Like the glowing logos on its all-important battery chargers, Possibly Completely satisfied Ending, a brand new Broadway musical from Hue Park and Will Aronson, is an general vivid affair, although you may forgive viewers of the primary full quantity, World Inside My Room, for shuddering with a considered the pandemic. Oliver (Darren Criss) is far more sanguine about isolation than we have been – he’s programmed to be. A humanoid private assistant/maid/companion often called a Helperbot, Oliver was designed to serve one particular person and one particular person solely – his proprietor, James (Marcus Choi) – and to finally succumb to the obsolescence that devours all issues. By the point we meet him, someplace in Seoul’s not-so-distant future, Helperbot Inc has ceased manufacturing of his era’s alternative elements.
In his interim retirement, Oliver retains his house spick and span: day by day cleansing, speaking to his plant HwaBoon, studying James’s copy of Rick Rubin’s The Inventive Act: A Means of Being, listening to jazz data by the fictional Gil Brentley (performed as a daydream alongside Oliver by a dashing Dez Duron).
This refreshingly authentic musical, first staged in Seoul in 2016 and directed right here by Michael Arden (most lately of Broadway’s glorious Parade revival), makes swift work of time and house; sheer layers of digital shows (video design by George Reeve), impressively constructed modular units (scenic design and extra video design by Dane Laffrey) and Criss’s rote actions succinctly illustrate the patter and (robotic) heartbreak of Oliver’s day by day routine over 12 years within the Helperbot Yards, ready for an proprietor who by no means comes again.
That’s, till girlbot meets boybot. A damaged charger and lagging battery capability brings Oliver’s across-the-hall neighbor Claire (a luminous Helen J Shen) into his meticulously stored house. Shen’s Claire, a extra superior Helperbot collection 5 to Oliver’s collection 3 (one of some successfully humorous recurring bits), supplies a much-needed counter to Oliver’s extra angular methods.
She is extra swish, extra contemplative, with a greater grasp on human humor and fallibilities (and with a beautiful, crystalline singing voice besides). He’s extra liable to binaries, routine and relentless optimism; Criss’s at first overtly bodily efficiency – the startled, staccato actions and jerkiness of a machine – settles together with Clarie’s scorn into beloved familiarity over the course of the present’s 1 hour and 45 minutes. Each robots wrestle with their obsolescence and laborious drive recollections of previous people, and the unusual story kicks into gear as soon as they hit the highway as reluctant buddies in a quest for solutions.
You do not need to grasp the particulars of robotic logic and emotion – the present doesn’t actually hassle with it, anyway – to know the broad strokes of the place this goes. There are shades of darkness to this humanoid future (people preferring the sleek compliance of robots to their disappointing kids or needy companions, for instance) which can be briefly talked about in comparatively seamless, for Broadway, video-montage flashback. However Possibly Completely satisfied Ending, as instructed by the title, is a predominantly vivid love story, with clear echoes of Pixar: a Toy Story-esque plot of deserted Helperbots who fall in love in what is basically an island of misfit toys.
And advised via a very beautiful, full-spectrum use of the stage, the set harmoniously reworked from sterile condo to Korean intercourse motel to forest and again once more with aplomb. The ability of this doomed love story – all batteries should die finally – is simply barely dampened by considerably pedestrian, vague musical theater songs, sans a significant showstopper. Essentially the most trenchant emotional moments, as Oliver and Claire study to like and possibly, finally, go away one another as robots can do, belong to not the singers, however a swelling, sometimes onstage orchestra and digital evocations of laborious drives.
Which can hit one’s hardened soul – it did mine, a bit – whereas nonetheless pulling some punches. You’ll probably go away with out a track caught in your head, however with a lump in your throat nonetheless.
Supply hyperlink