Boundless enthusiasm and sheer ebullience go a very long way towards making Duncan Macmillan’s hopeful, if slight one-man play, Every Brilliant Thing, soar. The show is currently wowing audiences at Broadway’s Hudson Theater. Patrons are also working overtime to help keep the show moving. More on that, in a bit.
Daniel Radcliffe won a much-deserved Tony Award two years ago for his performance as the angst-ridden playwright Charlie Kringas, in the brilliant revival of the Sondheim/Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, opposite Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez. He made his Broadway debut as the troubled Alan Strang in the revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 2008 (a transfer from London’s West End) and has appeared on the Great White Way in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, (2011), The Cripple of Inishmaan (2013) and The Lifespan of a Fact (2018). I’ve seen all of those productions and have always been impressed with his work.
In Every Brilliant Thing, co-directed by MacMillan and Jeremy Herrin, Radcliffe is given the near-impossible task of parlaying an overly sugary, gimmicky and sometimes contradictory 75-minute, one-person monologue into a full theatrical feast. And he pulls it off thanks to his inherent charm, wit, warmth as well as his ability to run swiftly while high fiving!
MacMillan’s text is about an often-depressed “Narrator” looking back on his life and the causes of his depression, beginning with his mother’s first suicide attempt. To provide himself with hope as a youngster, he began making lists of reasons why life is worth living, beginning with ice cream, water fights and staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV. The number of “brilliant things” increases exponentially as the evening progresses—it seems to stall just “one-hundred-and-seventy-three-thousand-and-twenty-two short of a million,” at one point.
There is lots of audience participation from patrons given words or sentences (some quite long) to shout out to theatergoers actually playing roles—sometimes left to improvise. Audience member selections take place during the 45 minutes before the show starts with Radcliffe doing much of the selecting and interacting. For any fan, this is nirvana.
I can only image how these moments must differ, fall flat and/or triumph from performance to performance. I was in a lucky group that saw a young woman excel at playing his beloved school counsellor, “who was actually just Mrs. Patterson from the Library.” The person chosen was amazing. Of course, she had a very generous and thoughtful scene partner.
All those eternal optimists out there will relish in this theatrical event. And it may even win over some skeptics.
The production’s goal seems to always play it safe and never allow the audience to really think about things that aren’t “brilliant.” But every once in breathless while, Radcliffe’s Narrator slows the antics down and allows us into the character’s shattered world, if only for fleeting moments. And it’s in those beats that the magic really happens—that we are able to feel the pain and anguish so cleverly masked by his elaborate lists.
Every Brilliant Thing is playing a 13-week limited engagement.
For Tickets visit https://everybrilliantthing.com
