Tracee Ellis Ross Makes Her Broadway Debut in ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ Her limited engagement runs through Aug. 9.

Tracee Ellis Ross in Every Brilliant Thing

 

First Look: Tracee Ellis Ross Makes Her Broadway Debut in ‘Every Brilliant Thing’

Her limited engagement runs through Aug. 9.

The “Black-ish” star takes over the intimate solo play for its final five weeks at the Hudson Theatre, bringing her own memories, comic instincts and sense of joy to a role previously performed by Daniel Radcliffe and Mariska Hargitay.

The first production images of Tracee Ellis Ross in Every Brilliant Thing capture an actress alone on a Broadway stage, though solitude is something of an illusion in this particular play.

Ross, the Golden Globe-winning star of Black-ish and Girlfriends, began performances July 7 at the Hudson Theatre, making her Broadway debut during the final stretch of the Tony-nominated production. Her limited engagement runs through Aug. 9.

Written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, Every Brilliant Thing begins with a child confronting a parent’s depression and attempted suicide. Hoping to prove that life remains worth living, the child starts a list of its pleasures: ice cream, staying up past bedtime, people falling over and other seemingly minor delights. The list grows as the narrator does, eventually becoming an account of love, grief, survival and the imperfect ways people try to rescue one another.

The production calls itself a solo show, but the term does not quite describe what happens inside the theater. Audience members are given scraps of paper bearing entries from the list and are asked to read them aloud. Others may be recruited to play a teacher, a parent, a veterinarian or a romantic partner. The performer carries the narrative, but the room helps build the life around it.

That structure makes each new actor more than a conventional replacement. Certain references, memories and comic details are adjusted to suit the person telling the story, allowing the text to change without surrendering its central architecture.

For Ross, Radcliffe’s cape could become a tutu; other childhood pleasures and cultural references have also been altered to feel like things her version of the narrator might genuinely treasure. Ross said she deliberately avoided watching Radcliffe and Hargitay perform the role, hoping to discover her own relationship to the material rather than inherit someone else’s.

The decision makes sense for an actress whose comedy has often depended on the precision of personal detail. As Rainbow Johnson on Black-ish, Ross could turn posture, fashion, exasperation and an impeccably timed pause into parts of the same joke. Every Brilliant Thing asks for that lightness, but it also requires the performer to move repeatedly toward emotional territory that cannot be charmed away.

The play’s achievement is its refusal to confuse cheerfulness with denial. The list is funny because many of its entries are ordinary and oddly specific, but it emerges from a child’s desperate attempt to keep a parent alive. Joy is presented neither as a cure nor as a command to think positively. It is closer to a practice of attention—a way of noticing what remains when suffering has narrowed the field of vision.

Ross has said that working on the play has changed what she notices in her own life, including the click of a curling iron and the taste of olives. “It changes the way you see the world,” she told The Associated Press.

Her arrival also completes an unusual Broadway relay. Daniel Radcliffe originated the role in this production when previews began in February, earning a Tony nomination for his performance. Mariska Hargitay succeeded him in late May and completed her engagement July 5. Ross entered two days later for the production’s final five weeks. The revival was also nominated for the 2026 Tony Award for best revival of a play.

The rotating cast underscores one of the play’s most durable ideas: The list belongs to whoever is speaking, but the need behind it is widely shared. Since its early development in Britain, Every Brilliant Thing has been staged around the world, often in dramatically different spaces and with performers who reshape its humor and references around their own lives. A West End production preceded the current Broadway transfer.

Jeremy Herrin directs the Broadway production, which retains the visual economy of a work built around language, proximity and participation rather than elaborate scenery. The actor must establish trust quickly, often while moving through the audience before the formal action has begun. Ross has said she looks for kindness when selecting volunteers—and sometimes a little reluctance, which can make an audience member’s eventual participation feel less rehearsed and more human.

That element of unpredictability may be the most consequential difference between Ross’s television work and her Broadway debut. A filmed performance can be adjusted, framed and preserved. In Every Brilliant Thing, the emotional temperature of the evening depends partly on strangers: whether they speak loudly enough, whether they hesitate, whether a joke lands and whether the room is prepared to hold the heavier truths beneath it.

The production has partnered with Project Healthy Minds to connect audiences with information about therapists, psychiatrists, support groups, crisis services and other mental-health resources. The partnership extends the play’s central concern beyond the stage without pretending that theater can substitute for treatment.

Ross enters the production at a moment when the first-time excitement of a Broadway debut is inseparable from the pressure of closing a successful run. There will be no long settling-in period. Her engagement consists of 40 performances, each requiring her to guide a new collection of people through the same story while leaving room for the evening to become something unrepeatable.

That may be why Every Brilliant Thing is particularly suited to a performer associated with exuberance. The play needs someone capable of making delight contagious without making despair decorative. Its optimism works because it has examined the alternative.

Ross is not stepping onto the Hudson stage merely to recite a list of wonderful things. She is asking a room full of strangers to help her remember them.

Every Brilliant Thing continues at the Hudson Theatre through Aug. 9.