the way that it has to be
News broke last week that after Darren Criss leaves the leading role of Oliver in Maybe Happy Ending this September he will be succeeded by Andrew Barth Feldman.
For those who don't know, Maybe is a love story between two helper robots set in Seoul in the 2060s that originated in South Korea, and became an unlikely hit starting off slow at the box office but going on to win six Tonys, including best musical, best original score, best book and best actor for Criss–who made history as the first Asian-American to win that award.
Understandably, there's been a lot of discussion about Feldman's casting because this would be the first time an actor without Asian heritage would take on either of the leading roles. I don't know if the producers understood how their, to be frank, stunt casting (Feldman is currently dating Helen J Shen, who has the other leading role in the musical) would cause a stir, but this gives me the chance to dive into the interesting question of what the rubric is when casting roles.
Why can some roles be cast seemingly without deference to a specific ethnicity, while others create pushback? What differentiates Eva Noblezada, of Filipino and Mexican descent, stepping into the roles of Eurydice and Sally Bowles1; local actors performing in Lion King2 or Frozen in Madrid or Tokyo, respectively; and, the predominantly-non-Black cast of the Hungarian State Opera doing Porgy and Bess?
It boils down to context: both within the work itself, and within the social structures the work is being presented in. This can be tricky because context is to some extent subjective and informed by a finely-attuned understanding of a highly-complex system. When you miss certain cues, you may not have the proper context, which could lead to an incorrect or downright offensive interpretation.
Speaking of context, I haven't seen Maybe (mezzanine tickets were $400 US, which, tbh, is Beyoncé-level money for me), so I will infer as carefully as possible. Story-wise, the roles of two robots in futuristic Seoul ostensibly could be played by anyone. Will Aronson, co-creator of Maybe, says as much in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, from March 2025: "[O]ur thinking was: They're robots, so they could technically be any background;" however, then he adds "but, if the audience only has a few moments to define the setting, it helps that the protagonists are cast Asian."
Hue Park, the other co-creator, notes in the same interview, on bringing the show to Broadway: "we're not changing the location, we're not doing stunt casting, the actors should really match the characters." So, while robots could look like any ethnic background, and Seoul in 40 years could be highly-multicultural, their comments point to the two main roles being portrayed by people of Asian descent3.
The other side of this is the context Maybe is playing in during this current moment on stage. Shen talks about, in that interview, how excited people of Asian descent were to see themselves reflected on the stage, describing the production as a "revolution." While Broadway has had shows like Miss Saigon and Allegiance, this show appears to have struck a different chord, especially after the groundbreaking Tony win for Criss. To follow up Criss with an actor not of Asian descent feels off.
The thing is, Maybe isn't at the point of a Chicago or Cabaret, where it has become canon, that then you can cast performers of any background. The themes, while universal, were still written through an Asian cultural lens–one that is still difficult for Western audiences to parse without other contextual clues like performers of Asian descent–and hiring performers of other backgrounds then bring up considerations the script might not be able to contend with.
A thought exercise that helps illuminate the complexity of this issue is imagining what the response would be like if both leading roles went to racialized, but non-Asian performers. Who gets to be the exception in these situations? For example, what mental models get built if Amber Riley and Anthony Ramos were announced as Claire and Oliver?
A non-Asian online theatre critic offered that this was a business decision, and hopefully the continued success of the show would allow the show to provide more opportunities later for performers of Asian descent. He conceded that that echoed the "just be patient and wait your turn" excuse often provided to racialized people, but in the end he was okay with it, suggesting the ends justified the means.
Ultimately, this points to why sour feelings were stirred up, albeit perhaps unintentionally: so much of Western culture–and, through colonialism and imperialism, thus, the rest of the world–has catered to whiteness. It's a cruel but necessary lesson that to exist within this system, what is ostensibly made for us can never be allowed to be owned wholly by us.
[1] In Hadestown and Cabaret, respectively
[2] I remember learning in a behind-the-scnes video that every company of the Lion King must meet a threshold of South African performers
[3] Even this has further nuance to it: the reason why the actors can be of pan-Asian descent (Criss is part-Filipino and Shen is Chinese) is in part because "Asian-American" was a creation in the 1960s to coalition-build among people of Asian descent against racism in Canada and America