Maybe Happy Ending creators Michael Arden and Dane Laffrey on their enchanting musical

Time Out

6 days ago

Director Michael Arden and set designer Dane Laffrey make real magic onstage, and they've been practicing it for more than 25 years. The two met when they were teenagers at Interlochen, the Michigan boarding school for the arts, where they became fast friends and roommates. "Our mischief started then, and we've been working together ever since," Arden says. Their collaboration intensified in the 2010s, when Arden shifted from acting to directing, and they've recently been on a stunning Broadway roll. In the 2022–23 season, the two gave us A Christmas Carol and Parade; they are now at work on a pair of new musicals, The Queen of Versailles and The Lost Boys, that are scheduled to open in the season ahead. And this past season, they poured their creative energies into the most enchanting show on Broadway: Maybe Happy Ending, for which they have both earned Tony Award nominations. (It's the fourth for Arden and the third for Laffrey; Arden won in 2023 for Parade.)
Maybe Happy Ending, an entirely original musical by Will Aronson and Hue Park, is the bittersweet story of two helper robots consigned to a retirement home in a near-future Seoul, where they find ways to connect in the shadow of obsolescence. The show's excellent cast is small: Darren Criss and Helen J Shen as the bots, Oliver and Claire; Marcus Choi as Oliver's former owner, James (and James's son Junseo); and Dez Duron as Gil Brentley, a 1950s jazz crooner for whom James and Oliver have a special affection. But while its heroes are androids, Maybe Happy Ending comes fully alive in Arden exceptional staging, in which Laffrey's designs—including the video he has created with co-nominee George Reeve—play a central, indispensable role. We talked about the specific ways in which the duo's dynamic choices guide the way audiences experience the show.
You've been friends since high school, but when did you begin your current creative partnership in earnest?
Laffrey: As soon as Michael started to move into directing, I think I was among the first people that he was like, 'I wanna do this. We gotta do this.'
Arden: I did one little immersive thing that Dane consulted on, but Spring Awakening in downtown L.A. was kind of our first time working together. And I've been lucky enough to never be without him.
Laffrey: I really only work with Michael now. With only one current exception.
When I was preparing for this interview, I realized that I've given all three of your most recent Broadway collaborations five-star reviews. But they've all been very different from each other.
Arden: That's what we really enjoy. We've been lucky that each thing we've done has been wildly different from the thing before. And Queen of Versailles will be wildly different from this, and The Lost Boys wildly different from that. It's just fun. It allows us to cleanse our minds. And part of the beauty of this long-term collaboration is that once we've done something, we're not interested in repeating ourselves, for better or worse. Hopefully we won't run out of ideas.
One thing your shows do have in common is that the design is unusually central to the storytelling; it's hard to imagine them without the specific ways they look. At what point do you, Dane, get involved in the conceptualization of these productions?
Laffrey: As you might imagine, it's at the earliest possible point. There's never a question about whether we would be working together, and in fact we discuss together which projects we do wish to be doing. So the conversation begins there.
Arden: Our collaboration is implicit. If something comes across my desk, the first person I talk to is Dane. What do we think about this? Do we have an idea? What will people want to see? And then I might go work with writers for a while and then bring something back for Dane to look at, because it's great to have someone to share something with and get a fresh perspective. But he's the first port.
Laffrey: I don't participate in the day-to-day in the way that he does, but I start to get a sense pretty early what he's thinking and kind of have a feel about what kind of event we're making. That's baked into our whole collaboration; it's got its fingers in every possible pie.
Michael, does that growing sense of how it's going to come together visually inform what you might suggest for the writing?
Arden: When I'm working with writers, I try to encourage them to first write what's in their minds, and then I'll begin to round the corners and whittle it into something that Dane and I might be interested in. It's a bit like being at a pottery wheel; you begin to shape it to what you're thinking. And then Dane will come into the process and usually the writers are thrilled, because we all want lines to draw inside of—especially in the writing process, so it becomes a choice when we go outside them. But the first thing is that the writer should write whatever they want to, with no limits. And if they write, 'They get in a spaceship and fly to the moon,' then that will be a metaphor for me. It's never going to be exactly what's on the page, but we want to be able to understand their complete impulse.
I was struck by the way that the design expands the world of the story as the show moves forward. You start out in a very enclosed space, enclosed by borders of light, but the space keeps getting wider until eventually Oliver and Claire go on the road and it opens up even more. Before that, though, they do an internet search together and the data sprawls out to the periphery of the stage, and we get a sense of a whole big world outside their windows (which then collapses back into their heads). T hat kind of expansion and contraction seems like an essential element of the world-building in this show.
Laffrey: Yeah, very much. You're talking about it exactly the way that we would, which is that it's about making as wide as possible a range of scale. We begin in an incredibly small frame, on just [Oliver's plant] HwaBoon, and then we grow into a bit more, and you see a window and you meet Oliver, and then you see the whole room, and then you get Claire, and then you get a little more. We're using these neon irises to aggressively control the visual aperture. But also we're working towards building a sense that the space is larger than it is—we're moving toward a sense of something boundless, and to do that in the confines of a Broadway theater requires that you be very economical with scale up to that point.
Arden: We also wanted the framing of the action to be in sync with Oliver's experience. We're trying to mimic, with our aperture, his understanding of his place in the world. Here's a guy whose wifi chip is broken—'The World Within My Room' is the first number—so it's about keeping it as tight as possible for as long as possible. But then we get a glimpse of Claire and it starts to open up a bit. And we're moving from a kind of digital portrait mode of how we digest information on our phones to a landscape world that feels much more organic and natural, so that by the time he's in nature, his world has never been bigger. It's never bigger than when he's with the fireflies.
Yet the expansion into the natural world in that scene isn't strictly literal—as you mentioned before, it has a metaphorical quality. Yes, there's the tall grass and the fireflies, but there are also live human musicians on a turntable, and Gil Brentley conducting them and James at his piano. And those are almost dreamlike elements of Oliver's experience.
Arden: The script said something like, 'A firefly appears, and then millions of fireflies.' That's all that was in the script. But we'd be crucified by PETA if we actually put that many fireflies into the air. So I was looking for the metaphor. I had a thought that, for Claire, a firefly represents deity in a way—there's religion in the fact that these living things produce light and battery on their own, which she can't. And what could that be for Oliver? It's James, it's jazz music. Like her dream is to see the fireflies, his would be, like, to see Gil Brentley play the Hollywood Bowl. Because his version of deity is humans. So to be deprived of human beings for that long and suddenly to see them felt like an apt metaphor for that. It just kind of made sense.
Laffrey: And I think to see that volume of human bodies in space—after that's been withheld for every moment of the show up until then—is sort of startling. The idea that a community can exist feels like a beautiful metaphor for something that is organic and boundless. You cannot put a field of fireflies on stage in a literal way. So the thing that will unlock it is the theatrical gesture.
The show has a prominent filmic aspect. Our scope of vision is strictly limited by those irises, as it would be by a camera, and there are even supertitles sometimes. There's an especially cinematic moment in which a change to the framing of a doorway gives us what amounts to a camera's pan effect.
Arden: When we first got the script, one of the first things Dane said to me was, "Oh, this is a movie." It's written like a movie.
Laffrey: And we constantly get scripts of movies that people want to make into musicals! So it was ironic that this is an original musical, but it has like 75 scenes in it. It's a film!
Tonally, it could almost be a Pixar film.
Arden: Yeah, and that's how we approached the iris: If we were doing this movie, we'd want to pan and see. And so that's how we began choreographing the sequences.There's no listed choreographer; it's us choreographing the interaction between the actors and the world around 'em.
The production's video effects feel hugely important in establishing the world of the show. Some of them are highly detailed and realistic—like the data that comes up in the internet search, or the scenes they play back as memories—whereas when Oliver and Claire actually end up in the natural world, the background is much vaguer and more painterly.
Arden: It's interesting you mention that. As we were talking about it, we thought, We want to absorb the world in the way that the bots would. What's interesting to them isn't necessarily the landscape that we as humans would see and go, "Oh my God, this is so beautiful"; for them, that is slightly watercolor, slightly blurred. What they do track are people. They are programmed to track people; any time you see video of people, you've got a tracking box around them with all the information about them. So that was how we approached that—not needing to make it too realistic or too clear.
Laffrey: We remain in their POV. Video is introduced as their interiority: the way they can transfer information to each other, or how that information looks in there. You get Claire's memories and Oliver's memories, all before you see that landscape. And then in that moment, Oliver and Claire are focused on each other—or on Junseo when he comes in—and not the environment behind them. And that allows us to not fall into the trap of creating photo-real scenery. That's a slippery slope with video, I think. And we are blessed in this show that it's in conversation with technology in a way that allows us to integrate it with a lot of DNA that is born out of the story.
That blurred-background effect feels cinematic as well, as though we were seeing them in closeup against a background that is out of focus.
Arden: And we basically made a movie as well: of Claire's memories of her owners, both when she's having a flashback and when she downloads the memory to Oliver, and of Oliver's memories, which are all from his point of view. How we used the cameras had to do with how each robot would view the world. If she's accessing her own memories, what would that look like? How does a robot daydream versus how do they want to show you something? It was endlessly fun and gave us a lot of different modes to plan.
Another striking aspect of the design is the way it uses color schemes. At first there's a very clear boy/girl, blue/pink distinction between Oliver and Claire's worlds. But their colors bleed into more of a mix, and then there's one point where a house ends up appearing—with Gil in the attic—and it's all in a warm, nostalgic orange that I don't think we've seen.
Arden: No, that's the first time we use that color. We wanted to save that for the idea of how time passes and what that means, and how they at that point in their relationship have abandoned their own color schemes and found something new together. The idea of late afternoon came to mind, and that fabulous midcentury orange was exciting to us. If you're sitting upstairs, I think his carpet is that color.
Laffrey: He has a kind of horrible-amazing burnt-orange rug. It all has a sort of Kodachrome feel. Gil is such a wonderful feature in this world because he lets so many different modalities bleed into the landscape. And in that one, it's like you're part of his Frank Sinatra-by-the-fireplace vibe.
The show's employment of a midcentury-modern aesthetic is so interesting, I think. Oliver has clearly designed his room in imitation of James's room, which itself was a tribute to the rooms of Gil's era.
Arden: A very American aesthetic.
Yes, but also an aesthetic that in its time was vaguely futuristic. So Oliver's room is someone in the future trying to reproduce someone in the past's idea of the future. And it couldn't be more different from Claire's room, which is like a college dorm that she's never unpacked, with boxes of clothing and a poster askew.
Laffrey: I think the difference there is the melancholy about the fact that Oliver is a bit delusional. He does not understand that he is retired. So he is making a home that he believes, when James finally comes to get him, he will be able to point to in an I-want-to-impress-my-parent kind of way—like, "See, you've taught me so well and I've been living in the way you taught me to.' Whereas Claire understands. She knows she's never going back.
Arden: She's got all these old clothes her owner gave her. I imagine that Jiyeon, Claire's owner, had a phase where she loved K-pop and pink, and everything was that. Then she grew out of it and didn't want to throw it away because it was expensive. So she's basically using this as a shitty storage unit. And Claire isn't interested in that. She hasn't unpacked it. She knows too much. She doesn't need to put the poster upright. It's just there.
There's a poignancy to Oliver's delusion, but there's maybe also a poignancy to Claire's knowingness. Believing in something fake and not believing in anything at all are both kind of disappointing ways to live.
Arden: Right. And I think it's the hole they fill for each other. Oliver gives her a reason to imagine there is something beyond these walls, even though she knows certain things he doesn't, or won't take on. And it's beautifully put in the script when she says, 'I was wrong. He did care about you.' She needs him just as much as he needs her to try to get what they think they want. And they end up not getting those things and finding they actually just need each other. And I love what you said about how we wanted to look to the past to look to the future. Because the minute we try to design futurism, it's just terrible. Luckily we were working with a script that had Gil Brentley, so we took all of our cues from that. If James is obsessed with this singer, then that means this, and then that means this. It was a fun series of doors that kept leading to other doors. It may even be why Oliver looks a little bit like Gil—certainly in the clothes. There was a choice made. He was a doll, in some ways, for James as his companion here. It's all very sad. [ Laughs. ]
Laffrey: And that section, 'Where You Belong,' when Oliver shows Claire what he thinks is going to happen when he goes back to James—it's such an interesting thing. It's sort of a memory, but it's different. He's not remembering something; he's telling her exactly what's going to happen when he shows back up at the house and James is waiting for him. He's projecting forward. There's something beautifully idyllic about that, and that's why it looks the way it does. We know that's not what their memories look like. Their memories are black and white, and have boxes around people and lots of information: how many ounces of gin James has in his martini, all that stuff. But this opens up. It's lush, and it's in color. It's a fantasy. And I love the melancholy of that because it is presumably based in reality, but we're not sure. There's Vaseline on the lens.
And we're seeing a full realistic set in that song, with multiple rooms on a turntable. We're getting a different sense of the world.
Laffrey: Yes—we're introducing a new axis of movement in that. We wanted that sequence to feel very unlikely but to be the most real thing we saw.
Arden: There's no video in that sequence. Oftentimes for a robot, the most radical fantasy is an imagined reality.
And then the other time the turntable is prominently featured is the fireflies moment, which is surrealistic.
Laffrey: That's right. It helps us move into another mode. The rest has this kind of filmic, parallax, camera-on-a-dolly feeling. But that sequence is totally different: organic.
Arden: In many ways, that moment is more for the audience than the characters. We want to feel what they feel about fireflies. It's like: Don't I miss people? Don't I want to see people when this is done?
And then the fireflies make a reappearance at one point. Just for a moment.
Arden: Again, that wasn't something that was in the script. But it just made sense. I said, 'Of course you meant them to be fireflies.' [ Laughs. ]
Laffrey: It's an idea that's been with us for so long. It felt so natural. And again, it's a metaphor—it's like we've moved inside some circuits or something, so anything's possible.
Ardan: We're talking about all this, but actually, Will and Hue just wrote an amazing musical. Truly. It's cool to approach work we're just trying to keep up with.