Everything’s Great Review – Daniel Radcliffe Sells Hard Broadway Transfer | Broadway

Every Brilliant Thing presents a theatrical challenge to former Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, a Broadway superstar and the only star in this limited 13-week engagement.

It’s not that the show requires sustained physical effort — although it does require some, as in a scene of manic exuberance in which Radcliffe’s character tries to please the entire audience — as much as it requires a quick-witted (and reactive!) warmth. While Radcliffe is the only professional actor in the show, his framework involves drawing audience members, including but not limited to those in a semicircle of seats on stage, into the action, all while making sure the monologue of sorts (we call it extra monologue) runs smoothly. This hybrid of acting, interaction and stage direction must be exhausting. But aside from a few quick water breaks and implosion after running around the lanes and doing those high kicks, Radcliffe doesn’t show it much. He seems to really love the job, which requires either superhuman high morale or great acting. Maybe both.

However, it does take writing an amazing play. The additional monologue by writer and co-director Duncan MacMillan feels autobiographical in its earnest, frank narration and light-hearted characterization: the unnamed narrator speaks directly to the audience about his experiences with depression, beginning with his mother’s attempted suicide when he was just seven years old. In an attempt to help her improve, he starts with a list of the “cool” things that make life worth living. (Presumably this seven-year-old had not seen the film Manhattan, which features an adult compiling a similar running list; it is not clear whether MacMillan did or not.) The list forms the backbone of the audience participation element of the play: when Radcliffe calls out a number from the list, a designated audience member will read out the corresponding item. (No. 1 is ice cream.) This seemed to have been resolved quickly beforehand; The audience members are real, not plants, but they also aren’t randomly surprised.

As the years go by, and the narrator grows from child to teenager to college student to adult, the list grows fitfully—even as he questions its effectiveness, especially in the area of ​​helping his troubled mother or his less volatile father, who doesn’t show up particularly romantically. In this regard, the narrator must also confront whether he too may have the same depression as his mother, and how this might affect his own relationships.

The language MacMillan uses in these chronicles is clear, direct, and accessible—almost to a fault. It is a play that is clearly and admirably concerned with doing and saying the right things; It’s part of the script that the treatment of suicide in the media can mistakenly glorify it, and MacMillan clearly has in mind that his work avoids that danger as much as possible while maintaining an emphatic sensitivity. At times, the combination of quirky observations, didactic tone and Radcliffe’s own cadence begins to resemble a John Oliver monologue, only without the political barbs or worldly absurdities tossed in aside. The laugh lines here are cute in nature, but often clichedly focused on cutesy connection.

The effort to discover that relatability becomes clearer with the knowledge that Everything Awesome is not actually straightforward autobiography. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but plucking these experiences directly from the playwright’s life might give the show some leeway when it starts to sound more like a public service announcement than a piece of fiction. As it is, even some detail-oriented elements, such as recurring thoughts about how easy it is to listen to music on vinyl while examining liner notes, seem calculated to prompt easy gestures of recognition.

This leaves the audience participation in the show, so potentially suspicious or unnerving, to provide a sense of genuine spontaneity. It is, and Radcliffe deals with it. Beyond the call-list, a few audience members are drawn into the action on stage, representing a variety of characters: a father, a college professor, a sympathetic school librarian, and even the narrator’s first real friend. These moments exist at the intersection of improvisation, trust practice, and banter. The show’s biggest laughs come from Radcliffe who seems to put his volunteers in a potentially embarrassing situation, and some of its warmest moments derive from how they inevitably rise to the occasion without actually having to make spectacular infomercials.

Like much of the Every Brilliant Thing series, this trick doubles as a lesson—in this case, about the power of just listening, in performance and in real life. This alertness keeps the show moving throughout its single 70-minute act, even when its straightforward script sounds like something a precocious college student might write. Essentially, the series succeeds because Radcliffe more or less wants it to. It would be misleading to call his performance a high-level work, as he deliberately stays closer to the level of the audience. However, as a mid-corps work, it’s still pretty great.