Daniel Radcliffe’s New Broadway Show Makes the Audience Part of the Cast
Every night at the Hudson Theatre, Daniel Radcliffe walks onstage alone. By the time the curtain falls, dozens of audience members have become part of the show. Some read lines from their seats. Five volunteers join him onstage. No two performances are the same.
The production is called Every Brilliant Thing, an interactive solo play written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe. It’s a format that collapses the wall between performer and audience — and it’s doing it on Broadway.
How the Show Works
Radcliffe performs the role alone, technically. In practice, the audience fills in the gaps. Select theatergoers read lines from their seats during the show, and five volunteers are brought onstage to perform alongside him at each performance.
The story, according to the show’s official website, follows a man looking back at his life through a list of moments that gave him hope. The official description: “In this one-of-a-kind solo show, a man looks back at his life and the glimmers of hope that carried him through. All told through a list of every wonderful, beautiful, and delightful thing—big, small, and everything in between—that makes life worth living.”
The play addresses depression, suicide, and mental health. But the tone, according to Radcliffe, isn’t what those themes might suggest.
What Makes the Format Different
Radcliffe put it bluntly in an interview with Broadway.com: “It’s billed as a one-person show and we talk about it that way, but in reality, if we’ve all done our jobs right it should feel to the audience like they and I have made the show together every night. Theater at its best should feel like a real community effort.”
This isn’t a passive experience where you watch from the dark. Your seat might come with a line to read. You might end up onstage. The production is designed so that the boundary between performer and audience dissolves over the course of the evening.
Radcliffe also described what separates live audience participation from simply performing to a crowd. “When you talk to people who go to the theater but are not in the theater professionally, people are always surprised when you say the audience is like the other actor in the play every night,” he told the outlet. “But this play really distills that to the nth degree.”
A play about depression and suicide could easily become a difficult sit. Radcliffe described how the script handles that tension.
“They have written something which allows the performer to deal with these very heavy things, and then to quick-as-a-flash turn around and be really silly about something else. I think there is something to modeling a world where we can talk about this stuff while being OK that is really powerful,” he said.
He went further: “It manages to be honest without being bleak, to be really emotional and joyous without being sentimental. It just walks a really beautiful, fine line between all those things.”
The combination of audience interaction and tonal agility means each performance has its own emotional arc, shaped partly by the people in the room that night.
Building the show required a different approach. Radcliffe described the early stages as isolating. “Learning the lines for the show on my own was a very isolated process,” he told Broadway.com. That tracks for a production where the other performers change nightly — there’s no traditional cast to rehearse with.
The shift came when practice audiences entered the room. Once he began rehearsing with them, Radcliffe said, “it became so much fun and so enjoyable.” The show doesn’t fully exist without the audience in it. It’s built that way by design.
Tickets and Schedule
Performances at Hudson Theatre began February 21, with an official opening night on March 12. Radcliffe is scheduled to perform through May 24.
The interactive elements mean your experience will depend on when you attend and who else is in the room. No performance will mirror the one before or after it.
Get tickets to Every Brilliant Thing here.
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
