The best rom-com of the year wasn’t in movie theaters, nor is it a streaming series on Netflix. It’s a new Broadway musical about two retired robots – plant-dad and hyperfixating jazz fan Oliver, and cool, brilliant Claire – having an odd-couple affair before one of their batteries dies forever. Maybe Happy Ending, written by American composer Will Aronson and South Korean lyricist Hue Park, is a charming, sweet, visually dazzling show, blending throwback, screwball comedy with technically elaborate, futuristic production design. Other shows in recent years have caused screen-fatigue; here, screens are used cleverly to illustrate the robots’ interfaces and memories, sort of like After Yang, but also Wall-E, and they don’t come at the expense of physical sets, classic jazz-inflected score, and chemistry between the leads Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen. The true lead of the show, however, at least on social media, is HwaBoon, Oliver’s potted plant.
Unlike other famous Broadway botanicals, like Little Shop’s Audrey II, or even Shucked’s drooping corn stalk, HwaBoon doesn’t move, and certainly doesn’t talk. He is simply a plant. But Oliver treats him like a roommate, a sidekick, a pet, and the production team is running with it. HwaBoon’s headshot is in the Playbill, and he was awarded a Legacy Robe on the show’s gala night. We wanted to get HwaBoon himself for this Chat Room, but he’s a plant of very few words. So instead, we spoke with director Michael Arden, and HwaBoon’s close personal friend, tech assistant stage manager Karlie Teruya, in a conversation that branched out into topics including how we relate to inanimate objects, technical feats of staging, and adapting a show that originally ran in Seoul for an American Broadway audience.
I’ve seen this week, people are taking the performance of HwaBoon and really holding space with that, and feeling power in that. What have HwaBoon’s thoughts been on this?
KT: HwaBoon is new to this. This is his Broadway debut. So he is very excited that people are being touched by his performance. As Cynthia said, that is also what he intended in his performance.
He really came out of nowhere, and now has this major part in a Broadway production. Is HwaBoon an industry plant?
MA: No. He’s really a fresh new talent. To see him so embraced by the community and the world is so thrilling, and hopefully inspires many other people who never thought they’d be on a Broadway stage.
What is it that gives this prop, essentially, such an It-factor?
MA: HwaBoon represents us in this story. He is the only living thing in this room with these robots, and therefore he bears a witness to the story of Oliver and Claire in the way that we do. We are all Spartacus, we are all HwaBoon, in a way. Also, we all, in our moments of loneliness and solitude, cling on to something, and need something to hold, and that is our security, and that is our safety. What HwaBoon represents to Oliver feels very known to us, as an audience. It’s hysterical and sweet and very real. HwaBoon is necessary. Attention must be paid to such a houseplant.
The show has really leaned into HwaBoon on social media, and gave him a bio in the Playbill. How does this represent the show, and how does it help your strategy of marketing an original show in 2024?
MA: We’re figuring out how to market something totally new without anything to latch on to, so the fact that people are latching onto HwaBoon is so exciting. I always knew I wanted the show to start on HwaBoon, and to end on him too; it reminds us who we are, that we live and we die. But also, it’s such a small cast, and he is such a character. His name is probably said more than Oliver or Claire’s names. One day I was like, “HwaBoon needs a bio and picture in the program.” And we convinced HwaBoon to start an Instagram page. He was new to that, but really getting into it. It’s a way to let audiences in on something that they are foreign to: a rehearsal process, a Broadway show, a company, through the lens of HwaBoon. It seemed like a really exciting way to bring new minds and eyes and ears to what we were up to.
KT: It also came from Will [Aronson] and Hue [Park], because from the moment you open the script, HwaBoon is a listed character. It’s clear that he’s a very important character in the show.
Speaking of the script, I imagine he was off book on day one.
KT: He is the most consistent actor. We’ve never had to give him a line note.
MA: Green, but consistent.
What is the rest of the cast’s relationship to him backstage?
KT: Everybody tries to give HwaBoon his space at half-hour, because it takes him a minute to really get into character. He likes to feel very rooted before he goes on stage. But everybody loves him. He’s a favorite.
MA: HwaBoon did have an accident the other day. During our understudy run, he fell off the stage, soiled himself, and everyone in the theater screamed. He was totally fine. A little embarrassed, if anything.
Oh no!
MA: There’s become this understanding of what our play is about — when does inanimate become animate, and how do we prescribe our feelings and emotions to it — has transcended into our work environment in the theater. Now we all have this reverence for HwaBoon in a way that we might not have had, had we not been working on the show together. It’s a beautiful thing that everything we touch has an experience. It certainly made me think about how we choose to interact with our surroundings, and that’s really rippled through the whole cast and crew.
KT: It’s been fun to see everybody really adopt HwaBoon as this mascot of the show.
What has it been like to adapt a show that originally ran in Seoul? How has it differed from directing a Broadway revival?
I approached this as a completely new piece. I have never seen the Korean production. I didn’t want to, because I knew I’d be influenced by it, and I wanted to make something that was its own creation. So I started from the script on the page, and the score. The writers wanted this production to be its own thing. They weren’t trying to do the American version of the Korean show. It’s quite different. In the Korean production, James and Gil are played by the same actor, and the plot is quite different. There are five or so different songs, they have a different relationship, the ways the robots break down are different. When I first got the script, I had ideas for how I wanted the show to change, and the writers were so collaborative. We approached it like there had not been a production before. That was probably very difficult for them to do, given that it was such a success there, but they knew that what worked for those audiences wouldn’t necessarily work for a Broadway audience. And I was really trying to make something for people who had no idea of what it is they were about to see, which was very different from a revival. With a revival, you know how the story works, so it’s more about, what lens are we looking through? What do we want to focus on? Whereas with this, my job was to really tell story as clearly as possible, to try to get one point across, as opposed to my opinion on the show.
What were some of those different elements that you feel wouldn’t have worked on Broadway the way they did in South Korea?
MA: I knew there should be an extreme comedy sequence in the piece, and the whole motel sequence was really developed in the room. It’s so ridiculous, and funny, and the caper of it all very American musical theater. It’s fun that they depart from the norm of this quieter Korean version, for a moment. And the flashbacks, learning about Claire’s past and Oliver’s past through video and film sequences, that was something that I was really interested in bringing out in this production. They wrote such nuanced, subtle material that I think it’s exciting for audiences to get to play in both mediums as well.
Beyond the video sequences, which use screens in interesting ways, the staging has a cinematic style. There are panels in front that seem to pan and zoom to focus on the onstage action.
MA: It’s incredibly complex. The video, lighting, automation, scenery, props, action, and music all have to work in such tandem, with such interlocking synchronicity, that it was both a challenge and so delicious to work on, because it really took all departments thinking outside of their own purview a little bit, which is the way I love to work. I want to create a system in which the edges are blurred between departments.
When we usually look at a stage, it’s flat and the actors are low. But we spend so much time on our iPhones, which are vertical, and we pinch, and zoom, and we decide what we want to focus on, and we swipe left and right and drag things. That’s how this rising system came into my mind. It’s the idea of two fingers zooming in on things. If you notice, for the whole first half hour of the piece, it’s more of a vertical space than it is horizontal. I wanted to give people a way in that was quite personal. And the way we look at our phones is very personal.
I raised the height of the stage, too. It’s much higher than normal, so that it creates a bit more of an egalitarian viewership between the mezzanine and the balcony and the orchestra. I started doing that in Parade, where I put the action eight feet in the air. If you’re looking at something from a new perspective, it automatically opens you up a bit more to feeling something in more of a spongy way. That’s how we started, and we knew it had to move cinematically, yet we didn’t want it to be just like a movie. We wanted to feel like we were really letting the audience be an active part in deciding what adventure they wanted to go on, almost like a manga. We have a lot of black space outside of these incredibly realistic worlds, so the audience can imagine something much more exciting than we can ever actually do on a stage. We’ll save that for the movie. It allows the audience to get a firm grip on what the real world is. Dane Laffrey and I went through a bunch of iterations of this, and we did the majority of this design in a high rise in Tokyo. So it’s very inspired by Eastern design, and verticality of space. Luckily, none of our cast members are afraid of heights.
What is the most challenging bit of staging to pull off?
KT: There’s one part, in “Goodbye, My Room,” where they have a very short amount of time to strike all of the props from the Oliver unit. We call it Propnado. And there are seven people involved in that transition in that tiny little room. Everybody has this very precise choreography, but when it works, and we all do it in a synchronized way, it’s really beautiful. There are much more crew members [under Production Stage Manager Justin Scribner] than there are cast members. You see four people onstage this whole time, and you don’t realize that there are 17 people backstage making it all happen.
MA: There’s a sequence where we go into the memory of Oliver with James, “Where You Belong,” where we suddenly use a turntable for the first time, and these walls drop in, but we’re not actually on a turntable; we’re on a donut. If it’s a credit card’s width off, it will fall apart. But that’s what’s so exciting. Musical theater is like an extension of circus. It has to stick the landing in order to work, and if you can do that without the audience noticing it’s happening, you’re creating a magical world in which they can fully forget that they’re even in a theater. They’re in the story in such a way that they’re believing everything is happening. And if you get people to believe in magic without being skeptical, that’s when people’s hearts open. It’s beautiful.
And you only use that giant rotating set once during the whole show, for like, five minutes.
MA: It’s three minutes, actually. Memory is like that. That was an entire life, and we just got a glimpse of it. The sadness that can bring when it’s gone, and we’re back in his old room, I love it. The temptation would be, “We’ve spent a bunch of money, and built this huge thing, let’s sit in it for a good while, and not just let it drift by.” But Oliver can’t stay there. That’s why he’s got to go on his adventure.
Broadway tickets are so expensive, and many sets are so minimal. In that context, these elaborate, huge setpieces and moments of staging feel very generous towards the audience.
MA: Look at something like Parade, which was incredibly minimal but ultimately, we had 19 people in the orchestra and 27 people on stage. It was a different experiment and different endeavor. For this, people are paying the same to come see Maybe Happy Ending as they are to see Wicked, let’s hope, and I think there’s a responsibility to the audience to really take them away, as long as it doesn’t overshadow the story. It’s about finding that balance of visual and storytelling so that you’re amazed but you’re not distracted. Making sure the visuals are always in service of something.
There’s a beautiful moment in the show that I won’t spoil, involving the fireflies, which are a motif throughout much of the show.
MA: In the script, there’s no mention of fireflies in that section. I think in the script it says, “images of Claire and Oliver together begin to separate and fade away,” and I really wanted to bring back this idea to represent them in that moment of darkness as fireflies, who are so tiny in the world, and briefly dance with each other and then separate and fly away. It’s a tiny point of light in this huge, infinite darkness, and every type of stage craft is happening in that moment. It’s done by humans, by computers, by everything. It’s a simple gesture during this super technological sequence.
Was HwaBoon worried about the fireflies stealing focus?
KT: HwaBoon loves to be the star, and he definitely is very protective of his friendship with Oliver. But he still gets his moment. He gets to end the show. So HwaBoon gets the last bow.
You mention taking inspiration from manga and phone screens in the staging, as well as playing to more affordable seats higher up. Were you thinking about appealing to a younger audience when building this show?
MA: WHen I first read it, I thought, this is about end-of-life. It’s not necessarily a young person’s story. Obviously the meet-cute and the hijinks are so young romance. So you’re watching On Golden Pond in the bodies of 20-year-olds. You can be 15 years old, and come see this, and be like, “That’s me. I’m Oliver,” or “I’m Claire.” And I’ve seen 90-year-old couples come, and they’re getting to see themselves in the bodies of these people. To be able to look across any type of physical human divide, and be like, “Oh, that’s me,” is the reason I do theater. So no, it isn’t something I just wanted to make for young people. I wanted to make this for people, and the only way to really make it for people is to be hyper-specific, with robots. But that’s why we love Pixar movies. We can see ourselves in inanimacy a little bit better than we can when we actually look in the mirror. Isn’t that funny? At a time when the world is so divided, this feels like a very unifying 100 minutes.
For as futuristic as it is, the show also has elements of classic screwball rom-com. What art were you looking towards when working on this?MA: Its setup is super classic. I went to the opera this weekend to see La Boheme, and while I was watching it, I thought, Oh my god, it’s Oliver and Claire. Her candle is out, and she’s dying, and she comes and knocks on his door. And the show has hints of a classic score through the Gil Brentley material, which really helps nod to that. I was trying to draw upon old school, mid-century stories and cinema, movies from the 60s. There’s such a great wealth of material out there that we wanted to pay homage to, with a twist of futurism mixed in. It was funny, watching La Boheme. Here we are again: no tuberculosis, but we do have a dying battery, which is kind of the same thing.
Earlier, you said something like “save it for the movie.” Have you thought about how this would be adapted as a movie?
MA: Oh my god, I’m ready. Let’s go. I’d like to introduce more people to this story, and actually go to Korea to show these places. It would be a real thrill.
KT: And HwaBoon would be in it. He’d be mad if we cast a different actor.
MA: But we want to make sure he doesn’t get too old for the part.