Theatre in Review: 860 (Imperial Theatre)

	Billy Crystal. Photo: Avery Brunkus

For Billy Crystal, comedy and tragedy are two sides of a single mask, so it's no surprise his shows freely combine both elements. His first Broadway outing, 700 Sundays, was filled with warm, funny stories about his Long Island boyhood, an Edenic existence shattered by his father's untimely death. Similarly, his latest solo show, 860, is an often-luminous account of marriage, family, and friendship, much of it played out at his longtime address (see the title) in Pacific Palisades, California. The laughs keep coming in 860, but they are suffused with sadness, and for good reason: Many of those friends are now gone, and the house, with its lifetime of beautiful memories, was incinerated in the 2025 Southern California wildfires.

The stage equivalent of a celebrity memoir, 860 tracks Crystal's early marriage (his wife, Janice, is the show's lead producer) and lightly trips through his career highlights: his groundbreaking role on the TV series Soap, his year on Saturday Night Live, the hit films, his reign as Oscar host, and more. Several sequences are devoted to his friends Muhammad Ali, Robin Williams, and Rob Reiner. But, of course, Ali, Williams, and Reiner are no longer with us. Indeed, Crystal can only allude to Reiner's murder, a tragedy that, he recently publicly admitted, has undermined his faith in God.

Of course, Crystal is at his best when going for the jugular with scalpel-sharp one-liners. Regarding his gay character on Soap, he notes that the 1970s were a difficult era for homosexuals, adding, with ruthless timing, "not like the cakewalk it is now." Regarding his one-time experience with mescaline, he recalls, "Then I started doing the Hora with my dead relatives." He also offers priceless imitations of Martin Scorsese (his cinema studies professor at NYU!) and Yul Brynner, among others. An epic anecdote about opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears, on a night when lead singer David Clayton-Thomas is in mid-meltdown, is worth the price of admission. So is an unrepeatable anecdote about viewing Ronald Reagan's funeral with Williams, which triggers one of the evening's biggest laughs, no minor achievement in these circumstances.

In some ways, 860 is a modern retelling of the story of Job: We see Crystal's family grow as his daughters marry and have children of their own. His successes multiply, and he becomes a national treasure. Good fortune rains down on him like manna from heaven. But he learns in the cruelest way that it can all vanish in a second. Even so, even the most devastating disaster can yield a bit of comedy gold: After the fire, visiting a clothing store, he dazedly tells a clerk he needs an entirely new wardrobe. "I understand," the man replies, adding, "Ozempic?"

Presenting a solo show in the vast Imperial Theatre takes a certain amount of daring plus some fine designers. Scott Pask's set, depicting Crystal's memorabilia-packed Pacific Palisades office, is a richly atmospheric creation; when it disappears, we understand on a gut level what Crystal and his loved ones have lost. The video design by Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera is a panorama of entertainment history packed with film and TV clips guaranteed to evoke waves of nostalgia in audiences who remember when; it contrasts starkly with documentary footage detailing the fire. Jen Schriever's lighting is typically professional, unobtrusively keeping the star in the spotlight. The only drawback is the near-constant underscoring by Marc Shaiman, which sound designer Dan Moses Schreier runs at distractingly loud levels. The script is sufficiently powerful that it doesn't need this sort of audio treacle, which sometimes undermines Crystal's peerless delivery.

Still, the director, Scott Ellis, harnesses Crystal's unstoppable energy -- he is an impossibly lively seventy-eight -- and if the show's elements sometimes sit uneasily next to each other, it's all part of the argument that laughter is the last best defense against the gut punches that life occasionally throws. "Health is laughter," says one of the characters in The Imaginary Invalid, playing just up the street, a sentiment Crystal surely understands. If he can crack jokes while picking through the wreckage of the home that sustained him for nearly half a century, there's hope for us all. --David Barbour