![\"Billy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792637649_985_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nNEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\u201c860,\u201d the title of Billy Crystal\u2019s tremendously moving new Broadway show at the Imperial Theatre, refers to the address of his house in the Pacific Palisades that was destroyed in last year\u2019s fire.<\/p>\n
Crystal re-creates the events of Jan. 7, 2025, as the wildfire that began in the Santa Monica Mountains started making its way down toward his home at 860 Chautauqua Blvd. Video clips of the escalating emergency are shown as a cardigan-clad Crystal, standing in a facsimile of his home office (the conjuring work of scenic designer Scott Pask), re-creates the horror of having to decide what to take with him as the evacuation orders come in.<\/p>\n
The photos, awards and other memorabilia aren\u2019t just souvenirs of his storied career. They are pieces of the life he built with his wife, Janice, and their two daughters as well as a record of the friendships that made Hollywood feel like a welcoming community for a wide-eyed Long Island kid. <\/p>\n
\u201c860,\u201d impeccably directed by Scott Ellis, occurs in a series of flashbacks. Crystal brings us back to what it was like as he and his wife made their way across a jam-packed Sunset Boulevard in separate cars to the safety of their daughter\u2019s house as smoke and flying embers turned their small-town paradise overlooking the Pacific Ocean into an apocalyptic war zone.<\/p>\n
A baseball superfan, Crystal gives us the play-by-play as though he were calling a World Series game that had taken an unimaginable turn. Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera\u2019s video design turns us into eyewitnesses of that terrible day.<\/p>\n
I was in Los Angeles when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, but I was far enough away not to feel the immediacy of the threat. Crystal had me in full fight-or-flight mode, as if I were in the car behind him going 5 mph along the only route out of danger.<\/p>\n
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Billy Crystal in \u201c860\u201d at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway.<\/p>\n
(Avery Brunkus)<\/p>\n
Making a show about a recent public trauma isn\u2019t easy to pull off, but Crystal has managed it as perhaps only he could. \u201c860\u201d is a meditation on loss, but it\u2019s also a theatrical memoir of his multifarious career as a comic, actor, filmmaker and celebrated Oscar host. He returns to his days on \u201cSoap,\u201d the controversial nighttime parody of a daytime soap opera created by Susan Harris that featured Crystal in the role of Jodie Dallas, one of TV\u2019s first openly gay characters.<\/p>\n
Crystal was living in an apartment in then-smog-filled Hancock Park with his wife and daughters when he was filming the show\u2019s third season. The couple wanted to move to an area that had better air quality for their children, and someone asked if he knew about the Pacific Palisades.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a small town, good schools, beautiful afternoon breezes from the nearby ocean, one main street with some shops, a deli named Mort\u2019s that had lean corned beef and a lot of people who didn\u2019t put mayonnaise on pastrami,\u201d Crystal recounts.<\/p>\n
The house they came to see wasn\u2019t for them, but a for-sale sign at 860 Chautauqua caught their eye. The real estate agent told them that the owners \u201cwere very motivated to sell because they were very motivated not to be together anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was December 1979 when, with a 30-year mortgage in hand, they moved into the house. Two women who grew up at 860 (\u201cImagine the twins from \u2018The Shining\u2019 \u2014 but they\u2019re 55\u201d) paid a welcome call to say how pleased they were that their former home was back in the hands of show people.<\/p>\n
The original owners were vaudevillians who had a mind-reading act and were passionately into the occult. They socialized with the comic luminaries of their day, including humorist Will Rogers, who would regularly stop by on his horse. Behind a secret wall, Crystal found a hidden room with a cork board that had clippings that suggested maybe it wasn\u2019t such an accident that the house became his.<\/p>\n