Theater fans who have yet to snag tickets to Broadway’s “Maybe Happy Ending” can now catch a glimpse of actors Darren Criss and Helen J Shen crooning a wistful duet from the musical.
In a music video released Friday, Criss and Shen perform “The Rainy Day We Met,” with music and lyrics by Will Aronson and Hue Park. The song is the first to be unveiled from the musical’s forthcoming cast album, due out March 14 on Ghostlight Records.
Directed by Tony Award winner Michael Arden, “Maybe Happy Ending” is a romantic comedy with a science fiction twist. The musical follows a pair of “Helperbot” androids in South Korea. The robots, Oliver (played by Criss) and Claire (Shen), have been discarded by their owners as they near the end of their service lives.
Watch the music video for “The Rainy Day We Met” below.
A malfunctioning charger soon brings Oliver and Claire together, after which they decide to pass themselves off as human beings and embark on a trek outside of Seoul to locate Oliver’s former owner. Over time, the two begin to contemplate love, loneliness and other emotions that seemingly exist beyond their digital constraints.
After earlier stagings in South Korea and Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, “Maybe Happy Ending” opened on Broadway at New York’s Belasco Theater last fall to rapturous praise from critics. At a time when many theatrical productions are still struggling to draw audiences at pre-pandemic levels, the musical is a surprise hit, with both Criss and Shen poised to be contenders at the Tony Awards this spring.
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“Maybe Happy Ending” marks Criss’ return to musical theater after a near-decade absence, having last appeared on Broadway in a revival of the non-musical drama “American Buffalo” in 2022. The “Glee” and “American Crime Story” actor said he drew on his college studies of the Italian commedia dell’arte to perfect his character’s mechanical gestures and blank expressions.
“I’m playing a non-human so the one thing that I want to do the entire time is cry my eyes out,” he told USA Today in November. “For me, every night, I just need like a good like five minutes to cry it out after because the entire show, I’m just gripping on for dear life not to do the one human thing that you want to do the most.”