[title]
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★ (three stars)
Ice cream, water fights, Miss Piggy, chocolate, Christopher Walken’s voice and hair: These are entries from the catalog of commonplace wonders assembled by the narrator in Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, who has spent most of his life compiling a list of the items that make it worthwhile. His ever-growing roster in the plus column is meant to guard against at least one giant minus: the gnawing depression he has felt since his mother’s first attempt at suicide, when he was seven years old.
On the subject of reasons for existing, one might well wonder: What is the raison d’être for the Broadway production of Every Brilliant Thing, which had a successful run in 2014 at the West Village’s cozy Barrow Street Theatre but did not seem to call out for revival a decade later at a venue four times the size? The answer to that question is brief: Daniel Radcliffe. Compact and scruffy in a casual outfit of sneakers, jeans and a lavender shirt, Radcliffe has a wired underdog energy that represents stage celebrity at its most approachable. And that matters a great deal in Every Brilliant Thing, a huge amount of which is built around audience participation. Before the play begins, its star is already onstage, greeting audience members and helping to cast some of them in parts to play in the story he will tell as the narrator. Some of these roles are important to the story (father, lover, counsellor); others are peripheral, and many more consist merely of shouting out one line when prompted.
Even more than the essentially lonely act of list-making, this enactment of community and public engagement is central to the messaging of the Every Brilliant Thing. If “suicide is contagious,” as the narrator points out—citing the proliferation of copycat self-harm after the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther or the death of Marilyn Monroe—then so, too, might be appreciation and mutual support. But this dimension of the show worked better in a smaller downtown space. (You can experience a version of it right now at Burnout Paradise.) The Broadway production, directed by Jeremy Herrin and Macmillan, does what it can to make the Hudson Theatre feel more enveloping; rows of spectators are seated onstage, and the front orchestra section has been given a center aisle for Radcliffe to run down, high-fiving folks as he goes. But most of the audience is still seeing the show from a distance (the Hudson has a second balcony), and the distribution of assigned shout-out lines throughout the venue puts the text at the mercy of uneven miking, acoustics and projection skills. Some of the items on the narrator’s list come through clearly—when I attended, it was hard to miss audience member Tracy Morgan yelling “Spaghetti Bolognese!!”—but others are so muffed or muffled you can barely make them out.
Radcliffe is a spark plug, and his interactions with the audience are peppered with charming improvisation. But his star power has a down side. In 2014, when Every Brilliant Things was performed by a less well-known actor, the British comedian Jonny Donahoe—who is credited with contributing to the final script—it was possible for the audience to assume it was autobiographical. That can’t happen here, for obvious reasons, and that shines a more glaring light on the play’s actual story, which is vanishingly slender. That seems deliberate: Guidelines for responsible coverage of suicide in the media, as the narrator explains in one digression, include “Avoid excessive detail” and “Don’t speculate on the reason.” But without specificity and motive, one is left with a thickly padded elaboration of an idea that Rodgers and Hammerstein compressed into two and a half minutes in The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things.” Primo tickets for Every Brilliant Thing cost more than $400, and if you don’t mind spending top dollar on a dime-thin show, this one won’t disappoint; it’s diverting and at times even touching. But, appealing though he is, there may be better things on which to spend that money than 70 minutes of Radcliffe doing crowd work.
Every Brilliant Thing. Hudson Theatre (Broadway). By Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe. Directed by Jeremy Herrin and Macmillan. With Daniel Radcliffe. Running time: 1hr 10mins. No intermission.
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