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- [00:05]
Tamsen Fadal
Welcome to the Broadway show Uncut. I'm Tamsen Fadal. On this episode of the podcast, we're all about the futuristic new musical, maybe happy Ending. The story of two lonely retired robots in South Korea and an interesting friendship that leads to adventure and maybe more. The show starring Darren Criss and Helen Jai Shen. Coming up in just a few, you'll hear from two members of the creative team behind the musical, Dane Lafferty and Michael Arden. But first, here's Paul Wontorek's chat with Darren Criss.
- [00:39]
Paul Wontorek
Welcome back to Broadway.
- [00:41]
Darren Criss
Thank you. Welcome back to so and so at the Rumor.
- [00:43]
Paul Wontorek
Yes, this is like a hot new piano bar spot.
- [00:46]
Darren Criss
I mean, I don't know how hot it is, but I do know they had an opening party that I may or may not have played at. So I feel connected to this place. And they were like, we really want to get in with the Broadway people. So the fact that you guys are here, I'm like, you guys are doing just a bang up job.
- [00:58]
Paul Wontorek
No. You're a Broadway person.
- [01:00]
Darren Criss
I suppose I am. Aspirationally am. And currently, I guess, while I'm on Broadway. A Broadway person, yes.
- [01:06]
Michael Arden
You know what?
- [01:06]
Paul Wontorek
I think you are officially a Broadway person. Like, you know, you sort of dropped in originally, sort of like as that guy from Glee.
- [01:11]
Darren Criss
I appreciate that.
- [01:12]
Paul Wontorek
Doing a thing. And now you're like, official. Now you're like producing. I mean, maybe half ending. You're a producer and the stars. An original musical.
- [01:19]
Darren Criss
I know there's a lot of. A lot of superlatives there. A lot of titles that.
- [01:22]
Paul Wontorek
I mean, original musicals. That's exciting.
- [01:26]
Darren Criss
That's an understanding. For sure. It's. Boy, I cannot. You know me. You've known me long enough to know that I have a lot to say about a lot of things. And I'd like to think I'm very articulate about them, or at least I try to be. I find myself losing my way with words at the end of the day when I come home after rehearsal, just trying to express how excited I am about this show. And also kind of, I shoot myself in the foot a little bit because I'm a generally excitable guy. So it's like boy cried wolves like Darren. You're always excited, it's always special. And I. So I'm careful to be overexcited because I'm trying to kind of convey just how unique this show is to me. Even hearing myself talk, I'm like, ugh, another actor just like talking about how important and exciting his project is. But because of the original thing. There is a specialness, at least, that is different from I've had. I haven't taken any risks on Broadway. There have been no risks. Did Houzz succeed in business? Glee was white hot, and I was going in for three weeks after Daniel Radcliffe. The show is a wonderful piece of traditional Broadway theater that if I'd gone in or not gone in it, would have done just fine, right? I would say the same exact thing for Hedwig. Hedwig is a beloved property. You know, people love that show. With or without me, would have been just fine. So American Buffalo, people know that play, if I wasn't in it, Sam Rockwell, Lawrence Fisher in it, would have done just fine. Need I say more about even Little Shop of Horrors? Right? These are shows that people are already familiar with that they like, if I was in it or not. They were doing just fine.
- [03:06]
Paul Wontorek
Doesn't mean you were walking through any of those, by the way. They were all great, great, bold performances.
- [03:10]
Darren Criss
I appreciate that. But, you know, there was no, you know, I'm hedging my bets pretty well. It's not like, oh, does the show work? Is it going to find its audience? It's like, no, these are classics. They're all classics to some degree. This is not that people don't have familiarity with it. And I have to hand it to Jeffrey Richards, lead producer, and Hunter, who have many Broadway credits, and Mr. Michael Ardent, who could do anything they want right now. It's a really, really hard market right now to be making art, much less commercial Broadway theater, which is tedious, expensive, and a gamble anyway. So people, like I said before, hedge their bets, right? So they do things that have familiarity with people. Movies, books, TV shows. Not because I always find people always, like, there's no one creating original things. I'm like, they are. It's just really, really hard to produce them because you really have to believe in something hard enough to be okay with the risk. And it's not just the financial risk. It's the sort of the creative risk to have, like, will people come to this?
- [04:11]
Paul Wontorek
Right?
- [04:12]
Darren Criss
So when you have those people, people like Jeffrey and Hunter and Michael saying, no, I'm going to do this, that makes guys like me go, huh? Like, you guys are okay with doing this. So I've been privy to maybe happy ending for several years. Michael brought it up to me a long time ago. And, you know, like many things, it was just all about timing and the way things worked out and the stars aligned for this. I immediately fell in love with. With the same. Yeah. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, you could go guide me.
- [04:41]
Paul Wontorek
You could do a monologue.
- [04:42]
Darren Criss
Yeah, I know. I was just gonna give you all the information and edit accordingly.
- [04:45]
Paul Wontorek
So let's sell this to a Broadway audience that obviously loves familiar titles. Like you said. Right. This is a musical that was, I believe, conceived in Brooklyn, premiered in South Korea. Right. And became sort of a sensation in South Korea. And now it is arriving on Broadway with this sort of great love in another country. People here don't necessarily know it.
- [05:07]
Darren Criss
Yeah. I mean, for all intents and purposes, this is the new, original, sort of seminal American. This is the Broadway show going forward. I was mistaken. I actually thought that this was gonna be like the Broadway version of this thing there. But is what I've been told from our creatives, Will Aronson and Hugh park, who wrote the book and the music, which is always very exciting when you have both having those kind of done by the same group of people. There's, to me, a synergy and succinctness to the way the piece comes together. When you have those be the same minds, they're like, no, no. We're treating this like this is a new. Its own thing. There's new material. There's new. Obviously, it's in English. That's not a small thing. So for all intents and purposes, this is the new kind of going forward, seminal version that I hope can last in perpetuity for the ages, because I do feel like this is a timeless piece.
- [06:04]
Paul Wontorek
So I have a. Let's talk about what it's about. I have a drawer in my house, and when I open this drawer, I have some of my old iPhones in there. Old versions of my iPhones. Right. A little bigger, a little thicker, a little slower. I don't use them anyway. They're just kind of sitting.
- [06:17]
Darren Criss
And you have this weird emotional attachment to it and beyond.
- [06:20]
Paul Wontorek
And that's kind of what we're dealing with.
- [06:22]
Darren Criss
That is exactly. I'm glad I've actually used this comparison. So there's what the show's story is and what the show is about. So we'll put a pin in that iPhone experience. The story is about helper bots. Helper bots 100 years in the future. It's exactly what it sounds like they are. Robots or helpers. They're somewhere between a helper servant of some kind, a pet, and a child. It's a mix of all those three things, depending on how their owners treated them. But at this point, even 100 years in the future, this model 3 and this model 5 are obsolete. You know, earlier models in a world of model, who knows, model 20s or something.
- [07:00]
Paul Wontorek
And like living in a building where.
- [07:02]
Darren Criss
Yes, much like a retirement, much like a retirement home, because in the way that your drawer is a current retirement building for your iPhone, which for reasons beyond our understanding, we ascribe these emotions to our thing. I mean, they're like appendages, you know, at this point. They aren't sentient now, but we become fond of the jackets, shoes, phones, and they don't have any kind of active intelligence that we know of. So in the future, once robots and artificial intelligence become more part of our interactions with things like iPhone, when the iPhone becomes a sentient being, you will have trouble. At least we pause it saying goodbye to them because we'll have these very intense emotional attachments to them. So what does that say about us as a human race? What does that say about the technology itself? So the story is these two obsolete helper bots kind of hatch this plan to get in contact with the former owner. That's the plot, the very neat and tidy 90, 200 minute story. What it's about is about shelf life and our battery life. And one can't help but immediately notice the parallels between computers and technology and our own existence. The brains of a computer, the way that we are programmed, the way that we program them, making people and things in our likeness, in our image and in our example, and being keenly aware of our battery life. We all know it in the abstract. We all know that this is a limited time offer only. But it's only when major events happen that we're sobered by the harsh reality of our transience. But you know, that's kind of a heavy handed theme. It's not really about mortality, it's more about celebrating your battery life. Really celebrating your battery life.
- [09:02]
Paul Wontorek
I like that.
- [09:02]
Darren Criss
And so what's great about this show to me is that all the things I just said would be really depressing if we made this about a pet, a child or some kind of servant or old folks. Right? It's a little on the nose, a little intense. This is a musical about robots in the future. And I've said this a thousand times in every interview that I've ever done about a lot of projects that I've done. But I think pathos is a dish best served fun. You're more likely to internalize and reflect on these really kind of lofty human themes if you have a fun story to be told. You know, I always say the biggest, the most I've ever responded to really amazing human stories has been through non humans, like cartoon lions, computer animated toys, things where the audience does the job of painting their experience onto the characters they're watching. So I'm not playing a human being. I cannot and will not play certain emotions because that's just not part of the gig. That's the audience's gig to have to experience that through us. So you've got a great score, it's funny, it's quick, it's tight, it's tidy. And those are the kinds of shows that I want to experience when being presented with these kinds of lofty themes.
- [10:24]
Paul Wontorek
We've been exploring a lot of these themes in pop culture for a while, right? I mean, we saw Joaquin Phoenix fall in love with his AI and her. Sure, yeah, yeah, right. Did you read the novel Clara and the Sun?
- [10:36]
Darren Criss
No, but I'm familiar with it.
- [10:37]
Paul Wontorek
Novel about a similarly like sort of discarded piece of technology. Robert Downey Jr. S playing with an AI up at the center.
- [10:45]
Darren Criss
Yes.
- [10:46]
Paul Wontorek
It's fun. It's fun to sort of get to explore these things that we're all thinking about, but then do it in.
- [10:52]
Darren Criss
It's also very in vogue. What's crazy is they, you know, these guys wrote this story almost 10 years ago. And even the word AI, I can think of a couple generation gaps where that would be. It would take a bit of explaining. People understand the concept, whether it's in the science fiction scale or the very practical real scale that it exists now. But it's not fiction. It exists on our phones now in a day to day being. And it's wildly exciting. It's also hugely terrifying. And it's a really great talking point to explore a lot of things about human nature. I mean, I think Will and Hugh wanted to write a really human story, but in the way that I was just saying how they wanted to do something that was fun. What's a way that you can talk about human emotions in a way that, you know, people will really internalize? And they're like, why don't we just displace that? It's a great dramaturgical device.
- [11:49]
Paul Wontorek
So Oliver, who you play, is a helper bot. And I believe he's of an older generation than Helen. Jai Shen.
- [11:56]
Darren Criss
Yes. Which is a little bit of Clara and she's imitating life because she is like full blown Gen Z and I am full blown millennial. And our wiring is different. You know, we relate to on a lot of levels. We both went to the University of Michigan. So there's that, you know, nice little footnote to our connection. But, you know, there's, you know, when you get to a certain experience in your life, you can relate on a lot of things, but every now and then things pop up where you go, ah, yes, our software is a little different, but it's nonetheless a joy to be with her. But, yes, she plays a much newer, more advanced model.
- [12:36]
Paul Wontorek
So how do you become Oliver? What is Oliver like, and how is it different than Darren? Because obviously, well, we're still in the weeds.
- [12:43]
Darren Criss
We're still very much in the rehearsal process. This show is very technologically advanced. I think it's kind of the ace in the hole that people aren't expecting. Like, oh, yeah, the cute little robot show, right? It's like a forehander at the Belasco. It's like a small thing. And I'm kind of, you know, I have this grit in my face of like, you have no idea.
- [13:05]
Paul Wontorek
Well, Michael Arden is a visionary and Dane Laffrey, his designer. I know they don't create a world.
- [13:09]
Darren Criss
They don't fuck around. So this show is. Michael and I were joking about this. That, you know, in the advent of a lot of sort of abstract minimalist or expressionist sort of like design, which is cool. I'm not poo pooing that by any means. This is the antithesis to that. This is like, we are going back to Saigon. We were like, back to Phantom. I mean, this is a big ass mother spectacle. I can see that as the quote outside. This is a big ass motherfucker. And, you know, people who don't know anything about Broadway, you know, I always say, like, we tend to appeal to our own kind on the show. And people who love Broadway, outside of our sort of weird nerd circle, it's like, look, people have this idea of what Broadway is. They want. They want to have fun. They want to hear music that they like, and they want to be dazzled, right? And I go or. And hear a good story. I'm like, yeah, that's. We got. I want to be moved all those.
- [14:07]
Paul Wontorek
And it feels like I put being.
- [14:09]
Darren Criss
Moved, having fun and hearing good story kind of in the same. The same package. So, like, you want, okay, moved slash fun slash good story, spectacle, great music.
- [14:17]
Paul Wontorek
Yeah, it feels like full dance card. That's like, you're going to hit all of those.
- [14:21]
Darren Criss
That's what we have here.
- [14:22]
Paul Wontorek
Does it remind you of anything? I mean, you're a big connoisseur of musical theater. Does it appeal to you how Would you sort of get people excited about it?
- [14:30]
Darren Criss
I'd be curious to see what people think. I mean, you know, love stories are never new. It's just the alchemy of the specific circumstances and characters that make them infinitely timeless throughout thousands of years of storytelling. So what's fun is that, again, we've displaced this human experience through a futurescape where it's not about humans, but about helper bots, and it's not about actually falling in love. And more about two computers trying to understand, computationally synthesize, and process what love is. And why do human beings do this? They know it comes with all this baggage, good and bad, so why the hell are they doing this? And really asking yourself that question as a non human, like, if you had to present ChatGPT with the mechanics, the ones and zeros of why, that is a pretty interesting rabbit hole to go down, especially when there's really fun chamber pop, well written musical theater behind it. So, yeah, I'm really beyond psyched. I know you asked me questions. I'm not sure if I really answered them.
- [15:44]
Paul Wontorek
It feels like I've seen you do a lot of big performances, and this show feels very insensibility. A lot more ironically human.
- [15:54]
Darren Criss
Yes. That's what you were asking me. You were asking me, who is Oliver? How do you become Oliver? And I said that we were in the weeds. Yeah. You know, this is not Greek melodrama. This is not these huge, sweeping, emotional things. You know, stuff like that.
- [16:08]
Paul Wontorek
Seymour versus the Plant.
- [16:09]
Darren Criss
Yes, exactly.
- [16:09]
Paul Wontorek
Hedwig dancing on top of my lap.
- [16:12]
Darren Criss
Yes. Those are big. Yes. They're boisterous, fun, big emotional arcs, Highs and lows, where what's an interesting task, dare I say, challenge of this role? Which is why it was appealing to me. It was actually. I was a little. I was like, I don't know. How am I gonna do that? But now it is becoming more and more exciting. Should I wait for sound? You guys okay with the beep? Oh, there we go. Great. This became something that became more. This idea becomes more appealing to me as we go further and further into the rehearsal process. But the idea that I can't be doing those highs and lows, you know, we're not tearing our heart out, crying and screaming or being sullen and sad or intense. It's the lack thereof. It's when, you know, I almost find myself as an audience member. If I see something or even in real life, you know, if you watch something in God, something in the news or anywhere on the street or on the subway, if something happens that's funny, dramatic, traumatic, bizarre, and you see a person sort of dealing with it. In real life, we don't tend to sort of immediately emote. I mean, everyone's different. Everyone's resting reaction, face is different. But it's almost the folks that don't necessarily have a reaction that you're kind of sobered by because you are filling in the blanks going, well, surely they feel this. And so, like I said, my job as an. If I do my job correctly, people aren't going to walk away from this going like, wow, that kid from that show, really? It's like they'll say, that was an amazing piece. They'll love the music and it'll be very thought provoking. If I do my job correctly, they will have filled in the emotional blanks that I'm presenting. That's my gig for this. Yeah.
- [18:20]
Paul Wontorek
What do you need a helper bot for? I need one everything, baby.
- [18:24]
Darren Criss
We all do. We could all use a helper bot. I think if we ever do have helper bots in the future, it would be like I would be too emotionally attached. I wouldn't be able to. To deal with getting the new one.
- [18:34]
Helen Jai Shen
The new one.
- [18:35]
Darren Criss
Yeah. I'm sorry, dude. I feel like our phones. I've had this conspiracy theory for years that as soon as a new iPhone model is released. I think they just announced a new one last weekend. The iPhones start to act up, they start to act out. They do.
- [18:51]
Paul Wontorek
They totally do.
- [18:51]
Darren Criss
And they totally get jealous and angry about the other woman and they rebel and they just start going nuts. And I think it's actually just Apple going like, all right, send out the virus. So we have to get the new phones. Or the phones really are sentient and are actually jealous and are just acting out because they can't take the idea of them being obsolete.
- [19:09]
Paul Wontorek
Do you think there's Any chance my 2 iPhones in that drawer have fallen in love? Yes, we'll go with that.
- [19:19]
Helen Jai Shen
Sure.
- [19:20]
Darren Criss
Next thing you know, you're going to open that drawer. There's going to be new little baby iPhones in there. That's how science works, Right. That's how biology works.
- [19:26]
Paul Wontorek
I need a new one. Perfect.
- [19:27]
Darren Criss
Yeah. Yeah, right? Yeah, we'll get them to. This is a whole other sci fi theory. This is like Battlestar Galactica.
- [19:35]
Tamsen Fadal
So maybe happy ending. Just recently celebrated opening night. We caught up with Helen J. Shen on the red carpet. She's making her Broadway debut.
- [19:48]
Beth Stevens
This is a dream come true. I really. Broadway in general, theater in general, has Been the dream come true. But to do it with this company, to do it on this scale, with this story, with this music, it just keeps getting better and better and better and more cherries on more layers of the cake. It just is very overwhelming. I feel very grateful for everyone who helped me get here, and I just am excited to do the show. It's really interesting because there's a bunch of pockets of just silence because audiences are learning and listening to this, to this book, to the score for the first time, which is something that I think is rare for audiences to go completely blind to a new musical and not know how funny it's going to be, not know how poignant it's going to be, not know the chord it's going to strike. So there's uproarious laughter, which is always really fun. I think doing a comedy is. I think there's such technical elements to it. It's kind of like science. It's kind of like math, and it's really fun to do. And then at the end, when you could hear a pin drop, it's really special because I know people are listening and I know it's hitting people in a way that is how we want it to hit people.
- [20:58]
Tamsen Fadal
And now here's Beth Stevens chatting with the creative team of maybe. Happy ending.
- [21:06]
Dane Lafferty
So your longtime collaborators not sick of each other yet?
- [21:10]
Helen Jai Shen
No, not today.
- [21:12]
Dane Lafferty
Tell me, I was thinking about how many things you two have done together, but on Broadway, is this your most ambitious project?
- [21:20]
Helen Jai Shen
I mean, they're all ambitious on some level or another, but I think from a purely kind of like technical complexity perspective. Sure.
- [21:29]
Michael Arden
And, you know, the fact that this is a completely original new musical like that in and of itself is, you know, probably as difficult as splitting an atom. So that mixed with what we're actually doing on stage, I think probably, I would say this is hard work.
- [21:46]
Helen Jai Shen
Yeah.
- [21:47]
Dane Lafferty
And it is so unusual to have a musical that's not based on a movie, that's not based on a novel. That's just pure imagination.
- [21:55]
Michael Arden
Yeah, there's no. It's not songs people know. It's not story, it's not based on real events. It's truly from the imagination of Hugh park and Will Aronson. And so we're getting to create a world completely from scratch. The sonic landscape, the visual landscape, the rules of the world. And we're also in this kind of future that we are making up. So it's a real exercise and opportunity for our imaginations just to run free as a group.
- [22:25]
Dane Lafferty
So tell me about this world. How do you describe maybe happy ending?
- [22:30]
Helen Jai Shen
I mean, maybe happy ending from the perspective of the world, maybe happy ending exists in a, I think, increasingly imaginable near future where AI elements have taken on human form to the point where they're ostensibly indistinguishable from human beings. And that's kind of like the launchpad of the world and the two primary protagonists that we meet. And so, you know, we've. I think it's easy with something like this to be attracted to kind of science fiction tropes, which is something that we've really been trying to push against in this cause that feels like a tricky marriage in theater and in live theater. And I think that there's a wonderful aspect of the piece in which, you know, the character Oliver is sort of, like, obsessed with a kind of, like, mid century, you know, mid 20th century. Yes, sorry, a mid 20th century crooner, Gil Brentley. And that greatly informs his aesthetic, which is kind of wonderful. So there's, you know, where there's an interesting and hopefully satisfying tension between an imagined future and, you know, a past that's very familiar to our audiences.
- [23:43]
Michael Arden
Yeah. I think it wants to feel like, you know, what we can imagine in a somewhat idyllic, somewhat dystopian future mixed with, like, a classic musical sensibility, classic design world. So, you know, despite there being a lot of digital elements, we wanted it to feel really tactile, that the textures were really apparent and that, you know, there were things very recognizable. You know, we're still having TV remotes somehow in the future. And, you know, and Oliver's obsession with, you know, things from the past and LPs and records and things like that. So it's finding sort of classic texture with futurism, you know, mixed with musical comedy.
- [24:35]
Dane Lafferty
Yeah. And I love that feeling as an audience member. There's a comfort to seeing that. And also that reaching backward as you're reaching forward into the future, that was very apparent. And that comfort factor, I think, is something that we could see or recognize from classic musical comedy, from even television. Some of these pieces, I mean, I was like, oh, jazz LPs, you know.
- [24:56]
Michael Arden
Yeah, exactly. Things like this. I think it, like, invites the audience in. So they feel both, like, even though they're entering a new space, they feel like they're somewhere they've been before.
- [25:05]
Darren Criss
Yeah.
- [25:06]
Dane Lafferty
So what are the challenges of directing actors who are not playing humans?
- [25:11]
Michael Arden
Well, I think, you know, we had a wonderful movement coach on the show named Moni Yakim, who was a teacher of mine. When I was at Juilliard, and he actually did movement for, like, Robocop and many other films. And so he got to work with them on sort of the rudimentary ideas of how machinery moves within the body. But we also really wanted to approach this as people. You know, it's my hope that we, the audience, over the course of the evening, forgets that they're robots. And we only choose the moments we remind the audience, oh, these aren't people. These are beings made of metal and circuitry. But we kind of had to rehearse in a way of, like, okay, today you're not robots. Just play these as close to you as possible. Okay, today, really dig into the machinery. And so it's really been a process of calculating where they want to exist at any moment. And luckily, I'm blessed to be working with the greatest actors ever. Helen, Jai Shen, Darren Criss, Marcus Choi, and Desduron are just incredible sensitive, you know, such humanistic performances, and yet are able to really process how these robots would move and their idiosyncrasies. It's really exciting to watch and. And play with. And it's different every night.
- [26:44]
Helen Jai Shen
Oh, sorry. No, I was gonna say there's a really interesting moment recently where, you know, there was a kind of discussion around, like, their capacity to feel emotion or, like, can a robot cry? And I think it is show that treads in some really, like, you know, deep kind of emotional territory. It's been interesting to see how that the calibration of their capacity to demonstrate a feeling versus what and how that relates to how the audience is metabolizing a moment has been sort of fascinating to watch.
- [27:23]
Dane Lafferty
It is amazing because obviously there's human metaphor here, and these are helper bots who have a shelf life, as do we. So that is very moving as a human audience member. Right.
- [27:38]
Michael Arden
Claire says everything must end eventually. And I think that's so true. Everything does. You know, it just. We all have to kind of accept that. And yet we were trying to answer the question, which is the first line of the show, which is, why love when you know something must end, why love? What is that human thing that keeps us loving and keeps us getting back up after we fall down? In relationships and in life? What is that enigmatic purpose that we all share? And I think that is what makes this musical so universal. It's that every person, no matter where, what walk of life you may lead, like, shares in that human experience of just being alive.
- [28:25]
Dane Lafferty
From a design standpoint. I can imagine an alternate universe where you could do this piece with a couch and a plant and your imagination. But this is an incredibly intense set design. So tell me about some of the conversations you had about coming up with this. It's a big swing. So coming up with the concept and talking to your team.
- [28:48]
Helen Jai Shen
Yeah, I think the first thing you said is really important, which is that all really great pieces of theatrical writing can withstand that kind of treatment. So there's no part of what we were doing that was like trying to create smoke and mirrors or compensate for something that the story or the music or the characters aren't doing. Like, that's not the intention. But I think the origin point for the general approach was one in which, you know, we wanted to explore how much agency these created beings had in their own environment. Because a lot of what challenges them is that they are supposed to be stuck in this kind of stasis of retirement, just sort of, you know, basically waiting to, you know, power down, Power down, and that they then make a choice to go out into the world and go on an adventure, you know, that they were not, you know, but without a great deal of control of their circumstances. Right. So we've sort of concocted a machine that propels them and it holds them, and then it gives them something to be released from, and it sort of carries them through and ultimately carries them back. But it's, I think, like. I think you're alluding to the fact it's very complex. There's a lot of automation. A lot, you know, things obviously move unseen, which is not a condition of the real world. Right. And so I think sometimes, you know, stage automation is used for convenience, you know, just to, like, get, you know, get something on from the wing or go from A to B or whatever. And we don't really believe in that approach. I think we have to sort of, like, understand the metaphor of it and what it means for a world to be, like, drifting and reshaping around characters. And so, you know, we've really embraced that here. And we really do think of it as a. You know, as a sort of a machine, really. The word we used to describe, I.
- [30:47]
Michael Arden
Think, too, you know, even though it's complex and everyone's talking about the spectacle of it, what we've tried to do is create something, though it transports us to many places. It always gives the audience an active role in that. You know, we use black a lot in this and neon, and we create spaces to kind of guide the eye and show how these characters are boxed in or contained. However, there's so much more we're hoping to evoke than show here. So, you know, trying to make sure that we're never trying to, like, actually. Actually do too much, and we never want to overshadow the material has been the work here.
- [31:31]
Helen Jai Shen
Yeah.
- [31:31]
Michael Arden
So hopefully, you know, everyone has a different idea of what this world is when they leave and in their dreams after seeing it, because that's gonna be much more exciting than anything that we are able to fabricate on stage.
- [31:44]
Dane Lafferty
And for audiences who probably spend way too much time looking at their phones and swiping, it feels like you're focusing our eye in a way that maybe we're not as used to in the theater, but still feels theatrical, not cinematic. It really is very rooted in musical theater.
- [32:01]
Michael Arden
I mean, we're borrowing from Bob Fosse and David Belasco. Thank you, David. You know, what we're doing is both cutting edge, but also incredibly simple and time tested. So it's fun to kind of mix those two things together.
- [32:24]
Dane Lafferty
So tell me some of your favorite details of this world. I heard that you sourced items from Korea down to light switches and that you really paid attention to some of the intricate details that maybe the audience doesn't even see, but feels and certainly the actors are aware of.
- [32:44]
Helen Jai Shen
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's. We spent a lot of time in the show in Oliver and Claire's kind of respective apartments, which are sort of like kind of mirror images of each other and based very much on a. This one particular building that's actually in Japan and not Korea or was. And it was an architectural experiment from the 70s, this kind of, like, futurist, utopian idea about. About a modular home that could exist in a tower in Tokyo. And then if you moved, you could take your home with you and there'd be another tower it could get plugged into somewhere else.
- [33:20]
Michael Arden
Sort of like a big Jenga set, actually is what the building was.
- [33:25]
Helen Jai Shen
And it was a sort of like. It's a wonderful kind of like, academic architectural idea that ultimately was a failed idea because they only ever built one building. So these pods, which were built to move around, just kind of stayed there and slowly decayed. And we happened to be fortunate enough to see it in person right before it was disassembled. And it was kind of magnificently broken down with extension cords coming out of the thing and tarps and leaks. And you suddenly felt like, oh, well, this we're kind of witnessing something that feels like. Has a strong corollary to this story about these kind of pieces of Cutting edge technology. This kind of. This bold new idea about how technology can work and as it ultimately breaks down, as so many things do. And I think. So that is something that. And the sort of the details and the ideas around what it means to exist solely in a sort of 12 foot by 12 foot cube, which some humans try to do, but that felt very applicable to these robots. So I think the way that I'm very fond of, the way that we have carved those out and detailed those and found a way to contrast between Oliver, who the opening number is the World within My room, who's kind of like. He's maybe a bit of an agoraphobe, but certainly is obsessed with his surroundings. He feels like a cancer to me. I am Shell, you know, and then. And Claire's, who's a little bit more like, resigned and uninterested in just trying to get her charger working, but hasn't like, you know, hasn't decorated in the same way that he has. So anyway, yeah, one detail I love.
- [35:12]
Michael Arden
Is just all of the records in the show are incredibly detailed. All the albums of Gil Brantley, and they're populated on the set. And we've made all these specific album covers with. With Desdoron on them, correlating to what the song is. And so every time we see Gil Brantley on stage, it's sort of an album that has come to life. So if you really clock, you'll see on a wall here or in a stack of records here, that album cover. And he appears in this costume later. And so that's a fun little tidbit to keep an eye on. And also, Hwaboon is really the star of the show, who is Oliver's house plant and best friend. And Wabboon goes through several phases. If you really keep your eye on him, There's a few changes. He gets healthier as the show goes on. To me, the opening and ending image of the piece is Hwaboon, because for me, this is a play. Although it's about robots in the future, it is about life. It is about what we need to survive. Yes. We need water and air and food, and I think we need love.
- [36:24]
Dane Lafferty
Well, I love that. Well, thank you both so much for taking a break and talking to me.
- [36:28]
Helen Jai Shen
Always a pleasure.
- [36:29]
Michael Arden
Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Beth.
- [36:32]
Tamsen Fadal
Well, that's gonna do it for this latest episode of the Broadway show Uncut. For more information or tickets to maybe happy ending, head on over to broadway.com and until next time, I'm Tamsen Fadal.