Daniel Radcliffe and Mariska Hargitay Toast ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ and the Center for Youth Mental Health

Reported by Vogue.

There are evenings in New York that remind you why the city still matters — and last Thursday was one of them. After his performance in the Tony-nominated one-man Broadway show Every Brilliant Thing, Daniel Radcliffe crossed the street from the Hudson Theatre to The Lamb's Club, where an intimate late-night supper was hosted in support of the Center for Youth Mental Health at NewYork-Presbyterian. The room — all Art Deco crimson and black — filled quickly with a constellation of theater, art, and fashion figures: Louisa Jacobson, Derek Blasberg, Bee Carrozzini, Natalie Massenet, and Adam Baidawi among them, co-hosted by Anna Wintour, Dr. Zandy Forbes, and Dr. Charlie Shaffer, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine.

The show itself is a gut-punch dressed as a love letter. Radcliffe plays a man who, as a child, begins cataloguing every brilliant thing in the world — sunsets, ice cream, the smell of old books — as a quiet lifeline for himself and his suicidal mother. By the time he reaches adulthood, the list has grown into something that looks a lot like survival. Audience members are pulled in as collaborators, making the whole thing feel less like theater and more like collective testimony. According to Vogue, Jacobson called it "theater with a capital T" — serious subject matter handled, she said, "with so much grace and humor."

One Story, Told Together

Peter Hermann, who attended with his wife Mariska Hargitay, framed the play's power with precision: "It explicitly says, 'I cannot tell this story alone.' It's about community." That idea extends beyond the stage. Hargitay — who makes her Broadway debut when she takes over the role on May 26 through June 28, after Radcliffe wraps May 24 — told Vogue she plans to bring her own texture to the character. "I kind of Americanized and feminized it a little bit," she said. After 27 years on Law & Order: SVU, she described the process as completely unfamiliar — and entirely a dream.

Dr. Shaffer opened the dinner with a note that landed: "Everybody knows we have a mental health crisis," he said, pointing out that the play's real merit is its lack of clinical framing — what it offers instead is something rawer and more transferable: resilience, witnessed in community. Hargitay echoed that. "What do we want to say to people?" she asked. "You're not alone, and we're all in it together."

In a media moment when mental health conversation can slide fast into platitude, Every Brilliant Thing — and the gathering it inspired — proved that the most radical thing art can do is refuse to look away, and insist that nobody has to, either.

Read the original at Vogue.