Billy Crystal’s 860…The Man has soul.

After watching the morally bankrupt spectacle of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their cadre of mostly old white men on television, an evening with Billy Crystal feels almost medicinal.

Here is a man whose business is making people laugh, who manages to remind us what it looks like to care.

The man has soul.

His new Broadway show, 860, takes its name from the address of the Pacific Palisades home he and his wife, Janice, lost in the January 2025 fire.

Directed by Scott Ellis, it builds an evening of storytelling around the life that filled that house and the terrible business of leaving it behind.

For me, this one hit particularly close to home. We lived in the Palisades for more than a decade. Those streets belong to our history. Watching that community burn meant recognizing, beneath the aerial footage and breaking-news banners, a place where we had lived a lovely portion of our lives.

Crystal begins with the approaching fire and the urgency of evacuation. What do you take? What do you leave? How do you make decisions about a lifetime when there is suddenly no time? The production recreates his home office, giving his memories somewhere to live even as we know what happened to the original.

From there, the evening moves through family, friendship, improbable encounters, and a career that has supplied an extraordinary amount of our collective pleasure.

And a fair amount of my own history.

Rick Newman, of Catch a Rising Star, where we discovered Pat Benatar and had a long association as Rick managed her career. Dick Schaap, the sportswriter for whom I edited books, Roone Arledge, my first ever boss. Names connected to Crystal’s journey that also connect to chapters of my life. You go to the theater to hear somebody else’s stories and discover that your own memories have apparently bought a ticket.

There is plenty of famous company storytelling, but the friendships give it substance. Rob Reiner. Robin Williams. Men whose work made millions of people laugh, remembered here through the affection of someone who knew them beyond the credits. Crystal’s recollections bring both their humor and their absence into the room.

That is the peculiar ache of getting older. You can still hear someone’s voice so clearly. You remember the timing, the expression, the thing that would have made them laugh. Then you remember you cannot call them.

The When Harry Met Sally memories carry their own emotional freight. That film has become part of the furniture of our lives, familiar, endlessly quotable, still capable of making us laugh even when we know exactly what is coming. Hearing Crystal revisit that period and his connection with Reiner adds another layer to something we already love.

Then there is Muhammad Ali, who called Crystal his “little brother.” The pleasure of that relationship lies in the sheer improbability of it, and in the tenderness underneath the comedy. The young comic and the heavyweight champion became friends. Decades later, the affection remains palpable in the telling.

These are the stories that make the evening feel bigger than a celebrity memoir. Crystal understands that a good anecdote needs more than a recognizable name. It needs a human being inside it.

Crystal knows how to tell a story. He gives it room, finds the ridiculous detail, lands the laugh. Then the emotional meaning catches up with you.

For all the extraordinary names, the deepest attachment is to the life he and Janice built together. The house held a marriage, children, grandchildren, and decades of ordinary days. The sort you rarely think to treasure while they are happening.

There is no neat consolation for losing that. Memories matter, but you still want the photographs. You still want the rooms. You still want to open your own front door.

What 860 offers is companionship in that knowledge, and enough laughter to make it bearable.

Which brings me back to the television.

I am exhausted by the cruelty. The sneering. The public performance of men who seem to regard empathy as a character defect. After so much airtime given to people congratulating themselves on their own hardness, there is enormous relief in spending an evening with someone capable of tenderness.

Billy Crystal’s humanity warms the soul and made me laugh and cry.

He lost his home. Somehow, for an evening, he makes room for all of us.

Billy Crystal 860 Imperial Theatre 249 West 45th Street New York City. Running time 100 minutes. 860 presently runs through January 3rd, 2027.