Every Broadway season has a theme it doesn’t announce. This fall’s, as of this weekend, appears to be the house in the West: who owns it, who gets to tell its story, and what’s left when it’s gone. Tomorrow night, Sunday, Oct. 18, a Palm Springs living room full of Republican secrets officially opens at the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street. On Wednesday, over on West 45th Street at the Imperial, Billy Crystal opens a one-man show named for the street number of the Pacific Palisades house that burned in January 2025. Real estate, as any reader of this magazine knows, is never just real estate.
The Wyeths at home
The first is the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, which began life at Lincoln Center Theater in 2011, and its producers have assembled what they are not shy about calling “a once-in-a-generation cast”: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Polly Wyeth, Ed Harris as her husband, Lyman, Allison Janney as Polly’s sister, Silda, Joe Keery as the younger son, Trip, and Lily Rabe as Brooke, the daughter who comes home for Christmas Eve with a memoir manuscript that threatens to blow the family apart. John Benjamin Hickey directs. The play began previews Sept. 29 and runs a 16-week limited engagement through Jan. 17, 2027, at two hours and 15 minutes with an intermission, according to Playbill.
The official synopsis frames the question as “who owns a family’s story and what is the cost to tell it.” In 2011, that was a play about a daughter and her parents’ Reagan-era friendships. In 2026, with a former Seinfeld star, a West Wing veteran and a Stranger Things heartthrob sharing a Palm Springs sofa, it is also a question about which famous names a Broadway producer can fit on a single marquee. The answer, apparently, is five, and the market is pricing them accordingly: as of this afternoon, Broadway.com listed seats starting at $192.86.
Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, whose producers’ copy lists 11 Emmys, plays a woman who has made a career of controlling the narrative, which may be the least effortful casting decision in recent Broadway history. Mr. Harris and Ms. Janney are, between them, the kind of stage-trained Hollywood heavyweights that make subscription audiences feel virtuous and tourists feel lucky. Mr. Keery is there, one assumes, for everyone else.
Reviews will land after Sunday’s opening. The City Politic will be in its seats.
860
Then there is 860. It is Billy Crystal’s first Broadway outing since the musical Mr. Saturday Night in 2022, and it is, by his own description, about the house. “860 was the address of the home we lost in the Palisades fires,” Mr. Crystal said in an April announcement from the Shubert Organization. “We lived there for 46 years. I invite you to come inside 860 and I’ll tell you all the funny and touching things that happened there, not only in my career but to our family.”
The fire was, of course, real and terrible. In January 2025, as the Associated Press reported at the time, Billy and Janice Crystal released a statement: “Janice and I lived in our home since 1979. We raised our children and grandchildren here. Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away.” Twenty-one months later, the address is a title on 45th Street, and the memories are, in the most Broadway way imaginable, playing to paying customers. The Broadway.org listing describes the evening as “a hilarious and intimate story about family, friendship, love, luck, and loss.”
The production is directed by Scott Ellis, interim artistic director of the Roundabout Theatre Company, with original music by Marc Shaiman. It is produced by Janice Crystal, James L. Nederlander, Larry Magid and Face Productions, and runs 100 minutes with no intermission, through Jan. 3, 2027, per the show’s announcements. Previews began Oct. 1. Seats were listed this afternoon from $91.41 on Broadway.com, which means that, for the moment, you can see the man who hosted the Oscars nine times for less than half of what it costs to watch the Wyeths argue.
Mr. Crystal has done this before, and spectacularly. His first one-man show, 700 Sundays, won him a Tony in 2005 and became, the Shubert announcement notes, the highest-grossing non-musical in Broadway history at the time. That show was about his father and the house in Long Beach, Long Island. This one is about the house he built for his own family, and about losing it. If 700 Sundays was a son’s memoir, 860 is a grandfather’s. The comedian is 78; the bittersweet is the point.
Two kinds of homecoming
What links the two shows is not only the Western real estate. It’s that both are about whether a family’s private history belongs to the family or to the audience. Mr. Baitz built a whole play around that tension. Mr. Crystal has simply resolved it, in favor of the audience, at $91.41 and up. One is fiction about a memoir; the other is a memoir performed as theater. Seeing both in the same week would make for a very New York sort of double feature, and a fine argument at Joe Allen afterward.
The crunch
They are not alone. The Broadway League’s opening-night calendar shows The Imaginary Invalid opening Oct. 22 at the Todd Haimes Theatre and A Few Good Men opening Oct. 29 at the Vivian Beaumont, with more to follow in November. Deadline’s fall preview, by Greg Evans, also flagged Tom Hiddleston in Much Ado About Nothing at the Winter Garden. It is the busiest stretch of the fall, the fortnight when the critics’ calendars fill and the Times Square restaurants learn, once again, to turn a table before the curtain.
But the week belongs to the two houses in the West, one in Palm Springs and one in the Palisades, one invented and one all too real. Both, it turns out, are worth the trip to 44th and 45th Streets.
The City Politic has reached out to the producers of Other Desert Cities, the producers of 860, the Shubert Organization, and ATG Entertainment, which operates the Hudson Theatre, for comment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The Hudson Theatre, West 44th Street, by ajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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