How It Works and Why Your ‘Vibes’ Matter to Daniel Radcliffe

If you think Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing is a one-person play, think again. The Tony Award-nominated Best Revival relies on its audience to move the story along, and if you’re part of the crowd, you may end up getting married to Daniel Radcliffe — in the show, that is!

Every night at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, Radcliffe (who also scored a Tony nomination for his performance in the critically acclaimed work) begins his performance a half-hour early, when the house opens. He arrives a half-hour before that, getting to work each night approximately an hour before curtain. 

“Dan was very committed,” production stage manager Jhanaë K-C Bonnick exclusively tells BroadwayWorld, explaining how the former Harry Potter star mixes and mingles with the crowd to find the perfect scene partners before going on the play’s 85-minute journey. 

“He was like, ‘I’m going to be out there the whole time, and I’m going to go upstairs [to the theater’s other levels],’ which was an option knowing how overwhelming that time can be,” Bonnick explains.

As theatergoers filter into the Hudson and begin to take their seats, Radcliffe can be seen engaging in conversation with people seated in just about every area of the house. Without giving away too much, he’s picking audience members to play characters or read lines in Every Brilliant Thing, which tells the story of a person looking back on his life and reflecting on the beauty he’s encountered along the way. 

When it comes to finding the perfect person to ‘join the cast’ that evening, Bonnick says, “It’s all vibes, which sounds like a cop-out, but it’s such a fast amount of time to meet that many people that it really is vibes-based.” 

Bonnick explains that Radcliffe, along with associate directors David Hull and Laura Dupper, spend the entirety of the time the house is open searching through the audience to “cast” the show. What they’re looking for, she says, are two things: their comfortability level — “because everything is done with 100 percent full consent” — and if they’re the right fit for a character. 

If “someone is a little bit too enthusiastic” or if they “would be really great, but there’s not a role for them,” those people may be given a “list entry” to read when Radcliffe calls out for a line from the tally of every brilliant thing his character has encountered up until now. 

With lines being shouted out from every area of the Hudson, sound plays an extremely important part in the success of the show each night. 

“I’m not sure there’s ever been a show that has had to amplify the entire audience in a Broadway house,” sound designer Tom Gibbons tells BroadwayWorld. “We had three tiers of audience to try and be made audible.”

To do so, Gibbons explains that there are microphones on every single level of the theater. “We have them split up into groups or into a big grid, and we can amplify squares in the grid, a bit like battleships,” he says. “If we turn them all on at the same time, they would immediately feed back through the system, and it would be kind of like the seventh level of hell. So we had to be really, really smart about where we rooted the mics and where they were placed and what kind of mics we used.” 

Radcliffe ensures he places the list entries strategically throughout the theater during each evening’s pre-show. The people he moves to be on stage with him is an entirely different matter altogether. 

Stage manager Bonnick explains that there are five “roles” in the show, four of which are moved to different seats. Those seats are held in pairs since theatergoers usually go with someone else. Once they have their conversation with Radcliffe or the associate directors, they get their seats moved, and their original spot is written down and “handed off to front of house so that front of house can seat new people in those seats.”

The people who go in those seats are from the rush line, Bonnick says. “So it’s really incredible, actually,” she says. “When you buy a rush ticket, you get a general admission ticket and have no idea where you’re going to sit.” 

Given that the show’s star is walking through the theater the entire time the house is open before the show starts, there’s security in the space “at all times,” Bonnick says. “Dan has his private security, and then there’s also security that the Hudson and our company has provided, and they’re really on it in terms of keeping an eye out.” 

“If something were to go incredibly awry, there’s always the option to do it like a more traditional play and just say what happened as opposed to having the person do it,” Bonnick explains. “That being said, we have been incredibly lucky in this process to never have to do that. And there haven’t been any major safety concerns. Folks have been really respectful and lovely overall.”

Every Brilliant Thing is about the power of community. Sound designer Gibbons says the way they approached things was “to promote this idea of inclusivity and just connect.”

“That’s the whole ethos of the piece,” he says. “It’s inclusion.”