Belasco Theatre, New York

Darren Criss and Helen J Shen play advanced robots falling in love in an unusual and visually stunning show that could have afforded some better songs

Like the glowing logos on its all-important battery chargers, Maybe Happy Ending, a new Broadway musical from Hue Park and Will Aronson, is an overall bright affair, though you could forgive viewers of the first full number, World Within My Room, for shuddering with a thought of the pandemic. Oliver (Darren Criss) is much more sanguine about isolation than we were – he’s programmed to be. A humanoid personal assistant/maid/companion known as a Helperbot, Oliver was designed to serve one person and one person only – his owner, James (Marcus Choi) – and to eventually succumb to the obsolescence that devours all things. By the time we meet him, somewhere in Seoul’s not-so-distant future, Helperbot Inc has ceased production of his generation’s replacement parts.

In his interim retirement, Oliver keeps his space spick and span: daily cleaning, talking to his plant HwaBoon, reading James’s copy of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, listening to jazz records by the fictional Gil Brentley (played as a daydream alongside Oliver by a dashing Dez Duron).