Chances are the multi-talented Darren Criss is as cross-eyed as the rest of us are with the twists and turns his career has taken over the past 13 years. In 2009, he began in television with six years of Glee, playing the lead singer of the Warblers, and helping power a Warblers focused soundtrack album to Number 2 on the Billboard album chart. Then in 2018 he switched from singing to spree killing, giving a stunning, steel-plated performance as Andrew Cunanan in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. That got him a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy and set people to thinking there might be a serious actor lurking inside that singer.
Before that could be settled, the singer reemerged, as a replacement in a Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, raking in $4 million during his three weeks. That was followed with an Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theater and a stint in Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Belasco Theater.
Two years ago, the actor was back when producer Jeffrey Richards hired him for some deep-dish David Mamet drama, American Buffalo. Now Richards has returned Criss to the Belasco, and singing, for an original Broadway musical, Maybe Happy Ending—a very original musical, in that it’s about the love life of robots in Seoul circa 2064.
You’ll not find much of that Glee guy you know and love in the character Criss plays in Maybe Happy Ending, a lonely Helperbot robot who putters aimlessly about his tiny apartment, listens to jazz and devotes all his TLC to a favorite pot plant. That changes swiftly when a female form of Helperbot, Claire (Helen J Shen), drops by to borrow his charger. Sparks fly, then conversation, and inevitably a kind of amorous connection.
Despite the nuts and bolts, what we have here is basically a rom-com, with a charming book and score by a couple of NYU classmates.
Actually, there are two books and two scores, one in English, one in Korean. Will Aronson, 43, of New Haven, composed the music, and Hue Park, 41 of South Korea wrote the lyrics. Once they did that, they put their heads together and wrote “connecting tissue”—a play in praise of love’s rejuvenating effects. Even robots at the end of their warranty are susceptible.
Evidently, Hue won the toss because the Korean version premiered first—in Seoul, where the story is set—and proved to be such a success that stateside productions were put together. The English edition made its first U.S. appearance two years ago at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, where The New York Times’ Jesse Green deemed it “Broadway-ready.” Thus, we now have a live-action robot show going strong on West 44th.
The terror of doing this kind of production, Criss confesses, is that actors are afraid they’ll look like cartoons of their character, taking big, blocky robot steps around the stage. “The show has no listed choreographer,” he tells Observer. But he feels he has that situation well in hand. He and director Michael Arden “have taken a particular interest in making sure the physicality is distinct,” he says. “And I’d be remiss not to mention a teacher at Juilliard, Moni Yakim, who had some Zoom discussion with us about this.
“It’s kind of a cocktail of those three things: Moni’s suggestions, Michael’s pursuit of perfection and my own interest in physical theater. It’s a skill set that I’ve never been able to utilize—at least to this level. When I was in college, I took a semester off so that I could study physical theater at the Accademia dell’Arte, the performing arts school in Arezzo, Italy.”
A cast of four inhabit the show: Dez Duron, Marcus Choi, Criss, and Shen. You may detect a little kinetic energy between Criss and Shen. That’s because they both attended the University of Michigan—albeit, not at the same time. “She graduated about two seconds ago, and I may have graduated a little longer ago than that,” concedes Criss.
“She graduated two years ago, and 10 years ago my name was up on the marquee at the Belasco Theater. And to be able to come back to the Belasco—but this time to share that billing with a fellow Michigan grad—is a very special moment for me. I’m now the upper-class man to the freshman of Helen J Shen. This is her Broadway debut. It’s a big moment for her, and getting to see her through that on stage—to call that a job is really a special thing for me.”
The enthusiasm Criss brings to the stage is practically palpable—and he still remembers where it came from: encountering Robin Williams at an impressionably early age in the 1992 animated Disney flick, Aladdin, in which his outrageous Genie-jiving was almost heart-stoppingly hilarious.
“I was probably six or seven—and I noticed how this audience connected with each other and with this Genie on the screen. I was very taken with that idea, and I wanted to give people what this Genie was giving them. Then, I found out the voice of that Genie was Robin Williams, who was such a prominent figure out in San Francisco, where I grew up. That made it an accessible concept: ’Oh, Mr. Williams is an actor. I’d like to be an actor, too.’ So I hopped right on it.”