Michael Arden

Yeah.

And so I wrote back and I was like, I have to do this.

I love this.

And I had ideas immediately on how it might be done.

And it turned out being a very different show than it started.

But that kernel of what it's about remained the same of helping of our responsibility to each other.

All accolades aside, maybe Happy Ending arrived on Broadway facing a lot of financial challenges that had followed the production.

Early box office numbers were uncertain.

Ticket sales were not robust initially.

It was really bad at the beginning, yeah.

Living inside that period, what felt important to protect about the production while people were still discovering it?

I think...

It was useful that it was like such a hard show to do because I wasn't able to like think about how it was being received or how it was selling.

I was just trying to make it great because I believed in everyone who worked on that show, believed 100 percent that if we could just get people to see it, that it would melt any heart that came through the door.

We wanted the production to match the beauty of the story and the simplicity of the story and the complexity of the story.

And so we all, like, closed our eyes and jumped off a cliff together.

And people started then to say, hey, you have to see this thing.

I mean, that is why we are running today is because people told people to see it.

It wasn't because of a marketing campaign.

I went immediately to Instagram and was like, best play I've ever seen.