In style, story, and staging, there has never been anything like Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway. An intimate tale of two discarded robots falling in love, musically inspired by the aching blues of Chet Baker, and sharing strains of cyber-ennui DNA with films like Her and the video for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love,” it is staged with awe-inspiring panache by Michael Arden, who balances the production’s cutting-edge technology with perfect emotional attunement.

This perfectly calibrated production, with a book by Will Aronson and Hue Park, who handled the music and lyrics respectively, focuses on a type of hushed emotion that is atypical, almost antithetical, to the Broadway musical. It’s a courageous (and successful) gambit, honing in on the quietness of its characters’ feelings – ones that subtly well up in your eyes rather than gush out in melodramatic spurts.

The story concerns Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), two “helper-bots” residing in a sort of purgatorial dorm for obsolete technology in near-future Seoul. Oliver is all bright smiles, perfectly gelled hair, and a ‘50s sense of politeness, which gives Criss a chance to play into his own squeaky-clean persona, and wring humanity out of a Kabuki-level performance of surface sheen. (Clint Ramos did costumes; Craig Franklin Miller hair; Suki Tsujimoto makeup.) He’s spent the past decade or so mindlessly amassing stuff he gets delivered, poring over the Jazz Monthly subscription his owner left him, and hoping he’ll one day return for him. 

His routine is interrupted when Claire crosses their shared hallway to borrow a charger, after hers breaks. She’s a newer model, the Sophia to his C-3PO (and Shen offsets Criss’ motorization with refreshing humanity), but he doesn’t miss an opportunity to say that the older series, despite their wonkier Wi-Fi services, are sturdier. They (un)naturally begin to develop feelings for each other, and Claire’s failing systems – aside from providing poignant commentary on both technology’s wastefulness and our own limited time – prompt her to encourage them to venture out to Jeju Island, where Oliver’s owner James (Marcus Choi) resides.

A road trip rom-com would be enough for most musicals, but Aronson and Park’s book, which premiered in a Korean version in 2016, zags past that and explores what happens to the helper-bots beyond their journey, once their attraction throws a wrench in the proverbial machine. (Their excursion, by the way, is one of the most breathtaking scenes in a production wall-to-wall with astonishing scenography.) This is all the while underscored by nightclub crooning by Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), Oliver’s favorite jazz singer who occasionally pops up with fourth-wall-breaking ditties.

Aronson’s score is made up of lovely, lowkey lullabies appropriate to the robots’ bottled-firefly style of emotion. Despite some fun queer notes – courtesy of ballads sung by Oliver and Claire to their same-gender owners (think “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2) – and the instant standard “Goodbye, My Room,” a too-real prayer that one might be able to return home whenever leaving it, a sameness (and sleepiness) begins to set in. The score, make no mistake, is never less than genuine, tuneful, and admirably committed to its characters’ interiority, but the unstifled bursts of vocalization from Brentley’s Bublé-ish vocal performance become too much of a saving grace.

While remaining faithful to its essential hush, Arden jolts the score to life with his impeccable direction, which allows both leads to find their way into, if not the hugeness of their emotions, then the earth-shaking capacity for it. In what may become his crowning achievement, he harnesses each production element with a masterful directorial hand, creating elegantly framed tableaux.

Dane Laffrey’s set is a miracle unto itself, anchored by the helper-bots’ small studios but often encased within movable scrims that create panoramas with cinematic smoothness, tracking the characters throughout their building and offering constant surprises, from smaller vistas upstage to a cleverly revealed turntable. Their quarters are appointed in an eye-catching modern style, and a nautical window in Claire’s room is particularly gorgeous. George Reeve’s neat video and projection design introduces the robots’ past through POV-driven memories.

Lit by Ben Stanton, the production’s overall effect is similar to the surreal appeal of the most haunting Vaporwave creations, which create a hypnotic aesthetic siren call that promises eternal, impossible warmth, and instant isolation once the reality of its cold technology is in our grasp.

I wondered if Oliver and Claire’s attraction would climax in a majestic wail of cyborg horniness, as in Björk’s seminal video but, though they both howl for humanity amid a barren emotional landscape, Maybe Happy Ending is a different, quieter beast. One becomes aware, throughout its lush 100 minutes, of what a humbly groundbreaking experience is unfolding onstage. This is a very special show; a tender, visionary ode to the space we’re able to create and hold for feeling, and the hope that it may continue.

‍Maybe Happy Ending is in performance at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The disappointing new biomusical A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical suffers from a frustrating case of split identity. Taking in this muddled if sporadically moving production, which opens tonight at Studio 54, is akin to watching two opposed artistic visions uncomfortably battle it out on a single Broadway stage. 

In one corner, we have the rote biographical jukebox musical—a Wikipedia-flavored jog through the major life events of beloved jazz singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong. In this vision, charming lead performer James Monroe Iglehart (a Tony Award-winner for Aladdin) dazzles with his spot-on imitation of Armstrong's gravelly voice, physical mannerisms and signature grin, while frequently stepping into a spotlight to spoon-feed expository information or (in two especially cringeworthy moments) lead the audience in collective song. 

Fighting valiantly in the opposite corner is a far bolder vision of Armstrong’s story. This version approaches the founding father of jazz as a complex figure defined by deeply American contradictions. A Black man rising through the white-dominated worlds of music and film, Armstrong invents his happy, always-smiling persona for the comfort of white audiences while staying silent on racial politics—a compromise that eats away at this heavy-drinking, pot-smoking womanizer. 

That latter vision would, obviously, make for a far more interesting show. It also so desperately feels like the show Wonderful World actually wants to be. But the tougher material has seemingly been contorted into a by-the-numbers, unchallenging narrative. 

Under Christopher Renshaw’s stilted and unimaginative direction, the show’s generic first act floats by uninterestingly. (Christina Sajous and Iglehart himself are co-directors.) A tossed-off framing device is mostly confusing. Rickey Tripp’s choreography is sharp, but the movement takes over at random. Iglehart seems lost, rushing between scenes while finding little chance to establish Armstrong as an individual. 

Only in the second act, when that more daring vision peeks its way through, does Wonderful World take on any life at all. By far the show’s high point is Armstrong’s encounter with Lincoln Perry Jr., or “Stepin Fetchit” (a tremendous Dewitt Fleming Jr.), who coaches Armstrong on catering to white audiences and raking in their cash. As Iglehart and Perry Jr. tap away skilfully, the crowd goes wild, bringing an interesting note of tension into the room. 

Iglehart himself comes to life only when Aurin Squire’s book allows him space to explore Armstrong’s more cynical side, or his pent-up anger at the U.S. government for its treatment of Black Americans. Outside of these moments, his work can feel closer to impression than embodiment. 

In the show’s pre-Broadway run in Chicago, Squire utilized Armstrong’s four wives as narrators—likely to both widen the story’s contextual lens and acknowledge Armstrong’s crueler side (he was unfaithful to three out of the four). Whether or not this device worked, its removal is awkward. The story is still divided up by each marriage, yet now provides only sketchy impressions of the first three partnerships. Only Lucille Wilson, powerfully embodied by Darlesia Cearcy, gets enough narrative real estate to transcend caricature. 

The power of Armstrong’s discography is, of course, undeniable. From “Black and Blue” to “When You’re Smiling,” his signature hits all sound incredible played live at Studio 54 (the orchestrations and musical supervision are by Branford Marsalis and Daryl Waters). Happy but sad, joyous yet angry, a mournful kind of celebration—Armstrong’s music speaks to the tangled mess of contradictory truths that this production as a whole fears to embrace. 

‍A Wonderful World is now in performance at Studio 54. For tickets and more information, visit here.

I did not know who Carmelita Tropicana, the persona of the (so I learn) legendary performance artist Alina Troyano, was before the announcement of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, the show she co-created with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins which serves as the final production at Soho Rep’s longtime Tribeca home, before they’re priced out of their lease. My real New York theatregoing began sometime in the mid-2010s, and mostly on Broadway. I, of course, had the option of researching her prior to seeing it, but chose to go in blind.

This phenomenal fantasia – equal parts exaltation of the art of performance, requiem for downtown, and cri de cœur for artists to continue it through the clever, often-underground shapeshifting they’ve always managed to do – accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do which, thankfully for me, includes formally introducing Carmelita (who has been around since at least ‘86) into the canon. Because, oh yes, the fourth integral part of this living death rite is to both embalm Troyano’s performance of her, and ensure the persona’s eternity.

Jacobs-Jenkins, we learn early on, was once Tropicana’s star student at NYU (Troyano taught there in character), and the two have maintained a strong bond since. Represented onstage by Ugo Chukwu, the playwright appears as a sellout, toting shopping bags from Bloomingdales and spouting intimate jokes about Oprah like the Tony-winner he’s become. Troyano meets him at a drab law office, where she’s about to sell her “living IP” to him after deciding, in a flash of existential panic, that she wants to retire Carmelita. At the decisive moment of signing her over, Troyano stalls and slips into her subconscious, and the Jacobs-Jenkins stand-in explains how the two reached this impasse.

To detail the resulting plot would be both irrelevant to my critique and a disservice to its madcap, psychedelic enjoyment. Suffice it to say, an Irma Vep-ish crime element leads the two artists down a rabbit hole into Troyano's mind, represented by characters and situations from her oeuvre, and staged to feel (under Eric Ting’s direction, and by Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian’s joyously shifting, engaging scenic design) like that SpongeBob episode where Squidward falls into hell. The pitch perfect other cast members (Will Dagger, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Keren Lugo) switch from Troyano’s inventions (Arriero, an S&M’d horse; Pingalito, a mansplaining Cuban bus driver; and Martina, a bratty cockroach) to past advancers of the performed word (Walt Whitman, the playwright María Irene Fornés, and the 17th-century nun Juana Inés de la Cruz).

The production serves as a purposely raggedy tribute to the New York downtown which was once the fertile bed for radically queer, post-modern works of left-field art created far from the prying eyes of ‘good taste’; where the tastemakers thrived. One of Troyano’s costumes is emblazoned with the names of formative venues like Dixon Place and WOW Café, both of which still currently operate but are not the hotbeds of must-see avantgardism they once were – or at least not of works which can easily springboard onto larger platforms.

Or is that on me? First meeting Carmelita Tropicana as she takes her final Troyanic bows, I thought of the theatre I don’t experience, and that which, because of the epochal shifts in what downtown, avant-garde, and even performance art* even mean, or how they’re allowed to exist, I might never be able to. I began to think of what kind of theatregoer I might have been in the late 1980s.

Would I have gone? Would I have known about these shows? Would I have enjoyed them,  and would that have been a gut-reaction enjoyment in perfect harmony with its ethos, or the detached academic bemusement through which I enjoy reading about them today? Or would I have been part of the numbing, commercial-seeking blob that ushered them out of favor, and out of their spaces? I'd like to think I would have been there, supporting these outré artists. But then, am I doing that for their current iterations? Are the new ones even comparable, in style and wit and praxis, to the old?

The phantom pain is peculiar to a certain type of hopefully-not-pseudo-intellectuals (ew), similar to when I wonder if I'd have been proudly Out in previous decades: Does who I am – comprising what I love and what I do – belong to that higher, unbreakable chain of truth that passes through those in communion with art; or am I just a tourist enjoying its most readily available and displayed fruits?

The Jacobs-Jenkins avatar asks versions of these questions to himself in a vulnerable monologue toward the end, and this sense of loss undergirds his appearance, both in script and on stage. He speaks of the gross capitalistic mindset which leads him to immediately process ideas as pitches; a relatable byproduct of the gig-economy freelance brain. But isn’t that creative impulse, as refracted through the possibility of the materially available, the same which led someone like Troyano to create counter-cultural works in the bombed-out Lower East Side (Loisaida for Latinos) of the ‘80s – or any artist, ever, for that matter?

Jacobs-Jenkins’ Hamlet-ing is aired out plenty, and most compellingly physicalized by a goldfish he once used as a living prop in one of Tropicana’s classes (embodied, in comically enlarging iterations, courtesy Greg Corbino’s costume and puppet designs, by Dagger). Ever the callow NYU avant-gardist, Jacobs-Jenkins once recited an original monologue while sipping the water out of the fish’s bowl, before vomiting its life force back in as it gasped for life. The fish, throughout the decades, it appears, has held the psychic grudge.

A grudge, however, is not what Troyano seems to carry. Just as Jacobs-Jenkins’ navel-gazing (not derogatory) veers into making this a work of apologia (again, not bad), Troyano retakes the reigns and delivers a direct address to the audience that, as the script notes, involves her saying and doing “whatever she feels like.” At the Friday night performance I attended, some 72 hours after the US Presidential election, this meant a heartfelt speech about community resilience and organizing. When the Commander in Chief wouldn’t even say the word “AIDS” until thousands had already passed, queer artists rallied to make their fiercest art yet, protecting each other through direct action and through the comfort of truthful, essential art. “Your Kunst is your Waffen” (“your art is your weapon”) is Troyano’s motto, emblazoned as proudly on that same costume I mentioned earlier as it emanates from her like a halo.

This show is an ode to artists who perform to crowds that remain silent until that final applause; who know puzzled looks better than knowing nods, yet always go on. It’s delightfully stupid, more than a smidge obtuse (sorry to the non-Spanish speakers in the house), and unmediated in its indulgence – which is to say, art. Long Live Carmelita Tropicana.

* There’s a great line from the Jacobs-Jenkins avatar: “...back when I thought I was going to be a performance artist before I realized performance was going to be hijacked so unsustainably and boringly by the visual arts before descending further into unproductive inscrutability…”

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is in performance through December 15, 2024 at Soho Rep on Walker St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.