Review: 860, Billy Crystal's Grief-Stricken Broadway Tribute to His Family Home

When you reach a certain age, the goodbyes start to outnumber the hellos. That’s the tragedy of long life: the older you get, the more you face the loss of the people and things you love. It’s shattering when you see it coming, and even worse when you don’t.

Billy Crystal’s new solo play, 860, at the Imperial Theatre, is bookended by two of the unthinkable and unexpected tragedies the Crystal family endured in 2025. It begins on January 7, when Billy and his wife, Janice, evacuate their home (860 Chautauqua Blvd.) in the Pacific Palisades, which is shortly thereafter reduced to ash amid the Southern California wildfires. It ends on December 14, with the double homicide of their best friends, Rob and Michele Reiner.

The Crystal we meet in 860, standing inside a physical and virtual facsimile of his home office (created by set designer Scott Pask and video designers Hana S. Kim and Kylee Lora), is a more grandfatherly version of the whirlwind of energy we encountered two decades ago in 700 Sundays. His hair might be white, but his sculpting of a moment is still unparallelled: this is both the funniest and saddest show on Broadway right now, and with good reason.

860 was obviously written quickly (we’re not even a year removed from the Reiner murders), and therefore it’s more reactive and less dramatically rigorous than 700 Sundays, which benefited from several decades of self-examination (it was about 15-year-old Crystal losing his father). Here, we’re a fly on the wall as Crystal processes his grief in real time, using his well-honed tool of humor to keep himself from despair. This play has the biggest heart, and that heart is clearly broken.

In a way, 860 is a public eulogy of times gone by. Crystal recalls opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears while still working as a substitute teacher in Long Beach, New York. He becomes close friends with his youthful icons Muhammad Ali and Mickey Mantle and explores his relationships with figures like Robin Williams, who Crystal is convinced visited him as a bird after his death in 2014, and Norman Lear, who gave him a gift of an early-career role on All in the Family. That led to an even greater present, his decades-long friendship with Reiner.

Crystal’s memories—hilarious and wrenching—are rooted in experiences that a lot of his audience grew up with, too. His getting stoned in terror while watching the Vietnam draft lottery resonates because so many people in the crowd probably had the same fear of having their number called (the ensuing Trump joke is a winner). Crystal’s spot-on description of Williams’s particular brand of improvisational genius—”If Whoopi or I said something that registered in his amazing brain, I’d see a spark in his eye and I knew to hold on for the ride”—conjures a performer we can all picture manically zipping across the stage.

Williams, Lear, Ali—they’re historical figures now, whom the next generation will learn about rather than remember. In its most poignant and well-crafted moments, 860 goes beyond the loss of a house, depicting the end of a shared cultural history and the anguish of realizing that the world we knew is almost all gone. There are belly laughs and celebrity impressions aplenty, but a profound melancholy swims beneath the surface like the Crystal family’s goldfish in their pond. Crystal’s longtime friend Marc Shaiman underscores each scene with fitting orchestral swells, jaunty for some, despondent for others.

Director Scott Ellis gives Crystal plenty of room to do what he does best, and together they know exactly how to let the laughter subside long enough for the poignancy and visceral discomfort to land during the fire sequences. Red, orange, and yellow flames flicker and dance through the windows of Crystal’s office (Jen Schriever did the expressive lighting), while the crackling of embers fill the speakers (Dan Moses Schreier’s sound is especially effective). Kim and Lora’s video design is vital, utilizing a massive upstage LED screen to present the Crystal family’s firsthand footage and images of the fire and its destruction. The immediacy makes us feel like we’re there—and even gladder that we’re not.

It’s a powerful thing to witness someone who’s lost so much in such a short time still manage to hold their head high because they realize how much still remains. With a loving family and a healthy dose of humor, you can get through the worst, Crystal seems to be saying with extraordinary grace. We should all be aware enough in our own worst moments to take that to heart.