Every Brilliant Thing ★★★★★

It’s not every day that audience members run into the star of the Broadway show they are about to see as they take their seats. But that’s what happened to this reviewer at Every Brilliant Thing. As I searched for my row, I heard a lovely, English-accented “Excuse me,” and when I looked up to see who was speaking, there was Daniel Radcliffe, looking decidedly not like a movie star: scruffy, bearded, in a curated nondescript gray sweatshirt.

In this solo show by Duncan Macmillan (People, Places and Things) with co-creator Johnny Donahoe (who originated the role of the play’s unnamed narrator at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and later played him off-Broadway in 2014), Radcliffe is busy long before he starts spouting dialogue. With a phalanx of assistants and very attentive ushers (and, presumably, a few discreet bodyguards), Radcliffe scours the audience for people to play various characters in the story, including his father, his vet, his future significant other Sam (whose gender changes by performance), and a school counselor, among others.

These choices matter. At this particular performance, the father and counselor played terrifically with Radcliffe; Sam, not so much. It’s the production’s greatest strength and its clearest vulnerability: the wrong volunteer can briefly puncture the spell. But no matter how the recruits do — and many beyond those who appear on stage are given assignments in the audience to shout out specific lines — Radcliffe is having a fantastic time engaging the audience. He’s done so before on a New York stage — in James Graham’s Privacy at The Public Theater — but that was just a warm-up to this fourth-wall-free show, which requires a level of audience participation that is highly unusual for Broadway.

The Narrator begins the play by explaining that he started a list of brilliant things at seven years old when his mother made her first suicide attempt. The narrative then spans his life, following him from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. The list includes things and activities, the first ten including ice cream, water fights, and “kind old people who aren’t weird and don’t smell unusual.”

The items on the list evolve as he matures, including skinny dipping, Christopher Walken’s voice, and “hairdressers who listen to what you want.” It’s all very relatable, made richer by the fact that we’ve seen Radcliffe grow up before our eyes, from the titular character in the Harry Potter film franchise to his recent Tony-winning turn in Merrily We Roll Along.

The list doesn’t help the narrator’s mother as much as he hoped, which leads him to learn more about the importance of mental health: how much more we should talk about and understand depression and its impact on those who suffer from it. The show becomes more emotionally moving as it follows the ups and downs of the Narrator’s life, and because Macmillan and Donahoe wisely don’t overdo or indulge in the sadness they are depicting, the result is far more powerful.

Directors Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin have taken a show that was once performed in a tent behind Summerhall in Edinburgh and successfully expanded it to a Broadway setting. Though there are more lights and a much fancier sound system in the Hudson Theatre than this play is usually accorded, the show’s heart remains fully intact. Most touchingly, the larger audience builds on the idea that we are all in this together; the play becomes more communal.

Radcliffe is an ideal leader for the moving experience that is Every Brilliant Thing: sincere, approachable, funny, and, at times, even heartbreaking. When the Narrator states that “suicide is contagious,” he looks out knowingly into the murmuring audience, imploring all of us not to walk that path, and we cannot help but look back and wish the same for him.