Maybe Happy Ending

 Can robots fall in love? It's been a common staple of Western art since the 1990s, but this musical has a fresh take on it. To summarise, two helper-bots (a fussy helper-bot-3 and an assured helper-bot-5) live next door to each other for 12 years and have never interacted. One day Clare bot needs help with a charger, which throws Oliver's standard routine into disorder. 

It's a classic rom-com formula of mutual attraction which starts with disruption to life and initial dislike. Oliver is insecure about the more advanced helper-bot in his life and desperate to show he can keep up; Clare couldn't care less. Oliver still has hope that his owner (James) will retrieve him from the scrapyard, Clare understands that she's been abandoned. Their different world views collide until eventually they came to terms with each other. So far, so standard. 

What's particularly good about this isn't the music (fine, but there are no showstoppers here, the music is helping drive the plot, they're not fantastic songs in and of themselves) but the reconsideration of such deep human emotions driven by such robotic characters. The actors are flawless - the only time Darren Criss displays any human emotion is at the end when he's engaging with the audience as we applauded. They cover betrayal, abandonment, love, despair, jealousy fear, and a spirit of adventure - all one needs for any sort of story. 

The humour is lightly sprinkled but surprisingly good. As they're entering a motel for the night, where everyone assumes the robots are about to have sex:

    "Buddy, you've got a ten right there.

    Actually, she's only a five!"

I felt particular sympathy for James' son. We discover through the musical that James at one point moved to Jeju island to be with his son. His son's condition was that James' robot (Oliver) who was perceived as James' perfect fake son could not come with them. As we move ever further to an isolated world where chatbots will be able to become permanent parts of our lives, finding ways to live with human-mimicking things while recognising that they are not like the humans we share our lives with is going to be extremely difficult and it was interesting to see that the rejection would hurt from a robot perspective as well. 

The musical ends with Clare's systems continuing to fail and her wiping her memory to forget Oliver to spare him the pain of love. Oliver lies and refuses to delete his memories, and over time Clare has to return to Oliver's apartment to borrow a charger. And Oliver has a second chance with Clare. I'm not sure it's the best ending - there's a subplot about fireflies burning bright but short lives and a better ending might have been for Clare to burn out but have a powerful effect on Oliver, but that would have been a mood-killer. At least this way, Oliver has a new purpose now that he's lost James. 

Seen 19th February at the Belasco Theatre