Billy Crystal review: Comedian’s ‘860’ turns loss into living memory
NEW YORK — “860,” the title of Billy Crystal’s tremendously moving new Broadway show at the Imperial Theatre, refers to the address of his house in the Pacific Palisades that was destroyed in last year’s fire.
Crystal re-creates the events of Jan. 7, 2025, as the wildfire that began in the Santa Monica Mountains started making its way down toward his home at 860 Chautauqua Blvd. Video clips of the escalating emergency are shown as a cardigan-clad Crystal, standing in a facsimile of his home office (the conjuring work of scenic designer Scott Pask), re-creates the horror of having to decide what to take with him as the evacuation orders come in.
The photos, awards and other memorabilia aren’t just souvenirs of his storied career. They are pieces of the life he built with his wife, Janice, and their two daughters as well as a record of the friendships that made Hollywood feel like a welcoming community for a wide-eyed Long Island kid.
“860,” impeccably directed by Scott Ellis, occurs in a series of flashbacks. Crystal brings us back to what it was like as he and his wife made their way across a jam-packed Sunset Boulevard in separate cars to the safety of their daughter’s house as smoke and flying embers turned their small-town paradise overlooking the Pacific Ocean into an apocalyptic war zone.
A baseball superfan, Crystal gives us the play-by-play as though he were calling a World Series game that had taken an unimaginable turn. Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera’s video design turns us into eyewitnesses of that terrible day.
I was in Los Angeles when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, but I was far enough away not to feel the immediacy of the threat. Crystal had me in full fight-or-flight mode, as if I were in the car behind him going 5 mph along the only route out of danger.
Billy Crystal in “860” at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway.
(Avery Brunkus)
Making a show about a recent public trauma isn’t easy to pull off, but Crystal has managed it as perhaps only he could. “860” is a meditation on loss, but it’s also a theatrical memoir of his multifarious career as a comic, actor, filmmaker and celebrated Oscar host. He returns to his days on “Soap,” the controversial nighttime parody of a daytime soap opera created by Susan Harris that featured Crystal in the role of Jodie Dallas, one of TV’s first openly gay characters.
Crystal was living in an apartment in then-smog-filled Hancock Park with his wife and daughters when he was filming the show’s third season. The couple wanted to move to an area that had better air quality for their children, and someone asked if he knew about the Pacific Palisades.
“It was a small town, good schools, beautiful afternoon breezes from the nearby ocean, one main street with some shops, a deli named Mort’s that had lean corned beef and a lot of people who didn’t put mayonnaise on pastrami,” Crystal recounts.
The house they came to see wasn’t for them, but a for-sale sign at 860 Chautauqua caught their eye. The real estate agent told them that the owners “were very motivated to sell because they were very motivated not to be together anymore.”
It was December 1979 when, with a 30-year mortgage in hand, they moved into the house. Two women who grew up at 860 (“Imagine the twins from ‘The Shining’ — but they’re 55”) paid a welcome call to say how pleased they were that their former home was back in the hands of show people.
The original owners were vaudevillians who had a mind-reading act and were passionately into the occult. They socialized with the comic luminaries of their day, including humorist Will Rogers, who would regularly stop by on his horse. Behind a secret wall, Crystal found a hidden room with a cork board that had clippings that suggested maybe it wasn’t such an accident that the house became his.
Crystal, the emcee of all emcees (as his performance at this year’s Hollywood Bowl Opening Night once again proved), tells the story of his home with buoyant humor and charm, turning loss into living memory. To set up the meaning of what was destroyed, he takes us back to his roots, starting with his graduation in 1970 from NYU, where he took a film production class with a young Martin Scorsese, who would critique his work in a manner that Crystal, the Al Hirschfeld of celebrity impersonators, hilariously captures.
Crystal’s comic timing was honed in the clubs doing stand-up. Jack Rollins, the producing titan who managed Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Woody Allen, imparted some wisdom after watching Crystal’s act. Crystal thought he killed it that night, but Rollins told him that he failed to “leave a tip,” meaning reveal something about himself in his jokes.
Opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears in Scranton, Pa., a huge opportunity, Crystal faced a hostile audience. But he won the crowd over and thought maybe he could really make this stand-up comedy thing work. But then he was sent back out onstage after lead singer David Clayton-Thomas decided he didn’t want to perform and had to win the jeering music fans over again — and then a third time. While driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike to his wife and baby that night, he felt his future in front of him, having found not only his calling but also his voice.
Crystal’s luckiest break may have been in not being drafted during the Vietnam War, but a close second was being invited to do his Howard Cosell-Muhammad Ali routine at a televised gala for the boxing legend. Crystal not only crushed it but he made a lifelong friend in Ali, who was already his personal hero.
Bonds forged in comedy, like the one he had with Robin Williams, deepened into a lasting brotherhood. Norman Lear cast Crystal as Rob Reiner’s best friend on “All in the Family,” and life imitated art. Their successful collaborations — crystallized in the fake orgasm scene at Katz’s Delicatessen in “When Harry Met Sally” — were an outgrowth of their telepathic comic rapport.
In reviewing his famous life, Crystal reanimates parts of our own. And it’s this shared history that helps us understand what he lost when his house went up in flames. The magnitude of the devastation is made personal for all of us.
But just when you think things can’t get any worse, something completely unthinkable happens. For Crystal, this occurred at the end of 2025, his annus horribilis, when Reiner and wife Michelle were found stabbed to death at their Brentwood home.
Some things are too painful for words, and Crystal knows that sense cannot be made from senselessness. But he’s already told us so much about this unique friendship that nothing more needs to be said.
Crystal doesn’t wallow in grief or self-pity. He bears the weight of his losses with his wit and generous spirit to help us carry the weight of our own. (When he walked into a store to buy a new wardrobe after the fire, he reports, the salesclerk looked at him and said, “Let me guess … Ozempic?”)
No one gets out of this world without becoming a master of the art of losing, to invoke the poet Elizabeth Bishop. But laughter can sustain us through our losses, and Crystal thinks it’s no accident that one of the few things that was salvaged from the ashes of his home was a stone from his garden with the word “laughter” engraved on it.
I found Crystal’s previous solo show “700 Sundays” to be a touch mawkish, so I wasn’t expecting to be so powerfully moved by “860.” But this is just a brilliantly conceived and executed piece, and I hope it yields Crystal another Tony Award.
But even more, I hope the production finds its way home to where it belongs, Los Angeles. We could really use the fortifying laughter.
