Tag: Maybe Happy Ending

Theater: Parade; Maybe Happy Ending

from Atlanta to Seoul

By happenstance, I saw two theatrical productions in three days, Parade and  Many Happy Ending.

In February 2024, Proctors Theatre in Schenectady held an event to announce the 2024-25 Broadway schedule for Proctors and Cap Rep in Albany.

When they discussed the musical Parade, which would start its tour at Proctors, an older gentleman on a screen said essentially that it was a sad and depressing story, but it was good. That could not be the “sell” the Proctors’ folks wanted to hear.

The musical won the 2023 Tony Award®  for Best Revival of a Musical and was nominated for a Grammy Award® for Best Musical Theater Album.

Katherine Kiessling of the Times Union wrote, “The heart of the show is assigned to Leo and his wife Lucille, played by Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer. The pair is charged with embracing the Franks’ rough edges—his aloofness and her initial desires to cling to her privileged life and flee the hardships of her husband’s trial—and eliciting empathy.”

They are a Jewish couple in the nineteen-teens Atlanta. He’s from Brooklyn, but she’s a native of Georgia. He runs a pencil-making factory. A young female employee is killed, and Leo is suspected.

Variety asked about the 2023 revival: “Will audiences take to a disturbing but captivating musical that deals with racism, antisemitism, and injustice?” Newspapers superimposed on the stage area ensure the audience knows the outcome before the production begins.

It’s very well done and important. While having a downer of an arc, it’s not all depressing, and it was worthwhile. My wife and I attended the January 11 program. It will be touring throughout the country through September 7. 

Made in Korea

Two days later, my daughter and I were in Manhattan working on a project. We contacted one of my nieces and her Significant Other. They secured four rush tickets for Maybe Happy Endings at the Belasco Theatre for January 13. The show opened on November 12.

“Inside a one-room apartment in the heart of Seoul, Oliver (Darren Criss, probably best known from Glee) lives a happily quiet life, listening to jazz records and caring for his favorite plant…

“When his fellow Helper-Bot neighbor Claire (Helen J. Shen) asks to borrow his charger, what starts as an awkward encounter leads to a unique friendship, a surprising adventure, and maybe even…love?”

The Will Aronson and Hue Park musical reminds us that “love is never obsolete.” It was delightful, not just because of the storyline, dialogue (“She’s a 5” was particularly funny), songs, and performances, which included lounge singer Gil Brentley (Dez Duron) and James and others (Marcus Choi).

Maybe Happy Ending uses specially made video projections, plus a fantastic physical space. “The musical exists in the relatively constrained spaces of the Helperbot retirement home, but there are also a series of flashbacks to Oliver’s time working with James in his house and Claire’s time working for her owner. Then, when the two robots eventually leave their apartments, there’s an entirely new landscape and horizon to contend with. And all of this takes place in a single unbroken act…”
Technology
Laffrey’s solution was to create a “machine that moved us through this world.” He used a “giant mechanism that encompasses the whole stage and fills it with moving pieces. For most of the show, the audience’s view is comprised of one or two boxes, one for each of the robot’s rooms—those boxes can slide horizontally, meaning there’s occasionally a single room and, more often, two side-by-side. The stage also has a central turntable, upon which some sets (James’ house, for instance) rotate.

“Simultaneously, Laffrey designed four huge black panels trimmed with neon. These panels, which are positioned in front of the stage where a curtain would be, slide up and down and side-to-side in order to act like a camera lens’s iris, opening wide to show the whole stage or narrowing to focus on a single piece of action. It’s a tool that occasionally makes the musical feel more like cinema than theater—the audience is seemingly viewing the play through a giant lens.”

A Korean-language version of Maybe Happy Ending opened in Seoul in 2016, and its English-language premiere was in Atlanta the following year. The show was very enjoyable, though sitting in the fourth row of the balcony, I had difficulty seeing some limited action in front of the stage.
Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial