Every Brilliant Thing review: Daniel Radcliffe gives us one million reasons to love life. This play is one of them.

The brilliance of Every Brilliant Thing begins the moment you set foot in the theater.

There is no set to take in, aside from rows of seating along three edges of the stage. Instead, the focus is on the play's star: Daniel Radcliffe, a Tony winner and the face of one of the biggest film franchises of all time, now mingling with the audience.

Radcliffe will bound up to audience members and introduce himself with a chipper, "Hello, I'm Dan." He'll ask how they feel about audience participation, hand out cards to read, or cast them in a specific role in the show. Each enthusiastic greeting, paired with a handshake, proves a disarming collapse of the wall between spectator and megawatt star. In one beat, he goes from Daniel Radcliffe, Pop Culture Icon, to Daniel Radcliffe, fellow performer for the next 90 minutes.

With this shift, Radcliffe and co-directors Duncan Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin invite the audience in not as spectators, but as collaborators. (Macmillan is also the playwright, and co-created Every Brilliant Thing with its original performer Jonny Donahoe.) That collaboration turns Every Brilliant Thing into a singular, life-affirming theatrical experience, with Radcliffe serving as our gem of a guide.

What is Every Brilliant Thing about?

After making his rounds of the audience, Radcliffe returns to the stage and starts Every Brilliant Thing with an absolute gut punch of a line: "The list began after her first attempt."

As we soon learn, when the play's nameless narrator was 7 years old, his mother attempted suicide. His father, when trying to give his young son an explanation, says it's "because she can't see anything worth living for."

So begins the narrator's quest to show his mother that she has so much to live for. He creates a list of "every brilliant thing" in life. Ice cream. Things with stripes. People falling over. Through the eyes of a 7-year-old, each entry is proof of the world's vast wonder.

The narrator keeps the list going throughout his youth and into his adulthood. As it does, the entries get more specific: gifts that you actually want and didn't ask for. Track seven on every great record. Old people holding hands.

After a while, the list isn't just a reminder for his mother, but a comforting exercise for the narrator and for people around him. Outsiders contribute to the list until it grows to hundreds of thousands of entries long. (In real life, there is also a Facebook group dedicated to adding to the list.)

As Radcliffe reads out entry numbers from the list, he'll point out into the theater seats, at which point an audience member will read the "brilliant thing" off a card he'd given them during the pre-show. He's the conductor of a chorus of all the wonderful elements of life, some of which we may take for granted. Hearing them shouted out in this space gives them new depth. "Yes," you'll think, "there is a brilliance in poring over vinyl liner notes, and watching someone squeeze through train doors with only seconds to spare, and beds."

Daniel Radcliffe casts a captivating spell with Every Brilliant Thing's audience participation.

Having the audience read off the cards is the most frequent form of Every Brilliant Thing's audience participation, but it's far from the only one. The house lights stay on for most of the show, reminding viewers that the narrator is not speaking in a vacuum, but rather interacting directly with us. Radcliffe will also frequently lift audience members from the crowd to play his father, a friendly librarian, even his eventual spouse.

Watching Radcliffe direct his impromptu co-stars is like watching a high-wire act. On top of delivering a performance that swings from dazzling to vulnerable, giddy to crushing, Radcliffe is also tasked with being a reassuring facilitator. In that second role, he bursts with an infectious openness that spills over into every audience member, not just those who share the stage with him.

There's also a refreshing improvisational quality to his crowd work. At one point during the show, the narrator takes two books from audience members. During my performance, one of those books was A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas, a BookTok staple whose distinct cover and heft set the audience tittering in recognition. Radcliffe fed off that reaction, throwing in a casual shout out to the ACOTAR series (yes, nailing the abbreviation) and even joking about how the book could teach the narrator something new and "sexy." It's more than a funny throwaway line, it's meeting the audience where they're at.

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The relationship between audience and performer goes both ways, though, and whenever Radcliffe called upon an audience member, my initial reaction was one of tenseness. What if someone tried to undercut the moment in some way? Or what if the rest of the audience gave them the cold shoulder? Yet time and again, my anxieties were proven wrong. Every audience participant approached the stage with respectful enthusiasm, and the rest of us in the theater lent a swell of support, be the scene silly or deeply sad.

At one riotous moment, a sock puppet gets involved, and it's a small miracle of theater to watch someone commit to making the puppet themselves. In an early, sobering scene, another audience member acts as the vet who must euthanize the young narrator's dog, Indiana Bones. This scene, too, is a small miracle. We don't hesitate to believe that a coat Radcliffe has just borrowed from a spectator is his dog, that a pen the "vet" is holding is a needle, and that we are witnessing a life go out in real time. It's one of many moments where Every Brilliant Thing will shatter you, but Radcliffe is always there to pick us back up and guide us back towards the uplifting list of brilliant things. To that end, the experience of watching Every Brilliant Thing feels like it should belong on the narrator's list itself — in fittingly specific fashion, of course.

Number 1,000,021: Watching a play with an audience that is, visibly and in real time, embracing the transformative magic trick that is theater.

Every Brilliant Thing is now running on Broadway through May 24.

If you're feeling suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis, please talk to somebody. You can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. You can reach the Trans Lifeline by calling 877-565-8860 or the Trevor Project at 866-488-7386. Text "START" to Crisis Text Line at 741-741. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. ET, or email info@nami.org. If you don't like the phone, consider using the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Chat. Here is a list of international resources.