Columbia Theatre-Makers Run the Show at ‘Maybe Happy Ending’

Stage Management faculty and students are in charge at New York Times Critic’s Pick and Richard Rodgers Award-winner, Maybe Happy Ending. The one-act Broadway musical, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen, follows two obsolete robots as they confront what’s left of their lives and fall in love.

Stage production is led by Adjunct Assistant Professor and poet Justin Scribner, whose credits include the one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and Tony winners Parade and Once On This Island. His team includes stage manager and Adjunct Assistant Professor Sarah G. Harris and production assistants Mia Qin ’23 and Stage Management student Hera Jung. Theatre Management and Producing alum Ali Daylami ’24 co-produced the show.

The musical is set in 2064, at a Seoul retirement home for robots. The sci-fi premise demanded ambitious staging, including holograms. According to Jesse Green, New York Times theatre critic, the result is “so fully imagined, sensitively expanded and brilliantly executed that it’s impossible to tell where one element ends and another begins.” 

Maybe Happy Ending premiered in Seoul in 2016 before making its Broadway debut this November at Belasco Theatre. Tickets are available here.