NEW YORK — Oliver, played by Darren Criss, is a lonely, nerdy apartment dweller with a love of Chet Baker, a plant as his sole companion and a persistent air of melancholy. Claire, played by Helen J. Shen, is the smart, cute neighbor across the hall who takes pride in her appearance but has abandonment issues and worries constantly about her future. One day, she knocks on his door looking for a charge.

Add some falling snow and spontaneous street musicians and you’d have a saccharine Hallmark holiday movie, or perhaps a sweet off-Broadway date-night comedy, but, as written by Will Aronson and Hue Park, the new Broadway musical “Maybe Happy Ending” comes with a very arresting twist.

Both these characters are highly sophisticated South Korean robots. They act like sentient beings as they navigate life, so to speak, in Seoul, but they’ve already been discarded by owners moving on to a new model. Their mutual “retirement” means they have been shoved in the metaphorical drawer like some sad-sack iPhone 8, with nothing left to do except wait until their internal batteries degrade to zero. Can their love save them from their fate? Can they even feel at all, even to save their own rechargeable lives? Can a human audience care about robotic characters? Those are the salient questions of the night.

As adroitly directed by Michael Arden, “Maybe Happy Ending” turns out to be a very charming, romantic and slightly unnerving little musical that keys into our current collective worry — induced by artificial intelligence (and the election) — that the easily manipulated but chilly Siri might soon evolve into a pliant, all-knowing, emotional treasonous companion that we come to prefer over actual people, and who might one day start making its own demands. Various manifestations of that fear are showing up on Broadway a lot this season. We’re all current witnesses to that growing neurosis.

But the appeal of this particular piece, which really is most pleasurable to watch, revolves not just around its sweet, quirky score (it kept putting me in mind of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and, specifically “La La Land”) but also in how skillfully the show sets and keeps its own rules about what these bots can and cannot do, and how well it allegorizes their robotic angst with human mortality. We might have hearts rather than batteries, the show implies, but they eventually disintegrate in much the same way. Better yet, “Maybe Happy Ending” is smart enough not to stick around so long that you start to question its internal assumptions; conceptual musicals are typically better when confined to 90 minutes and this one knows that score.

Thanks to Dane Laffrey, the show also benefits from the freshest and most cinematic set design of the season (“Sunset Blvd.” notwithstanding) that keeps the audience constantly guessing as to what will happen as various screens and platforms keep sliding around (they’re both digital and analog), constantly restricting views to just one section of the stage and then suddenly opening up as the retired robots start to grasp more of the emotional opportunities that present themselves and they interact with a small ensemble cast of humans. This kind of show needs that sort of confining focus.

I was never entirely clear why Criss’s robot has jerky movements while Shen’s model operates almost entirely like a person. I assume it’s because she’s a more advanced model, but it’s still a bit jarring for the whole show and the overall effect was perhaps not worth that focus-pulling detail. Still, both actors are most engaging, with Shen making a very sophisticated Broadway debut, her performance filled with the right combination of guilelessness and vulnerability, with just enough of an ironic twist to allow the audience in on the joke. That’s how she sings, too. And Criss is most certainly all-in when it comes to his guy. He’s pretty wacky here, but I enjoyed his work, too.

The whole shebang is quite the slow-burning charmer, honestly, and deserves to be a bit of a sleeper hit.

Both robots have been given the equivalent of a gold watch from their former owners (she got a wardrobe of designer clothes, which dovetails nicely with the needs of a Broadway musical, and he got a love of jazz music, ditto). But as you watch their love of their stuff deteriorate within their hearts (if they had them), you become surprisingly invested in their fates. Here, two robot characters, for goodness sake, are carrying on that age-old Broadway declaration of love, and only love, being the existential necessity we cannot live without, here manifested in ways that Stephen Sondheim, even, could not have dreamed.

———

At the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., New York; www.maybehappyending.com.

———

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.