How ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Overcame a Shaky Start and Won Big at the Tonys

“Maybe Happy Ending” had a very unhappy beginning.

The show’s triumph at Sunday night’s Tony Awards, where it won six honors, including best new musical, capped a remarkable turnaround for a small production with a baffling title and a hard-to-sell premise that was seen by industry insiders as dead on arrival when it began previews last fall.

But in the wee hours of Monday morning, as the quirky show’s performers and producers partied with their creative team and investors at the Bryant Park Grill, the celebrants finally allowed themselves to acknowledge that their against-all-odds show is breaking though.

“We didn’t know if this show would even open,” said its star, Darren Criss, who won his first Tony for playing Oliver, an outdated helperbot who strikes up a life-changing (well, shelf-life-changing) relationship with a robot across the hall. Criss, an Emmy winner (for “American Crime Story”) and “Glee” alumnus, is also a member of the show’s producing team.

“We didn’t have the luxury to dream about a scenario like this,” he said. “This was definitely the little show that could.”

How bad did things get? Last summer, the show’s lead producers, Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, postponed the first performance by a month, citing supply chain issues, which the producers insist were real (there was a delay in the availability of digital video tiles from China), but which many thought was a cover story to hide financial problems.

“They put a fork in us,” said Allan Williams, the show’s executive producer.

The production temporarily laid off workers, refunded tickets for the month of canceled performances and contended with a TikTok theater influencer’s suggestion that the musical might not open.

“People started texting me with sympathy,” said Helen J Shen, Criss’s co-star, who plays a later-model robot named Claire. “We never really felt secure.”

Some of those expected to help finance the show began peeling away, not wanting to put their money into a sinking ship.

“We lost a lot of investors because of that TikTok,” Arnold said. “No investor wants to write a check and think that they’re not even going to get to see the show.”

By the time “Maybe Happy Ending” finally started previews on Oct. 16, it had sold just $450,000 worth of tickets — woefully low for a new Broadway musical.

“Maybe Happy Ending,” which did not finish raising its $16 million capitalization until the week of its opening night, hemorrhaged money through previews. Weekly grosses were under $300,000, which is well below the show’s $765,000 weekly running costs. The 973-seat Belasco Theater was about 20 percent empty. By the fourth week of performances, the show’s average ticket price had dropped to a disastrously low $45, partly because the producers decided to offer all tickets for between $30 and $69 in a calculated, but also desperate, effort to get seats filled and build word-of-mouth.

Then there was a huge marketing challenge: How to describe a show with just four actors, two of them playing robots, that poignantly explores isolation, memory and love. The music is a mix of indie pop, American jazz and Broadway, and the design is a slowly unfolding spectacle that uses automation and projections to advance the storytelling.

“Every time you try to explain, ‘Well there are these two robots, in a not-so-far-future Seoul, South Korea,’ people are just like, ‘This doesn’t sound like a musical to me,’” Arnold said.

The show’s own website does not use the word “robot” when explaining what it is about. The director, Michael Arden, called the musical “a gentle, contemplative piece, in many ways, which isn’t an easy sell.” Shen said her preferred argument for the show was “Just trust me.”

“It’s like describing a new color,” she said. “We didn’t know how to describe this piece to people.”

Those who did see the show were moved by it, and they started telling others. “I think people liked being able to share a secret,” Arden said.

The show opened on Nov. 12, and the reviews by critics were overwhelmingly positive. “Ravishing,” wrote The New York Times. “A darling gem,” declared The Washington Post.

But still, doubt remained. Broadway is a failure-prone industry, and shows can crash quickly — in late 2022, the musical “KPOP” closed just two weeks after opening and last year, the musical “Tammy Faye” lasted just three weeks post-opening.

“We left town the morning after opening night, and we said these very emotional goodbyes to everyone because we thought it was going to be a very short run,” said Will Aronson, who wrote “Maybe Happy Ending” with Hue Park.

The producers, heartened by word-of-mouth and the reviews, raised another $1.75 million to promote the show. A turnabout began. “It simply built incrementally,” Arnold said. “We were burning a lot of cash. But we could see that online sentiment was changing, sales patterns were changing.”

The week after opening, the show grossed $591,000. Over the Christmas holiday, it had its first $1 million week, and since then its grosses have exceeded its running costs most weeks. And the show has been basically sold out since the Tony nominations were announced in early May.

It is still not clear if the show will turn a profit on Broadway. Rising production costs have made it nearly impossible for new musicals to make money in New York — over the past three seasons, only “& Juliet” has done so. But the Tony Awards should help: There are usually theatergoers who want to see the best musical winner.

“Maybe Happy Ending” has an unusual history. Aronson and Park, who made their Broadway debuts with the show, are a binational songwriting team — Aronson is from the United States and Park is from South Korea. They have worked in both countries and both languages.

Park had the idea that became “Maybe Happy Ending” while sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop in 2014. He heard the song “Everyday Robots” and started musing about the interplay between technology, isolation and connectedness.

The show’s first commercial production was in Seoul in 2016; later that year, the writers presented the English-language version in New York, where Richards saw it. He has watched a lot of shows during more than 50 years working on Broadway, and captivated by what he considered this one’s “sheer inventiveness,” he acquired the commercial rights.

The musical was on its way. The Korean production was successful, and has had several runs. There were also productions in Japan and China. In 2017 the English version, then called “What I Learned From People” and featuring only three actors, won the Richard Rodgers Award, which supports the development of new musicals.

Richards set about helping to assemble a creative team, holding workshops and raising money. Arden signed on in 2018, telling Richards in an email that he found the material “devastating and beautiful and ultimately life affirming.”

The show’s American premiere, directed by Arden, was in early 2020 at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it “dazzling,” and the Times critic Jesse Green called it “Broadway-ready.” Richards had hoped to bring it to Broadway the next season, but then came the coronavirus pandemic.

By the time theaters began to reopen, the momentum had been lost, investors were in high demand and theaters were booked. “We had to go back to the beginning,” Richards said.

But there were positive developments too. Criss, performing in a production of “American Buffalo” that Richards produced, agreed to do “Maybe Happy Ending,” and his participation encouraged both theater owners and investors.

“Maybe Happy Ending” needed a theater with a small house (the show is small-scale) and a big stage (the set is elaborate, and needs an elevator beneath its floor), and was unable to find one for several seasons. But finally, last fall, the Belasco became available.

The space worked, and also has a compelling history. Richards noted that in 1960, a poorly reviewed play called “All the Way Home” had a near-closing experience there and rebounded, earning it the nickname “The Miracle on 44th Street.” Now, Richards said, “We are the 21st-century miracle on 44th Street.”

Just before 2 a.m. Monday, the show’s Tony winners were still cradling their silver statuettes as they posed for pictures with well-wishers in an open-air dining room, celebrating how fully the awards voters had embraced their show’s fundamentals — it won for its score, its book, its scenic design and its direction.

“You could feel the industry get behind it because it’s exactly the kind of theater that everybody in this business wants,” said Dane Laffrey, the scenic designer. “It’s heartfelt, it’s original, it’s innovative — it’s all of the things that are scary and are risky but ultimately carry the most reward if you can stay the course.”