Maybe Happy Ending
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Telecharge API
YEAR
2024
EXTERNAL URL
The fifth Best Musical Tony winner in my portfolio — following Dear Evan Hansen, The Band’s Visit, Kimberly Akimbo, and The Outsiders. WordPress build with Telecharge ticketing integration, a custom stream selector for the cast recording, and the Club 2064 digital lottery at $20.64 per ticket woven directly into the site experience.
Owned the full-stack build at Situation Interactive.
Background
A South Korean musical making its Broadway debut needed a digital platform built for the spotlight.
Maybe Happy Ending — an original South Korean musical with music by Will Aronson, lyrics by Hue Park, and book by both — was making the jump from Seoul to Broadway with a production starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen, directed by Tony winner Michael Arden. The show tells the story of two retired HelperBot robots who form an unexpected bond in a near-future Seoul apartment, and it was generating significant advance buzz as one of the most anticipated new musicals of the 2024-25 season. Previews were set to begin at the Belasco Theatre on October 16, 2024, with an official opening on November 12. Coming off The Outsiders — which had just won Best Musical six months earlier — the playbook for launching a major Broadway contender was well established. The differentiator here was the show’s visual identity: warm, intimate, and stylistically unlike anything else in my portfolio.
The visual warmth of the production set the tone for the entire build — this was not a show that could live inside a generic Broadway template.
Implementation
A media-rich Broadway build with integrated ticketing and a multi-platform stream selector.
The Telecharge integration and performance calendar followed proven patterns — availability states, premium seating, group sales through Broadway Inbound — but the purchase pathways had more variety than most builds. Beyond standard tickets, the site surfaced the Club 2064 digital lottery at $20.64 per ticket, in-person rush at $49, and cast alternate scheduling by date, each requiring distinct routing logic within the calendar. The Look & Listen section featured a tabbed media gallery — photos, videos, and music — with the music tab powered by a custom stream selector that dynamically loads embedded players from Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music based on user selection, routing listeners to the original cast recording on their preferred platform without leaving the page. Where the ticketing was infrastructure I could stand up quickly, the content architecture demanded more attention — production photos, video embeds, cast bios, press quotes, and FAQs all competing for attention across a compact, carefully weighted page structure.
The lottery and rush programs added complexity to the ticketing layer — most Broadway sites route to one purchase flow, but Maybe Happy Ending needed to present three distinct paths without overwhelming the visitor.
Results
Six Tony Awards — including Best Musical — and a platform that carried the entire campaign.
Maybe Happy Ending swept the 2025 Tony Awards with six wins — Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Leading Actor for Darren Criss, Best Direction for Michael Arden, and Best Scenic Design. That made it the fifth Best Musical winner I had built the digital home for, extending a run that started with Dear Evan Hansen and continued through The Band’s Visit, Kimberly Akimbo, and The Outsiders. The platform handled the full weight of a Tony-winning campaign: ticket demand surges on nomination and win nights, press coverage cascading across 20+ “Best of the Year” lists, and the announcement of a North American tour launching Fall 2026. The marketing team managed every content update — award badges, tour announcements, video embeds from The Tonight Show and CBS Sunday Morning — independently through the CMS.
Five Best Musical winners is not a pattern — it is a body of work. Each one tested the platform under Broadway’s highest-profile spotlight, and each one held.
