Billy Crystal’s latest one-man Broadway show, 860, is not at all what I expected. Advertised as being about the destruction of his family’s home in the Palisades fire in January 2025, I found that to be only a minor character, so to speak. For me it was a show about a man who has lived an extraordinary life filled with career success after success and who values deep personal relationships above all. And who is a hilarious storyteller. I walked out of the Imperial Theatre with a feeling of warmth and respect for the depth of this man who presents a story not primarily of loss but of appreciation and recognition of what he has.
He does not gloss over the loss of his home of 46 years but he presents it with stories of gratitude for the career milestones that allowed him and his wife, Janice, to buy it and the good times they shared with there with their two daughters, Jenny and Lindsay. He gracefully handles the even bigger loss that year of his close friend Rob Reiner who was stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home along with his wife, Michele Singer, on Dec. 14. Those are part of the story, but they are not the whole story.
Director Scott Ellis oversees a perfect evening of theatre, helped greatly of course by Crystal’s gifts for performance and writing. The star could easily have carried the show with his storytelling – and the fascinating and funny stories he has to tell – but Ellis adds the video designs of Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera that give the show greater theatricality without taking away from the center on Crystal. The most dramatic use of video shows Crystal returning to the spot where his home once stood, only to find a vacant lot filled with ash. As he slowly moves through the space alone, the set of his office has disappeared and we are with him in that devastating experience. It’s powerful. The title of the play comes from the street address that house once held.
Billy and Janice were awaken on Jan. 7, 2025 by sirens and helicopters and the news of a brush fire in the Highlands, a community about three miles from them. They packed some photo albums and other family pictures but were undecided about leaving until their daughters kept calling, telling them to get out.
Crystal freezes when he heads into his office. Scenic designer Scott Pask has it covered, floor to ceiling, with framed photos of the comedian’s celebrity career. “My office was my life,” Crystal tells us. “It had everything in it,” his scripts, books, memorabilia. “I didn’t know what to do, what to take.”
Thinking they’d be back in a day or two, he left it all. They got in their cars, Janice following him, and joined the bumper-to-bumper evacuees on Sunset Boulevard, the only way out. “Seeing the sky grow darker and the ominous approaching smoke get closer in the rear-view mirror was terrifying.” They were going only five miles an hour.
We see this in videos. The trauma is enhanced by Jen Schriever’s lighting and original music and adaptations by Tony, Grammy and Emmy winning composer Marc Shaiman, who is a close friend of Crystal, and sound design by Dan Moses Schreier With fire trucks, police cars and ambulances roaring past, Janice called. “Oh, Bill. Look at the house.”
What he saw was their house on top of the hill, where it had sat since 1932, with the swirling smoky sky giving it an eerie glow. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it, my mind racing through all the years we’d lived there, right from the moment that the house became ours.”
It’s a chilling segway into the story that is Crystal’s life.
The house became a reality after they had lived in L.A. for a few years. Crystal was in his third season on the TV series “SOAP” and had saved money from performing in clubs and concerts. He decided they could afford a house and found the one they considered perfect for them at 860 Chautauqua Boulevard, an aging three-bedroom ranch house in “a sweet neighborhood” of bungalows and craftsman houses that felt familiar even though he had never been there. They moved in in December 1979; he was 31, Janice 30, Jenny about to turn 6 and Lindsay 2 ½. (They got married when he was 22 and she 21.)
His career break had come five years before and the scene in which he presents it is one of the funniest. He had been polishing his act at Catch a Rising Star, a comedy club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where would-be comics could perform, without pay. He was coming up with new material and feeling strong when his manager arranged for Jack Rollins to come see him. Rollins managed stars like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Dick Cavett and Woody Allen.
After the show Rollins took Crystal to a restaurant and gave him career-changing advice, that he was good but had failed because “you didn’t leave a tip,” something extra on the table to remember him by. He hadn’t said “I think” or “I feel.” “You weren’t in your own act.”
The good comics always used something personal, Rollins said, suggesting he talk about being a father to set him apart from the others, who had no children. “Lad, you’re working too safe.”
Crystal tried a set about being in the delivery room when his daughter was born. It worked.
“I started to craft stories instead of just jokes.”
With Crystal’s act getting better and better, Rollins invited a concert producer to see him and he was offered his first paying job, $150, opening for one of the hottest bands in the country, Blood, Sweat & Tears, in Scranton, PA. Crystal drove the four hours from Long Beach on Long Island to appear before 2,000 people. He was used to 150 max at Catch.
When the announcer told the crowd to welcome a funny young man, Bobby Crystal, the audience was NOT happy. “They had no idea there was an opening act. They had timed their drugs for Blood, Sweat & Tears.”
After a “cautious smattering of applause and a bit of boos,” his act worked and he left the stage confident that he could make a career of this. He had planned to watch a little of the concert from the wings and then drive home.
The curtain opened and the crowd went nuts. David Clayton Thomas, the lead singer, went up to the microphone, the drummer count them in and they started playing “Spinning Wheel,” one of the bands biggest hits. Thomas began to sing, “What goes up, must” and then screamed, “I CAN’T DO THIS! This place is the shits. Fuck you,” before slamming the mic to the floor and storming off.
With the crowd booing, the promoter went to Crystal and told him he had to go back out there.
“What? They’re mad, they’ll kill me! I can’t, I did my whole act. There is no more.”
The promoter told him to just do 10 minutes while he talked to Thomas. Crystal walked out. “Hello, this is weird. I feel like I’ve been here before. Let’s call it Deja JEW!” and started improvising. “So, where are you from? Scranton? You flew in for this, huh?” He kept it going.
“I was getting big laughs without doing any material, just talking off the top of my head. It was really fun.”
After 10 minutes the promoter signaled from the wings for him to cut it but he shook his head NO and kept going until the drummer told him. “Get the fuck off.”
Crystal said his good night to the audience, the curtain opened for the band, Thomas went up to the microphone, the drummer counted them down and the band started playing “Spinning Wheel.” Thomas got out one more word this time, “What goes up, must come” before shouting. “Ah, bullshit. EAT ME, SCRANTON” and stormed off.
The promoter persuaded Crystal to go back out. By then the crowd was chanting his name: “BOBBY, BOBBY.” He did a brief gag and then ran off the stage when the band got back and sprinted toward his car. The promoter came running after him, told him he was great and offered him an additional $50 and a gig opening in the next month for Billy Joel in New Jersey.
“Name on the marquee?” Crystal asked. “You got it.”
So he earned $200 and the chance to open for another Long Island kid. He found a phone booth, called Janice collect and told her it was great, that he’d wake her when he got home, told her to kiss Jenny for him and drove off.
“I was literally on the road with everything in front of me. Those days were the most romantic in my life. Daddy’s home.”
And then there were his outside relationships, quite unlikely in one case, with one of his heroes.
“With Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King gone it was Mohammad Ali who spoke to my generation. He gave up his career at the height of his talents to oppose the Vietnam war. I had no idea our paths would cross someday.”
When Sport Magazine named Ali Man of the Year and he was to be honored, along with other great athletes in their field, at a gala at the Plaza Hotel the editor called Crystal’s agent to ask if Robert Klein, who did a lot of sports material, would do five minutes. She said he was out of town but she had a new comedian who did a great impersonation skit of Ali and sportscaster Howard Cosell. That was fine, the editor said.
Crystal was amazed to be on the dais with Ali who seemed to have a glow about him as he talked and joked with the other famous athletes until “he got to me . . . confusion. I think he’s thinking, ‘What is Joel Grey doing here?’”
He did his imitation and finished to a big ovation. Ali hugged him, lifted him up and whispered in his ear, “You are now my little brother, ‘which is what he called me for 42 years.’”
And when he died, at Ali’s request, Crystal was asked to be one of the eulogists, “an honor of a lifetime. He was there for my start and I was there for his finish.
“As I was waiting to go on all I kept thinking was ‘what if Robert Klein hadn’t been out of town?’ Luck? Fate? You tell me?”
Then the friendship that ended in unfathomable tragedy. Crystal was cast as Rob Reiner’s best friend on “All in the Family” after producer Norman Lear saw him perform at the Comedy Store and decided the two would be great together.
“It went so well we decided just to stay best friends. And we did, as loving and close as one could possibly be.”
He talked about the movies they made together and the tribute Reiner gave him when Crystal was a Kennedy Center honoree several tears ago.
“I was sitting in the Presidential box watching him on stage. He looked up and got a little choked up and said: ‘Bill, you changed my life.’ And I thought, ‘You got it wrong, Buddy. You sure changed mine.’”
Crystal then brings 860 back to where it began. He reminisces, with projections of photos, about the family’s years in their house and the experience of going back four days after the fire to the place where it had been. It seemed everything was gone until Lindsay cried out in delight and brought her father a large rock. It was one of four engraved, each with one word, that he had bought for the gardens. WELCOME, DREAM and PATIENCE were gone. The one Lindsay tearfully held out was LAUGHTER.
“Oh, my God. It was how I survived the first loss in my life when my dad died. Making the family laugh to ease their pain and keep mine at bay. From that moment on, I had spent my entire life in pursuit of that precious sound, and that this little rock with that word engraved on it was the first thing that was salvaged was . . . perfect. I wrapped my arms around it and held onto it like it was a gift from God.”
His reference to the unimaginable, the loss of Reiner, is brief and without his name. No words could enhance the feelings expressed through the stories shared of their friendship. “It’s so hard losing friends. Because friends you choose. And they choose you back.”
He recalls Ali telling him that when he got knocked down he got up and he kept fighting.
“And that’s what’re doing. It’s been a struggle, but we have moved forward inch by inch, with love for each other, our family and friends, and the kindness of strangers. This is when you realize, maybe, you left a tip.”
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