The Hollywood Reporter's Neha Joy goes behind the scenes to visit the set of the Tony Award winning musical 'Maybe Happy Ending' to see how this futuristic world is put together.
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00:00We're here at the Belasco Theatre, home of the ten-time Tony-nominated Maybe Happy Ending,
00:05a show that blends science fiction with a story about love, memory, and what it means to connect.
00:10The show follows two helper bots, Claire and Oliver,
00:13and today we're going behind the scenes to see how this futuristic world is put together.
00:18A robot does what she always does.
00:21It's the only way it'll be okay.
00:25I'm Justin Scribner. I'm the production stage manager for Maybe Happy Ending,
00:29and a long-time collaborator of Michael Arden and Dane Laffres.
00:33I met Michael in 2006.
00:36We did a show called The Times They Are A-Changin' with Twyla Tharp on Broadway.
00:40He was in it, and I was the assistant stage manager, so we forged a friendship backstage,
00:45mostly laughing, mostly having a great time together.
00:48On a big Broadway show, often the production stage manager is the one that everyone calls during the day
00:54if anything comes up.
00:55So actually, my day starts when I check my phone in the morning,
00:58and there could be any number of things that happen.
01:01Usually, you have understudies and swings that are ready to go on at a moment's notice,
01:05and when actors get sick, injured, take days off, it is the stage managers who are planning for that show during the day.
01:12So whenever I show up to the theater, it's really to make sure that everyone's got all the things that they need,
01:17that we're heading towards a smooth show in the evening.
01:21We're kind of like the central nervous system, the communicators, the facilitators.
01:26Yeah, I call us the parents backstage.
01:29This show is so tech-heavy and so filled with special effects and relies on all of the design elements working in tandem,
01:37and this beautiful script.
01:39But I am really thrilled that we were able to achieve Dane and George's vision for the scenic and video design.
01:46And it was a hard job, but it was kind of like putting together a really complicated puzzle.
01:51Into the stage door.
01:53Right here, this is our call board here.
01:56Entrance to the stage.
01:58Darren's dressing room.
02:00We have a whole tower of dressing rooms here.
02:04I have a fabulous team of stage managers I work with.
02:08We live in here, and then right here is the calling room.
02:12Okay, walk me through what exactly a calling room is, because I don't think I've ever heard of that before.
02:16It's not a phrase.
02:17It doesn't exist usually.
02:18Usually you have a calling desk, a stage manager's desk, or a calling booth.
02:24But here, because we have so few actors, we had empty dressing rooms,
02:28and I advocated for us to have a desk space.
02:32So I sit here, and I have my calling script.
02:36I need to agree with you.
02:37Please.
02:38When the show gets going, I have a huge color shot of the stage,
02:44and I utilize cue lights and my headset to call all of the automation, lights, sound, video cues in the show.
02:56And I do it rhythmically, and I'm always counting music.
03:00But basically, I'm following along, and there are some sequences where I'm really talking very quickly.
03:08And I have indicated every time our set moves, I have what is happening on the left, and how I'm cueing it on the right.
03:18I've got 19 crew members on headset with me as we're going about the show, and it's an hour and 45 minutes of nonstop action.
03:32And when I'm cueing them, often we've organized it so that I will warn our auto-fly operator,
03:40who's up on the fourth floor with a big computer set up, our auto-deck operator,
03:44who's in the basement, also with a huge computer set up.
03:47And when their lights go on, they are warned. They know that the sequence is coming up.
03:51And I probably will be also calling a light cue at the same time.
03:55And I'll start the transition by saying go along with the lights so that everything can move in tandem together.
04:03Sometimes the computers will say, danger, we can't go.
04:07We can't roll this unit because something else is in its way.
04:10And so for that reason, I'm actually grateful that we have a system that speaks to itself
04:15and is able to tell us if there's going to be an issue.
04:17But we always try to avoid not, you know, stopping the show at all costs.
04:22But if you need to, you're right there.
04:23That's right.
04:24Yeah, you got it.
04:25Yeah, and I have so much trust in our team, so it's really great.
04:30This is awesome.
04:31And I know this might even be fun.
04:34When the packing is done, I'm finally hitting the road.
04:37Dane and George, it turns out, use some of the same software when they are building their material.
04:44And what they were able to do was do some pre-visualization of how this was going to look
04:49and get really clever about what areas of the stage are actually secretly made up of video.
04:57Here we are in the hallway.
05:00Wow.
05:01And one little tidbit is we're on the 106th floor and they're in units 82 and 84.
05:10But we chose that because Michael's birthday is October 6th, 1982.
05:15Wow.
05:16So a little, you know, a little Easter egg in there.
05:18Yeah.
05:19A little Easter egg.
05:20Would you like to come in?
05:21Yes, of course.
05:22Let's come on in, guys.
05:23I heard that these apartments were actually based off of a real modular building in Tokyo.
05:28Yes.
05:29So were you able to talk about that a little?
05:30I think it was built in the 70s and it was an idea of a modular building that you could
05:35actually take the units out with a crane and move them to other buildings.
05:39So if you wanted to move, you just have your entire little home.
05:42So these cubes kind of inspired them to build a world that Oliver essentially never leaves.
05:48And you can say this is the paper wall that has the video behind it and you would never know.
05:55These are all made for the actors.
05:58Each of the actors has their own set of these.
06:01So the understudies also did a photo shoot.
06:03It's so beautiful.
06:04This is the charger that lights up that he then charges himself with.
06:09And there's a lot of lighting built into it.
06:12So we have moving lights above.
06:14There are speakers.
06:15This is a fake speaker just for show.
06:18And then like the audience doesn't see these, but this is all helping to light the unit as it moves
06:24in and out.
06:25And then this is the star of the show.
06:28Star of the show.
06:29And of course, Wah-Boon has his own emotional arc.
06:32He starts a little sad.
06:33So you can see he's getting into character is what's happening.
06:36His favorite singers, obviously we have Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.
06:40We have Bill Evans.
06:42And then all of the magazines that he gets through the mail shoot, which comes zooming in from above.
06:47Okay, so now are we stepping into...
06:51This is Claire's unit.
06:52Wow.
06:53Come on in.
06:54Let's take a look.
06:55Absolutely.
06:56It's interesting.
06:57Their personalities are revealed through the design here.
06:59She's kind of strung up some fairy lights in a somewhat haphazard half manner.
07:05And she's turned her desk into a workshop.
07:09So what she cares about is getting her battery fixed.
07:12But they went so far as to even create a ground plan of what the units might look like in the building.
07:18This 106th floor building.
07:21The writers really were inspired by this idea.
07:24The hermetic lifestyle of the Hikikomori Japanese men who were sealed off in their own little rooms in their cubes.
07:32And here, Oliver has kind of never left his apartment for 12 years.
07:36And we kind of assume part of that is because James wasn't someone who actually left his apartment very often.
07:42And he had a robot to keep him company in his little world.
07:45The truth is, the genius of this design is that you don't know it's coming.
07:50It's not like when you sit down and you're watching the show, you say,
07:53I can see the video is going to be a big part of the show.
07:56It just feels very intimate and small.
07:58And as the show kind of unravels and you peel back the layers, design elements are revealed and you kind of enter the world of these robots adventure.
08:08It's really cool.
08:09And if it doesn't come for free, well that's the way that it has to be.
08:18I don't sleep.