“Maybe Happy End” had a very unhappy start.
The triumph of the show on the Tony Awards on Sunday evening, where the six awards won, including the best new musical, has concluded a remarkable change for a small production with a bewildering title and a difficult starting point that was seen by insiders from the industry as dead on arrival when the last fall began.
But in the early hours of Monday morning, while the artists and producers of the idiosyncratic show party with their creative team and investors at the Bryant Park Grill, the celebrants were eventually recognized that their counter-all-modds show breaks through.
“We didn't know if this show would even open,” said his star, Darren Criss, who won his first Tony for playing Oliver, an outdated helperbot that hits a life-changing (well, plank-life-changing) relationship with a robot in the hall. Criss, an Emmy winner (for “American Crime Story”) and “Glee” Alumnus, is also a member of the producing team of the show.
“We didn't have the luxury to dream about such a scenario,” he said. “This was definitely the little show that could be.”
How bad has it become? Last summer, the main producers of the show, Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, presented the first achievement with a month, referring to supply chain problems, the producers of which they were real (there was a delay in the availability of digital videos from China), but many thought that a cover story thought that it was a cover story.
“They put a fork in us,” said Allan Williams, the executive producer of the show.
The production of temporary employees, reimbursed tickets for the month canceled and claimed with a suggestion of a Tiktok Theater Influencer that the musical may not open.
“People started texting me with sympathy,” said Helen J Shen, co-star of Criss, who plays a later model robot named Claire. “We never really felt safe.”
Some of them expected to help finance the show, started to peel away and did not want to put their money in a sinking ship.
“We have lost many investors because of that Tiktok,” said Arnold. “No investor wants to write a check and think they will not even see the show.”
By the time that “maybe Happy Ending” finally started with previews on October 16, it had only sold $ 450,000 in tickets – miserably low for a new Broadway musical.
“Maybe Happy End”, which is not ready to increase its capitalization from $ 16 million to the week of the opening evening, squatting money through previews. Weekly gross was less than $ 300,000, which is far below the weekly operating costs of $ 765,000. The Belasco Theater with 973 seats was about 20 percent empty. By the fourth week of the versions, the average ticket price of the show had fallen to a disastrous low $ 45, partly because the producers decided to offer all tickets for between $ 30 and $ 69 in a calculated, but also desperate, efforts to fill seats and build word-of-mond.
Then there was a huge marketing challenge: how to describe a show with only four actors, two of those who play robots, who explore moving insulation, memory and love. The music is a mix of Indiefop, American Jazz and Broadway, and the design is a slowly unfolding spectacle that uses automation and projections to promote the stories.
“Every time you try to explain:” Well, there are these two robots, in a non-ZO-Far-Future Seoul, South Korea, “people are just like:” This doesn't sound like a musical for me, “Arnold said.
The Show's own website does not use the word “robot” when it comes to explaining. The director, Michael Arden, called the musical 'a gentle, contemplative piece in many respects, which is not an easy sale'. Shen said her favorite 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 saw the show were moved by it and they started telling others. “I think people enjoyed sharing a secret,” said Arden.
The show was opened on November 12 and the reviews of critics were overwhelmingly positive. “Ravishing,” wrote the New York Times. “A sweet gem,” said the Washington Post.
But there was still doubt. Broadway is a failure-sensitive industry and shows can quickly crash-end 2022 closed the musical “Kpop” only two weeks after opening and last year the musical “Tammy Faye” lasted only three weeks after opening.
“We left the city the morning after the opening evening, and we said this very emotional farewell to everyone because we thought it would be a very short run,” said Will Aronson, who wrote “perhaps happy ending” with Hue Park.
The producers, encouraged by word of mouth and the reviews, raised another $ 1.75 million to promote the show. A change started. “It simply built incrementally,” said Arnold. “We burned a lot of money. But we could see that the online sentiment changed, sales patterns changed.”
The week after the opening, the show earned $ 591,000. During the Christmas holidays it had its first $ 1 million weeks, and since then the gross has surpassed the running costs most weeks. And the show has actually been sold out since the Tony nominations were announced at the beginning of May.
It is still not clear whether the show will make a win on Broadway. Rising production costs have made it almost impossible for new musicals to make money in New York – in the past three seasons only “& Juliet” has done that. But the Tony Awards must help: there are usually theater visitors who want to see the best musical winner.
“Maybe Happy End” has an unusual history. Aronson and Park, who made their Broadway debut with the show, are a binational songwriting team -Aronson comes from the United States and Park comes from South Korea. They have worked in both countries and both languages.
Park had the idea that “maybe Happy Ending” was while in 2014 he was in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. He heard the song “Everyday Robots” and began to muse about the interplay between technology, isolation and connectedness.
The first commercial production of the show was in Seoul in 2016; Later that year the writers presented the English version in New York, where Richards saw it. He has viewed many shows at Broadway for more than 50 years, and fascinated by what he considered 'pure inventiveness', he acquired commercial rights.
The musical was on the way. The Korean production was successful and had several runs. There were also productions in Japan and China. In 2017 the English version, then “What I learned from People” and with only three actors, won the Richard Rodgers Award, who supports the development of new musicals.
Richards started to help put together a creative team, keep workshops and raise money. Arden signed himself in 2018 and told Richards in an e -mail that he found the material 'devastating and beautiful and ultimately life -making'.
The American premiere of the show, directed by Arden, was at the beginning of 2020 in 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 take it to Broadway the following season, but then came the Coronavirus Pandemie.
By the time that theaters started to reopen, the momentum had been lost, investors were much demand for and theaters were booked. “We had to go back to the beginning,” said Richards.
But there were also positive developments. Criss, who performed in a production of “American Buffalo” that Richards produced, agreed to do “perhaps Happy Ending”, and his participation encouraged both theater owners and investors.
“Maybe Happy End” needed a theater with a small house (the show is small -scale) and a large stage (the set has been expanded and needs a lift under the floor), and no seasons could find one. But in the end, last fall, the Belasco became available.
The space worked and also has a compelling history. Richards noted that in 1960 a play called “All the Way Home” had and recovered, so it earned the nickname “The Miracle on 44th Street”. Now Richards said: “We are the 21st-century miracle on 44th Street.”
Just before 2 o'clock Monday, the Tony winners of the show were still their silver statuettes cradling while posing for photos with benefactors in an open-air dining room, and celebrated how completely the prizes had embraced the foundations of their show-it for his score, his book, his landscape design and the direction.
“You could feel the industry behind it because it is exactly the kind of theater that everyone in this company wants,” said Dane Laffrey, the picturesque designer. “It's sincere, it's original, it's innovative – it's all the things that are scary and risky but in the end have the most reward if you can stay the course.”
