[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you are here. On today's show, we'll talk about how to preserve your family recipes, as if your grandmother says things like, "Oh, just toss in a pinch of this and that." We'll learn how to drill down on the specifics, and we'll talk about some compelling podcasts you can binge while you're traveling this week or just anytime, including one about the Thanksgiving rescue of 5-year-old Elian Gonzalez, which happened 25 years ago.

That's the plan, so let's get this show started with a show that USA Today calls one of the best musicals in years.

[music]

Alison Stewart: The new original musical Maybe Happy Ending is an unconventional love story because the couple at the center are robots. The setting is in Seoul, South Korea, in 2064. Oliver and Claire are two retired help bots designed to help things, people with household tasks, but they're both now living in a kind of complex apartment for obsolete robots. Oliver, a series three, 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 at his door. Claire is a series 5 robot, but her charger is broken and she wants to borrow his. It's a meet cute robot style, but 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. The New York Times calls Maybe Happy Ending a joyful, heartbreaking, cutting-edge production. It's running now at the Belasco Theater. I'm joined now by the stars of the show, Darren Criss. Hi, Darren.

Darren Criss: Hi.

Alison Stewart: And Helen Chen. Hi, Helen.

Helen J Shen: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello.

Darren Criss: I couldn't have done that summary better myself. I don't know who wrote that, but I'd like to shake their hand.

Alison Stewart: All right. We love hearing that. Let's say we live in a world where help bots are present, sort of like Siri in 3D, how would you describe Oliver to someone just meeting him, Darren?

Darren Criss: Well, first of all, I would say we do live in a world with helper bots, and they're called smartphones, and we are used to having a significant degree of help from our technology on a day-to-day professional and personal level. So much so that it has almost extended itself to almost a spiritual, romantic connection. When we lose our phones, it's like we lose our minds. They're appendages, and I'm sure many of the listeners can relate to this, but I certainly keep outdated pieces of technology around for reasons beyond my rational comprehension.

They're outdated things, but I keep them around. Having said that, Oliver would be something of an iPhone 3, an iPhone 4. I play a robot who is probably at the beginning of this new technology, and so 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. 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 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 factness. She has more nuance, and I think 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. I think 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 she's accepted the reality of life, which is that there an expiration date for everybody.

Darren Criss: Something that just occurred to me now is both our characters are basically the "humanized", even though they're robots, human-like versions of their owners' algorithms. We are the For You pages of our owners. Oliver is a little more of a hermit, has less ability to relate to human people and emotions, and loves old records and old things, and is almost more of a static being, which is a direct result of his owner that we learn about in the show. Claire is more in touch with human emotions and aware of human emotions and the complexities of romance and love and has more humor because she was the byproduct of a couple.

There's a lot of echoes of what our technology is by way of how we act around them and how we use them.

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

Darren Criss: Yes. Well, art imitates life a little bit. [unintelligible 00:05:39] is definitely a bit of an underclassman to my upperclassmen, so there is an inevitable sense of perhaps the old ways that are inherent in however I do things. I think 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, and so I employ a lot of things that I studied in drama school. There's a lot of very nerdy theater names I could drop, but let's just say there's a lot of-

Alison Stewart: Oh, you can drop them.

Darren Criss: - wonderful physical theater training. Well, I mean, there's a lot of historical theater traditions around the world. I would say comedia 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 I think finds its way into what I'm doing, and 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 fill in the emotions where he cannot.

For me, it's funny that I'm choreographing this thing's lines in between his lines by way of how he expresses himself physically.

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

Darren Criss: Newer model.

Alison Stewart: Newer model. Excuse me. Thanks.

Helen J Shen: If Oliver is straight lines, Claire has 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, I think 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, and then being utilized for her prime directive, she really turns on the 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 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.

Alison Stewart: 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: Well, I mean, the word is escaping me. I studied Japanese for a while, so forgive my listeners who know the word. It begins with a H. I just don't want to mess it up on WNYC because there's a lot of smart people here, but I forget the name. It's the concept of men that never leave their house, and this exists all over the world, but in Japan, there's an actual word for it of hikomori, who never want to leave their tiny little hermit lives, and everything needs to be perfect, and they'll just spend weeks upon months just never leaving.

He's a lot of that, and anything that can disrupt his perfect little tiny world is terrifying. As long as he can stay within his lane, life is beautiful, and he has the whole world within his room, which is the name of the song.

Alison Stewart: Here's World Within My Room.

Oliver: 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: Oliver goes from being he's in his room, and then Claire comes knocking, wants to borrow his charger every day. At first he's kind of annoyed by it, but then he almost seems like he's actually looking forward to it. What do you think slowly changes in him?

Darren Criss: Well, such is the nature of, I think, good dramaturgy and theater. What is the arc of a character that can disrupt the character's-- How do we get to point B from point A, if that is the baseline of storytelling. Helen's character, Claire, kind of disrupts that. The word is hikikomori, by the way, people who seek extreme degrees of social isolation and confinement. That was the word I was looking for, just to correct myself. I was talking about the physicality of the show.

His arc throughout the show really does become closer to that of Claire, where those lines and those angular, static pieces become softer and have more curvature to them by way of this unexpected, beautiful, catalyzing event in his life, which is [unintelligible 00:12:49]. I think the idea of helper bots, especially somebody like Oliver, who design their purpose around the people they help, I think the show at its core is about how we take care of each other and how we love things and make them alive and how do we take care of those things.

Without giving anything away, Helen's character does provide something that perhaps was lost with his previous owner, and so rewires, adds some new ones and zeros to an otherwise presumed finished equation, and in so doing, reprograms him a little bit.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:13:28]-- [crosstalk]

Darren Criss: Maybe.

Helen J Shen: Maybe.

Darren Criss: We don't know for sure.

Alison Stewart: Claire clearly brings out something in Oliver, and 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, and then little by little, he does challenge her idea of what being alive means. 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--

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 think I take from this piece and I think 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: She knows her battery is going to run out. She's fairly clear about that. Let's hear a little bit from the play Maybe Happy Ending. This Is The Way That It Has To Be, and we can talk about it on the other side.

Claire: It's the way that it always was. You should know by now, you should know by now, the body does what it always does. Things will break somehow, you should know by now. You know you only last so long, you know you're only made so well, and you'll be gone eventually, 'cause that's the way that it has to be. Time goes by like it has to go, flying by like light, flying by like like. Summer rain must turn into snow, every day, each night flying by like light. But who says endings must be sad? Who says goodbyes aren't just routine? Seems like a normal thing to me, 'cause that's the way that it has to be.

Alison Stewart: What does Claire feel about her inevitable decline?

Helen J Shen: Actually, at the top of the piece, which is she knows that this charger isn't working, there's a sense of contentment and matter of factness about it. She says, "Who says endings must be sad? Who says goodbyes aren't just routine?" Because her friends in the helper bought yards, who she has been more social with throughout, more so than Oliver, she's watched them power down. She's watched them slowly lose their capacity as well, and yes, definitely sad and also kind of normal, which actually I think brings her some comfort that it's not just happening to her, it's happening to everybody. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Darren, you know-- [crosstalk]

Darren Criss: Yes, "I'll say hi and shake its hand," is one of my favorite lines in that song. "When that final moment comes, I'll say hi and shake its hand." It's very Buddhist, like acceptance of the inexorable in a really not a grim way at all, in a very pragmatic way, which it's a beautiful thing. Even though the show really deals about the end of things and you could posit the grim word of death, it really doesn't feel like that at all. To say that that's it's a show about death and loss would be a very poor way to sell it. It is the opposite of that.

It's a show about living and life and how much battery you do have versus how much battery life you don't have. It's definitely, I think, a glass more full than empty kind of show.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting about the show because the songs are just very lovely, as we heard. They're written by Hue Park and Will Aronson. There's a showstopper, but it's not how you think about a showstopper. We won't give it away, but there aren't big dance scenes.

Darren Criss: There's a showstopper? I want to know what the showstopper is.

Alison Stewart: Oh, come on. You know what it is. I'm not going to tell anybody, but it's stunning.

Darren Criss: They're all showstoppers. The show itself is the showstopper.

Alison Stewart: What do you think about having slightly more understated music for this musical, Darren?

Darren Criss: Well, I mean, listen, I'm a lifelong musical theater fan, and one of the biggest uphill battles that you have to face is when something becomes as popular as it is, the cliches are inevitable, and so people who don't know anything about musicals think that they must be this sort of sound, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. Some people come to musical theater going, "I better hear this kind of music," whatever that is, and there are people who don't come to the theater because they think, "God, I really don't want to hear that kind of music."

There is an accessibility to this music, which I think is not me just trying to sell the show as being an actor, and I could say that I truly believe this objectively. The show toes a really delicate line between accessibility and sophistication, as I think all the best art tends to do. I can say that because I didn't write it, so I'm not tooting my own horn here. There is an elegance and a familiarity to the music that sounds, I think, familiar enough to the musical theater loving crowd, but kind enough and inviting enough to people from outside of it that won't feel like, "Oh, boy, I'm in a musical."

I think the music is seamless because we have two librettists. Two people that wrote the story in the book are the same people that wrote the music, and so there's a holistic understanding of how they can work with each other in a way that doesn't feel stop-start, "Okay, here's a story, here's a song, here's a story, here's a song." They are all in tandem with each othe, and that organic kind of creativity I think comes-- The proof is in the pudding where people come and they feel like part of this world very instantly.

I think the music is almost-- I can't separate it from the story itself. It's kind of part of the whole aesthetic. There's a lot of nostalgia in the show. This character that I play, Oliver, has a love for mid-century standards and crooners, so a lot of the music kind of leans into that a little bit. I could go on and on and on how much I'm just madly in love with this music. I just really look forward to more people seeing it so they can hopefully co-sign on that with me. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Yes. Also, it's very modern. The staging is very modern. The projections are very modern. Helen, how do the sets and the projections help you as an actor and help you immerse yourself in the story?

Helen J Shen: The set feels like it's happening to you as the actor because there's certain set pieces that move towards you. Then, we have something called what we call the Iris. Basically, it serves as-- The only thing that I can think of to compare this to is when you see a movie and you can control what an audience will see at any given point, and there's moments of the apartments being next to each other, apartments-- The set itself feels like magic, which as the actor, and then I think also when you get to watch a transition or a set design move, it's just so seamless and smooth.

What's interesting about acting with projections, which I do often in the show, is that I'm reacting to something that is the same sound and same inflection, same line readings every night, and somehow it still also feels new to me every night. I have to be reacting to it as if it's the first time that I've ever heard it before, which actually gives me a little bit of more room for myself to feel organic in it because the thing that I'm playing opposite is so constant that I can actually zhuzh the timing, zhuzh the inflections for my own character, while also knowing what the reaction will end up being.

Yes, it's a very outside-in kind of acting job that that has become, but it's so much fun to do.

Darren Criss: And it's a thrill for the audience. My thing about this show that I'm so in love with is that, again, whether you know stuff about musical theater or you don't, there are three things that I think hopefully happens when you go to a Broadway musical, which is like a big tradition and a big thing that people think they have to do, that have never been to New York. There's three expectations that I think need to be met at some point, which is you want a moving story, you want some kind of spectacle, and you want some lovely music.

Between the music that I'm madly in love with, and I think I speak for [unintelligible 00:23:17] when I say she probably feels the same way, there's also this unbelievable spectacle that happens. Even without those two things, when we started this show just with binders and chairs and a piano in a room and we're just reading these words and telling this story, we were all just running out of tissues because of how moved we were by it. I feel so lucky to get to be part of that holy triumvirate of storytelling on the American stage.

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

Helen J Shen: Yes, exactly. I think 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, I think, exciting for people to experience.

I mean, 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 you know where the story is headed, and then a sharp left turn, that would feel emotional to me. Yes, I think because 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 is-- It works like movie underscoring, where you're not really sure what the emotion is that you're feeling, and suddenly it blasts open. I think that is emotional. To sit and be together, experiencing something new, I think 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, and that is what I think we get to provide here. The tears that you're talking about I think are just a byproduct of what it is to be moved by 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 felt it once, you have wondered if it's ever going to come again, and 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 in 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: I'm struck in the playbill that HwaBoon has its own bio. Says, "HwaBoon Broadway debut! Regional credits include Little Shop (Audrey 2), Into the Woods (Understudy Beanstalk), and The Secret Garden (Ensemble). Special thanks to Maboon for inspiring him to grow. Insta: @thereal_hwaboon."

Darren Criss: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I just want people to know that, that HwaBoon gets its own-- [crosstalk]

Darren Criss: Yes, HwaBoon is the runaway star.

Helen J Shen: HwaBoon is actually the breakout star. Breakout star for sure.

Darren Criss: Helen is also making her Broadway debut, but I think unfortunately, it might be getting slowly eclipsed by the diva that is HwaBoon.

Helen J Shen: Completely eclipsed. Completely.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Maybe Happy Ending. It's at the Belasco Theater. My guests have been Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. It is really nice to meet you.

Darren Criss: Yes, likewise.

Helen J Shen: Nice to meet you. Thank you for having us.

Darren Criss: Thanks for your time.