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Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (firmly recommended)
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
In his introduction to the HBO film of his 2004 Broadway solo show, the family memoir 700 Sundays, Billy Crystal revisits his childhood abode on Long Island and muses about the sadness that drove him to write it. “2001 was a tough year for me,” he recalls. “The only performing I did was give eulogies for people that I loved. When a funny person doesn’t feel like being funny anymore, that’s a tough place to be.” But in revisiting the now-vacant living room where he got his first laughs, he says, “I started to think, ‘If only I could hear those laughs again…’”
The laughter is back in 860, Crystal’s warm and bittersweet new monologue, and so is the blueness in its background. This time, his inspiration isn’t an empty but still-standing residence; it’s a full one that has vanished. In 1979, Crystal and his wife, Janice, bought a three-bedroom stucco ranch house at 860 Chautauqua Blvd. in the Pacific Palisades, propped above a canyon by stilts. It’s where they raised their two daughters, and where Crystal kept a trove of irreplaceable memorabilia: photographs, autographs, a seat from Yankee stadium that Mickey Mantle sent him. And when a wildfire swept through the Palisades in early 2025, it all returned to ashes and dust.
Those flames cast a retrospective light on Billy and Janice’s love affair with their domicile, with which they have shared what might be called a long-term domestic partnership. In romcom fashion, it begins with love at first sight, and soon they are meeting the family: the twin daughters of its first inhabitants, a pair of vaudeville mentalists named Harry and Frances Usher. “Daddy originally called our home the House of Usher,” they reveal, introducing an ominous note, but the discovery of a particular old newspaper in a hidden room seems like a sign that this place is the Crystals’ bashert. In time, like any loved one, their house becomes a repository of memories.
“Damn, I miss all my stuff,” Crystal admits. “Every time I'd look at something, or hold it, I could remember every detail and I'd be there again.” The loss is not just material; this is such stuff as dreams are made on, as the lack of it registers like a wake-up call to a man who’s almost 80 years old and starting to feel it. He can joke about that: “Things have started to grow on me,” he kvetches. “Skin tags and things. My ass looks like the bottom of a boat.” But an awareness of death colors his reflections on his life and career, and much of the show is a kind of a living memorial not just to 860 Chautauqua—as reconstructed in video by Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera on the entire back wall of Scott Pask’s set—but to the people whose reminders it contained. Prominent among these are three dear friends of Crystal’s who have died since 700 Sundays’s encore run in 2013: Muhammad Ali, Robin Williams and Rob Reiner.
It would be easy for such a show to devolve into an ego trip down memory lane, but Crystal’s generosity helps him avoid that trap. He is a model mensch, kind in his outlook and quick to share credit with others—such as Buddy Morra and Larry Brezner, his early managers, or Bruce Vilanch and Marc Shaman, who helped craft his signature opening numbers when he hosted the Oscars. (Shaiman also provides adept musical scoring for 860.) Under Scott Ellis’s able direction, Crystal is self-effacing without seeming phony, and emotional without getting sappy; he’s so comfortable onstage that he slips the pain in easily, like a practiced nurse administering a shot.
Although the show has its fair share of shadows—dark Crystal, if you like—it is brightened by a torch that Crystal carries high: his abiding love for Janice, his wife of 56 years. And of course, above all, it is funny. Heir to the Borscht belt tradition he dramatized in Mr. Saturday Night, Crystal is a master of polished shtick who is also uncommonly connected to his audience; he makes the 1,450-seat Imperial Theatre, which normally hosts huge productions like Les Misérables and Chess, feel cozy. (700 Sundays and 860 are the only non-musicals to play there since the Seventies.) When he’s up there getting laughs, he seems completely at home, and—the consummate host, as ever—he invites us all in.
860. Imperial Theatre (Broadway). By Billy Crystal. Directed by Scott Ellis. With Crystal. Running time: 1hr 35mins. No intermission.
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