Daniel Radcliffe Crowd-Sources Community in EVERY BRILLIANT THING — Review

On paper, a one-person show about writing down life’s little joys (ice cream!) on Post-its and nurturing our feelings – with audience participation – seems the type of over-therapized, anti-art nonsense that activates the most reactionary sleeper cells in my psyche. And seeing an enthusiastic Daniel Radcliffe hold a stranger’s jacket, pretending it’s a sick dog named Indiana Bones, in the first couple of minutes of Every Brilliant Thing felt like a nightmare slowly coming alive.

That some 50 minutes later Radcliffe would have me, along with the rest of the crowd, stand up to do the wave without an ounce of cynicism speaks to his extraordinary charm as a performer, and to the writers Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s ability to fully disarm us, and overcome the almost insurmountable corniness its premise threatens. 

Radcliffe’s unnamed protagonist tells us about a list he started compiling as a young boy following his mother’s suicide attempt, which was relayed to him by a father who is caring, if ill-equipped (as so many of us are) to properly discuss her mental health. His grade school counselor helps him sort out his feelings, as does a college professor later on after his mother’s second attempt. He takes up list-writing in fits and starts as he journeys through adulthood, marveling at how much better his childhood self was at dealing with the unnameable, especially once he’s blindsided by his own slip into depression.

The play is similarly excursive, maintaining a steady forward momentum (Macmillan co-directs alongside Jeremy Herren) even as the protagonist veers into detours, most of which involve a sort of prop comedy in which the audience is the prop. Radcliffe employs a handful of the few dozen people seated onstage (the set is Vicki Mortimer) to act out parts in his story, and while it’s made clear participation is optional, no one at the performance I attended seemed able to resist. These moments are deployed deftly, with the plot kicking in long before they can start to grate, though it can’t hurt that the experience runs just over an hour.

Macmillan and Donahoe’s script is nimble and impressively executive in its underlying theory that happiness – just like depression, as the protagonist learns from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther – can be contagious. As Radcliffe ricochets throughout the theater, asking for audience help with winning earnestness, the idea arises that community is what happens when you crowd-source what you need.

The actor is a revelation, though I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone who could have retired a multimillionaire at 22 but keeps pushing himself into new challenges really does love what he gets to do for a living. Beside Radcliffe’s magnetic charisma, it’s his palpable joy in the project that shines brightest. There are a few reactions carefully calibrated for maximum fawning, sure, but his demeanor throughout suggests that he, too, is working through the meaning of performance; of engaging strangers through the one-way mirror through which they’ve grown accustomed to seeing him.

Every Brilliant Thing is in performance through May 24, 2026 at the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.