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Moving away from the stage adaptations and revivals that seem to have dominated Broadway throughout the past few years, Maybe Happy Ending is a new musical romantic comedy starring Ryan Murphy darling Darren Criss alongside Helen J. Shen, who will make her Broadway debut.
Maybe Happy Ending is set to begin previews at the Belasco Theatre at 111 West 44th Street near Sixth Avenue on September 18 and officially open on October 17. No announcement has yet been made regarding ticket sales.
Based in Seoul, the show was actually written in both Korean and English. The former version, which debuted back in 2016 at the DaeMyung Culture Factory in Seoul, won six Korean Musical Awards, including one for Best Musical. The English iteration of the production premiered in Atlanta during the 2019-2020 season but had yet to reach New York audiences.
Throughout all previous runs, Maybe Happy Ending was praised for its off-kilter yet fascinating plot.
In the show, Criss plays Oliver, a HelperBot 3, “a robot that has long been retired and considered obsolete,” according to an official synopsis. Living a happy, quiet life in his one-room apartment in Seoul, Oliver eventually mets his fellow HelperBot neighbor Claire (Shen) and the two embark on “a unique friendship, a surprising adventure, and maybe even…love?”
“I am so very happy to be joining the enchanting world of Maybe Happy Ending,” Criss said in an official statement. “I can’t wait for audiences to take part in this wonderfully original theatrical experience, and behold a story from a future that explores one of the most ancient questions of humanity- why love?”
American composer Will Aronson worked on the music for the show, with lyrics by Hue Park and a book by the both of them together. Tony Award winner Michael Arden of Parade and Once on this Island fame will direct the show, which will also feature The Voice’s Dez Duron’s Broadway debut.
Back in November 2021, when Barbados threw a glittering ceremony to ditch the British monarchy and become a republic, it stirred up a whale of emotions among its regional neighbors, with calls for authorities in nearly every Caribbean Community (Caricom) member state to follow suit.
Broadcast live to the world and attended by Prince Charles, then heir to the British throne, millions of people around the world—Caribbean citizens in particular—watched as the eastern Caribbean island completed what officials had said was the full circle of independence and decolonization as a local ceremonial president replaced then-Queen Elizabeth as the nation’s head of state.
Among those making the loudest noises was Jamaica, with patriots and nationalists bemoaning the fact that the island had not made any concrete steps to dump the British monarchy and then Queen Elizabeth in more than 60 years as an independent nation.
Now, Jamaica’s latest efforts to join fellow Caricom member states Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, and Dominica as a republic have hit a major snag: The main opposition People’s National Party (PNP) has reminded all and sundry in the past week that it will not vote in parliament to support the move unless and until the governing Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) agrees to a full decolonization process all at once by ditching the British Privy Council at the country’s final court.
The PNP wants the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to be the island’s apex court. Unless this is done, the PNP will not support any moves to republicanism because it describes ditching the monarchy but not the Privy Council as a half measure that it does not agree with.
The JLP says the Privy Council will disappear in phase two of the decolonization process, but the PNP has suspicions about this because the JLP has traditionally been steadfast in opposition to the CCJ. It still prefers that white, British, bewigged law lords hear appeal cases from Jamaica despite legal and administrative costs, as well as logistical challenges.
To become a republic, both parties need to support each other, because the requirements involve a complex web of constitutional moves, including a referendum and a two-thirds majority vote, among other rules.
Late last week, the PNP announced that it had instructed its representatives on the national constitutional reform commission not to sign off on the report about republicanism until the government agrees to its demands to also quit the British court as the nation’s final level of appeal.
“For us to say goodbye to the monarch, we need a consensus—a solid agreement between government and opposition—before the people are asked to decide,” said Legal Affairs Minister Marlene Malahoo Forte over the weekend as Opposition Leader Mark Golding reinforced his party’s opposition to the phased or piecemeal approach to republicanism. “The committee from the outset agreed to work by consensus, knowing that our founding fathers envisioned that attempts to reform the constitution, especially those deeply entrenched provisions, would fail unless the two political parties forming government and opposition sing from the same hymn sheet.”
