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Daniel Radcliffe is starring in Every Brilliant Thing at the Hudson Theatre, an interactive one-person play where audience members become active participants — reading lines from their seats and joining him onstage — making every single performance unique.
The production, written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, is staged as an interactive one-person show in which audience members participate during the performance. Select theatergoers read lines from their seats, and five volunteers join Radcliffe onstage during each performance, according to Broadway.com. That structure means no two performances can ever be quite the same.
Performances began February 21 ahead of a March 12 opening night. Radcliffe is scheduled to perform in the production through May 24.
According to the show’s official website, the story follows a man reflecting on his life through a list of moments that brought him hope. The official description reads: “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.”
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The play addresses themes including depression, suicide and mental health — weighty subject matter that, based on Radcliffe’s own account, the script handles with a striking duality of gravity and lightness.
Radcliffe discussed the role of the audience in the production during an interview with Broadway.com. His comments make clear just how central the participatory element is to the show’s identity.
“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,” Radcliffe told the outlet. “But this play really distills that to the nth degree. 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.”
While the show is billed as a one-person show, by Radcliffe’s own description the audience functions as a collective scene partner, making it something far more communal than the label suggests.
Radcliffe offered a candid window into what it took to prepare for this kind of demanding solo work. “Learning the lines for the show on my own was a very isolated process,” explaining that the experience changed once rehearsals included audiences.
Once he began rehearsing with practice audiences, he said, “it became so much fun and so enjoyable.” The play, by design, comes alive only in the presence of an audience willing to participate.
Radcliffe spoke directly to the way the script navigates tonal shifts between its heavier themes and moments of levity, crediting the playwrights’ craftsmanship.
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“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 in praising the script’s emotional precision: “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,” Radcliffe added.
Get tickets to Every Brilliant Thing here.
