definitely easier, was more akin to human like behaviors, but emotionally, you find Claire's most robotic when she's interacting with her human owners, which I find a really interesting acting challenge and meal to sink my teeth into.

She's almost unintelligible from humans when reacting to Oliver's roboticness. Then being utilized for her prime directive, she really turns on how she can be helpful and how she can get to the point quicker, not make those jokes, not do those things. It's an interesting journey that [chuckles] I've gone on trying to build this character, especially for the premiere on Broadway. It just feels very much like we were able to build from the ground up and discover what those character traits, how they were going to manifest in our portrayals.

Helen J. Shen: My guests are Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen. They are the stars of the new musical, Maybe Happy Ending. The show is running now at the Belasco Theater. Let's listen to a little bit from the opening number. We start with Oliver. He's alone in his little tiny apartment. First of all, Darren, what goes on with Oliver in his little tiny apartment when we see him?

Darren Criss: The word is escaping me. I studied Japanese for a while, so forgive my listeners who know the word. Begins with an H. I just don't want to mess it up on WNYC because there's a lot of smart people here. I forget the name, but it's the concept of men that never leave their house. This exists all over the world, but in Japan, there's an actual word for it of hikikomori.

They never want to leave their tiny little hermit lives, and everything needs to be perfect. They'll just spend weeks upon months just never leaving. He's a lot of that. Anything that can disrupt his perfect little tiny world is terrifying, but as long as he can stay within his lane, life is beautiful. He has the whole world within his room which is the name of the song.

Helen J. Shen: Here's World Within My Room.

[MUSIC - Darren Criss: World Within My Room]

Today the air in Seoul is very clear and warm

Today the smiles, too, are warmer than the norm

Though the change is not profound

There's a specialness going around

Let's enjoy the day

Watching from the window as the morning crowds appear

Picturing the places they are going

Soon the rush is over and the sidewalk starts to clear

Then I start my day in here

The world within my room

The perfect place to explore from

I never need more from

The world within my room

I choose a book and I read it

A place to recharge when I need it

And it's all within my room

Alison Stewart: Claire clearly brings out something in Oliver. I wonder does she really care for him or is she performing her duty to help?

Helen J. Shen: That's a great question. I think that in the beginning, there's a real need for this charger. There's a need, physically-- Actually, this is probably the worst being that she could have met across the way to borrow a charger. Then, little by little, he does challenge her idea of what being alive means. That is an interesting-- It surprises her to then challenge herself about what she thinks existence needs in order to feel fulfilling.

There's a moment when they're already on the journey of-- Towards the end of her, I guess, lifespan, both of them think that they have finished cooking and have finished learning everything that they need to learn about the world, but that is a lesson that I take from this piece, and audiences take from this piece, is that one is never too late to learn something new about the world and learn something new about themselves as well.

Alison Stewart: There were people crying when I went to see it. Helen, why do you think this show can make people cry? Happy cries, sad cry, whatever cry you want.

Helen J. Shen: Yes, exactly. This show has so many ins for anything. If you have a relationship with a parent that you're trying to heal, if you have a relationship with isolation that you're trying to heal, certainly coming off of the heels of the COVID moment for all of us, it feels like it resonates so deeply with us. We know what that kind of deep isolation feels like. Then to feel the vastness and openness of how big the world can be on the opposite end of that spectrum is something that is really exciting for people to experience.

I don't know, but I assume the feeling of sitting in a theater and watching something brand new for the first time and not knowing what's going to come at you, thinking that where the story is headed, and then a sharp left turn, that would feel emotional to me. We've emotionally dilated the audience from this rom-com, gentle, we think we know where this is going, because of that first half, the second half ends up resonating. We're already a little bit more open to the emotions that we can feel.

Yes, to feel real hope for the first time, maybe in a while, is something that will be emotional for people. The music works like movie underscoring, where you're not really sure what the emotion is that you're feeling. Suddenly, it blasts open. That is emotional. To sit and be together experiencing something new is something really special.

Darren Criss: That's why we go to the theater. It's why theater has been an inevitable art form for thousands of years, despite all the technology that we have, whether they're helper bots, smartphones, or ChatGPT. At the end of the day, human beings have an unavoidable desire to have some kind of catharsis in person. That is what we get to provide here. The tears that you're talking about are just a byproduct of what it is to be moved by a human story. It's not a sad cry. It's being moved by feeling so unabashedly human.

We feel it on stage. People feel it out there in the audience. As Helen said, that's a feeling that you hope for when you experience art at its best. You chase it. If you've felt it once, you have wondered when it's ever going to come again. Having the, again, privilege to be in a show that is so new and original and singular, which is directly antithetical to a lot of shows that have some kind of familiar IP attached to it and so audiences come with expectation and comparison, we're unencumbered by that.

We can feel the hearts and minds of people's dials being really open. Their gain is up to like 11 to hear something new and special. It's just such a joy to be able to share that with new audiences.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen. They are the stars of the new musical, Maybe Happy Ending, which is nominated for 10 Tony Awards. It also happened to take home the Drama Desk award for Best Musical.

Coming up, a special live performance from the cast of the new musical Real Women Have Curves. Plus, we'll speak with the Tony-nominated composers behind the musical,, Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez. This is All Of It.