Maybe Happy Ending at the Peace Center
Oliver is a jazz-obsessed recluse who’s unflappably hopeful, spending every day in his one-room apartment listening to vinyl records and talking to a potted plant named Hwaboon. Across the hall lives the more sensible Claire, similarly alone. One day Claire knocks on Oliver’s door… and with that, and the title, you know where the new musical Maybe Happy Ending is going. There’s the cute meeting, growing affection, a road trip, painful back stories, fireflies, and the looming possibility of loss — it is, in short, a love story. The national tour of this 2025 Tony Award winner for Best New Musical (as well as Best Original Score and four more awards) has set up at the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina, through Sunday, and it’s the rare show, like last season’s Kimberly Akimbo, that takes musical theater into new realms.
In part, that’s because Oliver and Claire are retired “Helperbots,” human-appearing robots formerly paired with owners but now living in an android retirement facility outside Seoul, South Korea. But Maybe Happy Ending is less science fiction than parable, a way of looking at the many stages of a love affair from a fresh perspective (one that eliminates all sexuality from the mix). Oliver and Claire may not be human, but their emotions, rationalizations, hopes, and worries certainly are.
Even more innovative is the dazzling staging, which won Tonys for director Michael Arden and scenic and video designers Dane Laffrey and George Reeve. The colorful, appealing sets appear and disappear through the stage equivalent of a camera iris opening and closing, an almost magical cinematic effect that isolates the characters from each other and from the audience — and gives scenes with wider scope magnified impact.
The book and song score are sweet and involving, but not subtle. Many of the upbeat, gently melodic songs with often-clever lyrics simply sketch out the current scene (“World Within My Room” and “Goodbye, My Room,” as well as three versions of “Hitting the Road”). Other numbers spell out the show’s themes: “When you’re in love, you are the loneliest… You’re part instead of whole” (“When You’re in Love”) and “Everything must end eventually” (“What I Learned From People,” the show’s original title). Oliver’s jazz fixation introduces a couple faux mid-20th-century standards (“Why Love” and “Jenny”) that work as dreamy homages with a 21st-century spin.
Claire Kwon as Claire and Steven Huynh as Oliver in Maybe Happy Ending.
The onstage cast numbers just four — or five, if you count Hwaboon, the house plant who gets his own bio in the program. As Oliver, Steven Huynh is charming and boyish, with just the right defensive edge. Claire Kwon, as Claire, is both grounded and tender, with just the right undercurrent of melancholy. James Seol plays Oliver’s former owner (among other characters), representing all of humanity with a kind demeanor stretched over a pained gravity. Francisco Javier González is Gil Brentley, a fictional Tony Bennett-like figure who’s suave and cool (presumably in Oliver’s memory) and appears to comment on the action through song. A few other actors, uncredited, appear in the Helperbots’ recollections, which appear as stunning projected montages — another sign that theater artists have learned to use the power of this technology in measured, high-impact doses, rather than relying on it to fill in where creativity falters.
The creativity of Maybe Happy Ending is never in question, and its message about the inexorable link between the ecstasy of love and the anguish of loss may be simple, but it’s nevertheless poignant. As my companion for the evening put it — I’m paraphrasing — you might not be moved to download the score, but anytime the show reappears on a stage near you, you’re going to want to see it again.
Maybe Happy Ending plays through Sunday, October 4, at the Peace Center. For tickets and more information, visit peacecenter.org.
(Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman, courtesy of the Peace Center.)
