Original Broadway Cast, 2025 (Ghostlight) (4.5 / 5) While Maybe Happy Ending’s story revolves around two humanoids known as Helperbots, the score is anything but robotic. In fact, the music by Will Aronson is decidedly passionate. Aronson uses light jazz melodies, paired with Hue Park’s simple and effective lyrics, to create a beautifully melancholy mood. With a book by Aronson and Park, this musical centers around Oliver and Claire, who are being stored in separate rooms in a retirement home for older Helperbot models. We first meet Oliver (played by Darren Criss) in the song “The World Within My Room,” as he moves through his daily routine in his solitary space with only his plant, named Hwaboon, for companionship, plus plenty of jazz records and magazines on hand for listening and reading. (Oliver’s previous owner, James, loved that genre of music). The jazz songs featured on the records that Oliver plays are primarily sung by cast member Dez Duron, who croons pleasantly throughout the album. Claire, played by Helen J Shen, is a newer, more human-like model of Helperbot, though still considered obsolete. She intrudes on Oliver’s solitude one day when she knocks on his door asking to borrow his charger, and soon, the two of them decide to journey out of their storage center and see the world — Oliver hoping to find his onetime owner, James, Claire wanting to see fireflies for the first time. Criss plays Oliver with a stubborn optimism, and his singing is perfectly suited for the score. Shen gets more feisty character moments, but she also shows a sensitive side when she sings about loss in “What I Learned From People.” The pair’s quirky charm is captured wonderfully in the duet “The Rainy Day We Met,” in which they create a fictional, romantic backstory for themselves in case they are questioned on their adventure. The instrumentals in Maybe Happy Ending should also be mentioned, as they make for some of the most effective tracks on the album. “Why Love” is a melody repeated throughout the score, but it never sounds sweeter than when arranged for solo piano, and one can almost see the magic of the fireflies during the orchestral piece “Chasing Fireflies.” The concept of this show, the cast, and the music all combine to tell a moving story of love, loss, and — most surprisingly — mortality. — Forrest Hutchinson