Settling into your seat at the Hudson Theatre, you’ll notice typical background activity as ushers seat patrons, technicians and stagehands organize and check whatever it is they normally organize and check, and the like. Aisle traffic is significantly increased, as ticketholders are ushered (literally) to fill the several rows of onstage seats that line the central stage-within-the-stage. Several assistant types busily canvass the audience, seeking patrons willing to participate and distributing cards that contain lines of dialogue for them to shout out from their seats on cue.
As you remove your coat, check your Playbill, and (hopefully) prepare to power down your phone, you might not even notice that the smallest and scruffiest of these scruffy assistants is —well, yes! That’s Daniel Radcliffe, running and scampering frenetically through the Hudson consulting associates, selecting patrons on all three floors of the house, and politely but briefly greeting fans with the demeanor of someone running the final lap of a one-person relay race.
Radcliffe has been so strenuously omnipresent that when the play finally begins, he can’t even make an entrance: He’s been out there all along, working with intense concentration since before you even took your seat. Then, suddenly, he steps forward, tells us that now he is 7 years old, and conjures up out of nothingness a dying dog in his arms. We watch him, we watch him watch the dog die, and skeptics will be amazed to find within the very first minute that we believe every word of it.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★★ review here.]
This is Every Brilliant Thing, the one-person play “written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe,” which Radcliffe has brought to Broadway for 13 weeks. Or, one imagines, as long as he has the time, will, and stamina to keep at it. If the subject matter—coping with death, depression, and other dire life situations—sounds daunting, the play is anything but. Excessively sentimental? Yes. Built on performance gimmickry, with participation by dozens of ticketholders? Yes. Sweet, lovely, and altogether enthralling.
Radcliffe, who has demonstrated increasing power as an actor since his inescapable cinema origins, is so perfect in the role—and so suited to the play—that a spectator might think Every Brilliant Thing built for and molded upon him. Not so. The play began on a small scale, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, fashioned by Macmillan around Donahoe, a comedian. The play has since traveled the world, including, notably, a 2014 stint at off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre and an HBO version (both starring Donahoe) as well as a 2025 production at London’s intimate Soho Place with a handful of actors playing short stints in the role (namely Donahoe, Lenny Henry, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, and Minnie Driver). So Every Brilliant Thing is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a custom-built vehicle for Radcliffe. That said, his participation has propelled this small play into the Broadway spotlight. Does it work, in a three-tier 1,000-seat proscenium house? Spectacularly so.
One-person, yes—but with a cast, you might say, of dozens. Every Brilliant Thing is cannily but cleverly built around audience participation, so much so that it is worth a word of discussion. Those who assiduously avoid this sort of thing, be comforted: There is none of that “you in the checkered shirt in row L come up on stage”–type badgering. The pre-show scampering by the star and his associates is, in effect, a casting session. In impromptu chats, audience members are asked whether they’d be willing to read from a card. (These voices need to come from all corners and levels of the theater, so this becomes quite a technical feat for the sound department.) Along with these dozens of one-liners, four or five audience members are drafted for bona fide roles; nothing more need be said than that it so well conceived that it works perfectly. Along with everything else Radcliffe needs to do, he puts his amateur assistants at ease and improvises as necessary—manufacturing additional laughs as he goes along.
Macmillan, in addition to providing the script, has directed in collaboration with Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall), who is also the originating producer. Vicki Mortimer (who designed the National Theatre’s stunning Follies) has contrived a simple but effective playing area, with stark lighting—featuring hundreds of bare bulbs—by Jack Knowles (Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York). The sound design, a critical element to the success of the performance, is by Tom Gibbons (the recent Oedipus). Full credit is merited by all the stage managers and all the stagehands, who make everything work effortlessly and support Radcliffe throughout.
In the early stages of what turned out to be his final illness, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein 2nd came up with a simplistic but durable piece of self-help advice: “…when I’m feeling sad/ I simply remember my favorite things/ and then I don’t feel so bad.” It’s a far stretch to suppose that Oscar’s favorite things in any way influenced Duncan Macmillan’s Brilliant Thing. Unless subliminally—generations of folks, certainly, have grown up with “My Favorite Things” and The Sound of Music on permanent replay. But in a world where pain, cruelty, and violence are all too present, the notion of listing and remembering all that is good—favorite things, brilliant things—provides an anchor to hold onto. As an evening with Radcliffe in Every Brilliant Thing at the Hudson powerfully demonstrates.
Every Brilliant Thing opened March 12, 2026, at the Hudson Theatre and runs through May 24. Tickets and information: everybrilliantthing.com
