Before I went to “Every Brilliant Thing,” now open on Broadway at the Hudson Theater, a friend who had already seen it braced me. “Look,” she said, working her way up to it. “It’s going to make you love your fellow man.”
That news didn’t exactly come as a surprise; I saw Duncan Macmillan’s interactive solo show 12 years ago, when it still starred its co-writer, the comedian Jonny Donahoe. Back in 2014, it charmed my socks right off my body. (Socks are kind of a theme.) Surely with the star Daniel Radcliffe, it would again? Yes — but yes in a new way, too.
When you enter the Hudson Theater, it looks almost as if we’ve turned up for rehearsal. Instead of a set, the seating includes several risers onstage, and the front of the stage itself has been replaced with a broad set of stairs down into the orchestra. The usual preshow scrum has an extra, agitating element in it. Dashing up and down the stairs, collaring theatergoers in the aisles, then rushing back to consult with various assistant director or stage manager types is a guy in sneakers and a violet sweatshirt, his short beard pointing vigorously and persuasively at anyone he waylays.
This is Radcliffe in hyperactive choreographer mode: As the narrator of the frequently participatory “Every Brilliant Thing,” he must cast, and often physically arrange, his audience. He murmurs in one guy’s ear; that man will need to speak a few lines an hour from now. He coaxes a couple into highly visible corner seats, and you know they’ll feature too. Radcliffe is deep into crowd-work by the time the lights dim, so that once he starts the show proper, all of us — from the giddy volunteers to the participation-averse — are already over being star-struck. We’re not fans; we’ve become collaborators instead, a useful attitude to have in an openhearted show about naming and noticing the good.
“The List began after her first attempt,” Radcliffe says. “A list of everything brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for.” The List is a child’s response to a parent’s suicidality, a desperate but also sweet and silly gesture meant to tether his mother to the Earth. (“His” mother does not, of course, refer to Radcliffe’s mother. The play is fiction, and dozens of actors, including Minnie Driver and Lenny Henry, have played the narrator, changing details to suit themselves.)
As the narrator counts off, voices from the audience shout out their assigned brilliant thing: The first item, which we hear several times, is “ice cream” because the boy started making his list when he was 7. As a message to the narrator’s fragile mother, the List doesn’t work, or at least she won’t talk to him about it, even after she returns from the hospital the first time — or after subsequent hospitalizations. (He mails her an expanded version of the List from university, “anonymously,” he says.) As cheery as Radcliffe seems, we do notice that the shocked boy is himself offered help only intermittently, primarily from a kind school counselor, Mrs. Patterson, played by a member of the audience, who gamely turns her sock into a joke-telling sock puppet to draw out the frightened child.
The narrator’s dad has less to say about the family’s crisis, and the night I saw the show, Radcliffe cast a magnificently taciturn theatergoer in the role. As happened again and again, the vicissitudes of audience participation created some spectacularly funny effects. When, during a wedding scene, the dad was called on to make a toast, he stared the “bride” (yet another audience member) dead in the eyes and improvised, terrifyingly, “When I first met you, I didn’t get it.”
The narrator grows up and into his own depression — he tells us that he and his partner have a black dog, named Metaphor, who follows him everywhere — and so the List becomes a crutch and an anchor and a blanket. As the story unfolds, he calls out 24 (“Spaghetti Bolognese”) and 320 (“Making up after an argument”) and 518 (“When idioms coincide with real-life occurrences, for instance: waking up, realizing something and simultaneously smelling coffee”). The List changes purpose and even authorship, but the numbers keep climbing, moving on toward a million by the show’s end.
“Every Brilliant Thing” is itself an accretive artwork: it started as a short Macmillan monologue, was expanded into a collaborative project — people were invited to contribute on Facebook — and then blossomed into this crowd-work-heavy performance, informed by Donahoe’s experience as a comic. Since 2014, it has became a juggernaut, performed in at least 80 countries, and still gathering speed. This particular iteration, directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, has moved to Broadway from the West End, and it does not, strictly speaking, need Radcliffe and his sunflower openness. The play’s instruction to notice what’s beautiful about the world has real motive power, and the interactive components have been machined to perfection.
But the production does have Radcliffe, and he is himself a brilliant thing. Perhaps it’s because he has a quality of perennial boyhood. Not that Radcliffe isn’t fully adult in affect — the gentleness with which he asks his audience to pretend along with him, plus the beard, mark him as a Peak Dad. But he hasn’t lost his inbuilt spring. (When Radcliffe is excited, he boings straight up into the air, like a pop star being launched out of a stage cannon.) Radcliffe’s fully a theater creature now; he won a Tony Award in 2024 for his performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” And yet we loved him first on film as Harry Potter, or “the boy who lived.” In “Every Brilliant Thing,” the narrator grows up over the course of the show; Radcliffe grew up in front of everyone. As wonderful as other actors might be in the part, it’s key that we knew this one as a little kid, plucky in the face of fear.
And something more is happening here, too. Radcliffe makes himself extraordinarily available to us — his fondness for the audience radiates outward from wherever he is onstage. When participants make tiny errors (say, Mrs. Patterson’s joke is a dud), he laughs with unguarded delight. He thanks those yelling out their brilliant things with a courtly nod. Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony. (His “Merrily” co-star and friend Jonathan Groff achieves a similar area-of-effect spell in “Just in Time.”)
The same day that I saw “Every Brilliant Thing,” I read about a Pew survey which found that Americans don’t trust their neighbors. Out of 25 countries polled, the United States logged the highest proportion of respondents — 53 percent! — who had described their fellow citizens’ “morality and ethics” as bad. By the time I reached the theater, I had managed to get pretty despondent about it, and I was well on my way to a panicky spiral. As the show began, and we all started to laugh, I felt relieved that the production was going to let me escape that chilling portrait of our body politic. But as “Every Brilliant Thing” went on, I started thinking about it all over again. Come to this theater, I thought at those 53 percent. I bet I know what might help.
Every Brilliant Thing Through May 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; everybrilliantthing.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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