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“Flop.” “DOA.” “The show is absolutely in trouble.”
In the weeks leading up to the opening of Maybe Happy Ending, a new Broadway musical about two robots going on an adventure, the rumor mill spun furiously. Anonymous users filled message boards with gossip about an early closing, a financial disaster. The fact that it’s an original musical, imported from South Korea and written by people you’ve never heard of didn’t help. And when it was actually delayed due to supply-chain issues? To some, Maybe Happy Ending had reached its inevitable end.
Dez Duron was undeterred. The only actor to stay with the show from its English-language debut in Atlanta in 2020, Duron — who plays Gil Brentley, one of the robots’ favorite jazz singers, in his Broadway debut — admits the uncertainty surrounding the musical’s transfer to New York was nerve-racking. But he says all the people involved in the production, from stars Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen to director Michael Arden, were unwavering in their pride for what they had created.
The production did, blessedly, make it to previews. A couple nights before opening, Duron was notified that Jesse Green was in the house. The chief theater critic for The New York Times is the one reviewer who still has the power to tilt the fate of a Broadway show, and this one needed a rave to survive. Still, in a journal entry that Duron wrote afterwards, it was clear that his love for the musical had become unassailable, to the point of defying “god.”
“I was just like, dude, I do not care what anybody says about the show. I love it so much,” Duron told me during an interview in March. “Stephen Schwartz is like my number-one god of musical theater — Pippin is my favorite musical, Wicked was one of the first things I saw on Broadway — and I wrote in [my journal], and I put in all caps, ‘I DON’T CARE IF STEPHEN SCHWARTZ SAYS THIS IS SHIT. I love Maybe Happy Ending! I think it’s incredible!’”
A few days later when his review was published, Green called the show “ravishing,” “astonishing” and “a totally original human heartbreaker.” Just about every other critic agreed. Ever since that forceful nudge, Maybe Happy Ending has been snowballing into the surprise hit of the Broadway season. On Thursday, the show received 10 Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical, which it just might win.
Even Duron’s idol Stephen Schwartz is a fan of the show. The composer and lyricist behind the Broadway smash-turned-blockbuster sensation Wicked attended a performance early on, before the runaway success, on the same night as Anna Wintour and Marc Jacobs. Duron remembers him saying, “If this doesn’t run, that’s really bad news for the theater community.”
Schwartz confirmed to me in an email that’s “a pretty verbatim quotation,” but even so, he wanted to elaborate: “If it’s no longer possible on Broadway to present a well-written, well-directed, well-designed, and well-performed original musical that is also well-reviewed and has strong word-of-mouth, then indeed I feel Broadway musicals are in trouble.”
“Fortunately, it seems that Maybe Happy Ending has caught on and is doing very well,” he added, “which I think it richly deserves.”
For 35-year-old Dez Duron, the surprise success isn’t just a testament to the years of work he’s put in playing a Frank Sinatra-like crooner in this unconventional yet unforgettable musical — it’s validation that, after a brush with fame 12 years ago, the velvet-voiced singer and songwriter has the chops to take up that mantle in real life and become this generation’s Sinatra.
Love Songs, Show Tunes and “the Greatest Music in the World”
The problem with Maybe Happy Ending was never the musical itself, it was how to sell it.
I saw it in December during a trip to New York when I could fit in exactly two Broadway shows. I could have bought tickets for something with marquee names and easy elevator pitches — Nicole Scherzinger drenched in blood in Sunset Boulevard, Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler accompanied by squealing Gen Zers in Romeo + Juliet — but instead I went to this Korean import based solely on a trusted recommendation. I came out a victim of the tear-jerking trap that composer Will Aronson and lyricist Hue Park have laid at the Belasco Theatre, and a new fan of Dez Duron.
Duron’s professional career has faced a similar conundrum as his show: how do you sell him? More specifically, what is the music industry supposed to do with a dreamy Millennial man who wants to sing from the dusty Great American Songbook?
When Duron first tried out for The Voice over a decade ago, the answer was to have him jettison the classics. After making a demo of “crooner stuff” in high school and getting an agent while attending Yale University, which recruited him to play football, Duron got a call in 2011 about auditioning for the second season of NBC’s singing competition. Attending an Ivy League school was a huge deal for his family back in Shreveport, Louisiana, especially his father, but he decided to take two semesters off and give it a shot. To get him reality-TV ready, his shaggy helmet hair was chopped off and styled into a pompadour, and he was told to sing “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. Despite intriguing Christina Aguilera, one of the judges, he didn’t make it past the blind auditions.
“I love the Backstreet Boys,” Duron told me, “it just wasn’t what I wanted to sing.”
“Dez” is short for Destin, a name that makes more sense when you know that his parents are named Denny and DeAnza, and that they’re both pastors. Even more illuminating: When he was little, his dad would send out cassette tapes with his preaching on one side and children’s songs his mother wrote on the other, which were recorded by Dez and his siblings Destiny, Dee, DawnCheré, Denny and Dakota. “I call it Christian Barney,” he told me. But while he grew up singing DeAnza’s educational ditties like “Sorry, I’m Allergic to Griping” alongside hymns in church, it was his oldest sister’s rendition of “On My Own” from the musical Les Misérables at a “best of Broadway” concert that, he said, “changed my life forever.”
“People would be like, ‘You’re gonna be a worship leader,’ and I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna sing love songs,’” he remembered. “I said that from like four years old.” (All of his siblings have been pastors. Dez is the odd one out.)
The seminal album for Duron, though, wasn’t Les Mis, Pippin or The Phantom of the Opera, the latter of which he listened to so often that his dad made him throw away the CD. No, the artist who put him on the path to his signature style was the most recent of the chart-topping crooners.
“I heard ‘Feeling Good’ by Michael Bublé, and then that It’s Time album rocked my world,” he said. “This sounds bad on me, but I had never heard any of the songs that he covered on that album, like ‘You and I’ by Stevie Wonder…‘Sway’ even. I was just like, this is the greatest music in the world.”
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The star of “The Life List” never dreamed of becoming an actor. But at 30, he’s already worked with Spielberg and Branagh, with a secretive Kathryn Bigelow project next in line.After missing his chance on the second season of The Voice, Duron decided to stay in L.A. and stick with his plan of taking a year off from Yale. The next fall, he was invited back to audition again — but this time, the stakes were much higher: If he wanted to give it another go, he’d have to officially withdraw from the university.
“I did not want to come back. I was very scared,” he told me of his return to The Voice. “I guess I’m just this guy who puts undue pressure on myself, but I really felt like if I didn’t make a team twice, my career’s over.”
On a recommendation from the TV show’s bandleader, Duron skipped the boy band oeuvre and sang a love song, “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates. Thirty-two seconds into his blind audition, Blake Shelton pressed the red button, securing Duron a spot in the official competition. But then Christina Aguilera pressed hers too. Then CeeLo Green. They all wanted a piece of this Dez — the true Dez.
He eventually made it all the way to the top eight, singing, among other songs, a tune from the 1960s musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd that was popularized by singers like Nina Simone and Michael Bublé: “Feeling Good.”
Maybe Happy Ending’s Secret Ingredient
If you step off W 44th Street into the Belasco Theatre and make your way backstage to Dez Duron’s dressing room, you’ll find it adorned with albums from four artists: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé and Michael Bublé. “I call it my Mount Rushmore, even though it’s missing Chet [Baker],” he told me. He picked the artists, but it was Joseph Sibley, the show’s wardrobe supervisor, who surprised Duron with the makeover. “It was like a running joke that my dressing room felt like a prison cell because I’m so bad at decorating.”
In Maybe Happy Ending, which takes place in Korea in the year 2064, Duron’s character Gil Brentley is a fictional singer and bandleader who is said to have been popular in the time of Sinatra, Cole and Tormé. Oliver, a “Helperbot” played by Darren Criss who is facing the junkyard, is a jazz aficionado thanks to his human owner, and Brentley is one of his all-time favorite musicians. There is no shortage of crooner impersonators in the world — playing cruise ships, Vegas bars, wedding venues — who could have done a reasonable job aping one of these 20th-century models. But that’s not what the writers wanted for the show.
In an email, Will Aronson and Hue Park, who also wrote the book of the musical, told me that Duron landed the part because he “had such a gorgeous ‘crooner’ voice with a contemporary sensibility — it was the perfect combination.” They also added, as an aside, “People who see the show sometimes ask ‘Is his voice real?’ That doesn’t make any literal sense, but we know what they mean.” I know what they mean, too.
Sitting down in the mezzanine of the Belasco in December, next to another audience member who was there on a solo outing, I was surprised that the show began not with Criss or Shen, whose names you’ll see in glowing yellow lights above the title on the marquee outside, but with “Why Love,” a gorgeous solo from Duron. His voice floated out from the stage, disarming me, my row mate and seemingly the rest of the audience — an entrancing melodic aperitif that prepared us for the remarkable romantic comedy to come.
These doses continued throughout the night, building up to “Sentimental Person,” a tune worthy of the Great American Songbook, and which is new for the English-language version of the show. I can see how Maybe Happy Ending would be good even without Gil Brentley, but I can’t see how it would be Best Musical material without Duron, their secret ingredient.
When Duron first auditioned for the show, back before the Atlanta production five years ago, he was living in Harlem, trying to break through into Broadway, and singing songs like “Cake by the Ocean” and “Mr. Brightside” in a wedding band to make ends meet. (In 2022, he even performed at the wedding of professional golfer Dustin Johnson and Paulina Gretzky, daughter of Wayne Gretzky.) “I think what made the Maybe Happy Ending audition different than the rest was that it was what I do,” Duron told me. “I put way more pressure on myself than I should have, but it was kind of like, this is you, so if you don’t book this, maybe we should move home.”
His first audition was long and “became very workshoppy,” he said. The same thing happened at his callback. At this point, Duron didn’t even know what the show was about; he just knew they needed a jazz vocalist type. Yet, the people sitting silently in front of him as he sang song after song — the writers, director Michael Arden, music supervisor Deborah Abramson, the casting agency — weren’t giving him any inkling into whether or not they liked him.
“I just feel a little confused as to what you guys want,” he told them during the callback. “If you want Dean Martin, if you want Frank Sinatra, if you want Sammy Davis, if you want Chet Baker, Mel Tormé — those are different things — but if you tell me what you want, I can do it. I promise I can.” He had brought a big book of “like every Sinatra song that exists” and told them they could pick anything they wanted.
Arden told him to sing “The Way You Look Tonight.” “‘I want you to pretend you’re in a studio and I want it to be the most intimate thing ever,’” Duron remembers him saying. “‘I don’t want you to be a Broadway crooner. Do what you do.’” So he did — and then he was dismissed from the room. Soon after, he got the call that he booked it.
The Way You Look Tonight
Broadway in the 21st century is all about momentum. A well-written, well-directed, well-designed and well-performed musical, as Schwartz put it, could easily stall if mounted at the wrong time. At the right time, the same show could become a sensation.
How do you know when the right time comes? For Maybe Happy Ending, the producers thought the Atlanta run was going to be the springboard for Broadway; Duron said Arden called him in April of 2020 with a plan to open in early 2021. Unfortunately, Broadway didn’t reopen after the pandemic until September of that year, and when it did, the theatrical landscape was dire, with audiences hesitant to return.
That years-long delay appears to have been serendipitous for this musical, leading to a number of unforeseeable factors that have stoked its fire: The creators were able to cast the delightful Helen J. Shen, also making her Broadway debut, in the role of Helperbot Claire; the subject matter of humanoid robots could not be more timely; in coinciding with New York magazine’s “Legends of Broadway” issue, the show got unexpected shoutouts from luminaries like Matthew Broderick and Lin-Manuel Miranda; and it was buzzy enough to get a slot on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show.
The fact that Maybe Happy Ending will likely run for a while is, of course, great news for Duron’s short-term prospects. But music is his long-term dream, and kickstarting that part of his career is also dependent on making the most of a window of opportunity.
When Duron was on The Voice, the lead casting director told him something that has stayed with him. “‘It’s really sad because you see the red carpet rolled out in front of people on these shows,’” Duron remembers her saying, “‘and they don’t realize that it’s being rolled up behind them as they walk.’” A decade on, Duron seems to have taken an important lesson from that warning: don’t let others dictate your opportunities. Today, he’s seizing them as they come, in forms both expected and unforeseen.
A few days after Maybe Happy Ending’s Broadway opening was officially announced, Duron released his first real single, “Let’s Just Call It Love.” The lush recording, which one could easily hear Michael Bublé singing on his next album, makes it feel like the work of a major label introducing a new talent — but it was a self-produced project, written and compiled with the help of friends. “I was just like, I want to put something out to break that barrier and let people know I can write songs and I’m an artist,” Duron told me. “I’m not just a cover artist.”
He’s continued to prove that by playing sold-out concerts when he’s not required at the Belasco, including a recent night at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub where he sang originals alongside show tunes and pop throwbacks. And then there was the April 22 incident.
Last week, a medical emergency forced a performance of Maybe Happy Ending to pause for an extended period of time. Everyone was safe in the end. In the moment, though, there was also the issue of what to do about the full audience sitting there in the dark. Eventually Criss and Shen came out to perform an impromptu concert with him, but the savior in the moment was Duron, who charmed the crowd with an a capella rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight,” the song that scored him the part.
In a video of the moment posted on TikTok, an attendee wrote that Dez Duron was “saving the day.” A commenter added, “Not ‘saved the day’ like he gave CPR.” In another clip, of him singing “Feeling Good” while Criss played guitar, another TikTok user wrote, “this is all i’m going to be thinking about for the next five years actually.”
In that unplanned performance, Duron became more than a Sinatra or Bublé stand-in, more than a crooner character in a musical. He showed his true potential: as a spellbinding jazz singer who can carry on the illustrious tradition under his own name, able to win over Gen Zers on social media and Baby Boomer matinee ladies alike.
“Some day, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight,” Duron sang, his voice shimmering through the aisles of the Belasco. Then he ad-libbed, flashing his million-dollar smile, “And you all look beautiful.”
The crowd erupted.
Photography: Johanna Stickland for InsideHook, except where otherwise noted
