Billy Crystal’s ‘860’ Turns a Lost Home Into a Warm Solo Show

When Billy Crystal brought his 2004 solo show 700 Sundays to Broadway, he explained that it grew out of grief: a tough year, an empty childhood home on Long Island, and a longing to hear certain laughs again. His new one-man piece, 860, now at the Imperial Theatre, comes from a similar place, according to Time Out New York’s four-star review by critic Adam Feldman. This time the house in question isn’t standing at all.

The title is the address of a three-bedroom stucco ranch house on Chautauqua Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades, perched above a canyon on stilts. Crystal and his wife, Janice, bought it in 1979 and raised their two daughters there. It was also where he kept irreplaceable keepsakes, including photographs, autographs and a Yankee Stadium seat sent to him by Mickey Mantle. A wildfire that swept through the Palisades in early 2025 reduced all of it to ash, as Feldman recounts.

The show, as Feldman describes it, unfolds like a long-running romance. The Crystals fall for the house at first sight, then meet its past: the twin daughters of its first occupants, a pair of vaudeville mentalists named Harry and Frances Usher. A discovery in a hidden room feels to the couple like a sign that the place was meant to be theirs. Over the years, the house becomes a repository of memory. “Damn, I miss all my stuff,” Crystal says in the show, per the review.

The loss registers as something larger for a performer who is nearly 80. Feldman writes that an awareness of mortality colors the evening, which doubles as a living memorial to the people those objects recalled. Chief among them are three friends who have died since the 2013 encore run of 700 Sundays: Muhammad Ali, Robin Williams and Rob Reiner. Crystal can still joke about aging, as in a line about his skin that the review quotes, but the shadows are real.

Feldman credits Crystal with avoiding the trap of an ego trip down memory lane. He describes the performer as a model mensch who is quick to share credit with others, among them early managers Buddy Morra and Larry Brezner, and Bruce Vilanch and Marc Shaiman, who helped shape his signature Oscar-hosting openers. Shaiman also provides the show’s musical scoring. Under Scott Ellis’s direction, the review says, Crystal is self-effacing without seeming phony and emotional without turning sappy, slipping the pain in the way a practiced nurse administers a shot.

The production values lean on the missing house itself. Scott Pask’s set uses video by Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera across the entire back wall to reconstruct 860 Chautauqua. Above the grief, Feldman writes, burns Crystal’s love for Janice, his wife of 56 years, and the evening is, above all, funny. He places Crystal in the Borscht belt tradition the performer dramatized in Mr. Saturday Night, a polished practitioner of shtick who stays closely tuned to his audience.

That connection matters at the Imperial, a 1,450-seat house that usually hosts large-scale productions such as Les Misérables and Chess. According to Feldman, 700 Sundays and 860 are the only non-musicals to play there since the Seventies, and Crystal still makes the room feel cozy. The running time is 1 hour 35 minutes with no intermission. Feldman’s verdict: at home onstage, and ever the consummate host, Crystal invites the audience in.