To say that Alex Edelman is proud of what came to be of his critically-acclaimed one-man show Just For Us would be an understatement. Still, after everything that is wrapped up in it for him in terms of memories, his feelings and thoughts about his friend and director Adam Brace, and the audiences that have seen it all over the world, he’s ready to let go of it — no matter how hard it is for him to do.
The overall response that he’s received for the final product, however, following the special’s recent premiere on HBO’s Max streaming service has made it a little easier for him to loosen his grip on the labor of love that Edelman started to craft in 2018. In addition to the monsoon of positive feedback he’s received on social media, which has resulted in him recently being included in Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2024” list, the Brookline native has also noticed some hostility and frustration toward the show, but in all honesty, he’s totally fine with it.
“It’s been really nice, and the response has been overwhelming. Someone told me he was teaching it in his class, and multiple people have reached out to me to tell me that they’ve seen it multiple times. It’s just been really good,” Edelman tells Vanyaland. “It’s also inspired lots of conversations, including anger, which I’m actually not too upset about. There are people who have said that they don’t like this or that about it, and that’s all a part of it too. It’s been great.”
The recorded special shows a fully developed final product, and to viewers, a clean-cut approach to the story of a Jewish man walking into a white nationalist meeting in Queens. But Edelman is quick to acknowledge just how different each night was from the last, as he saw the show as a constant work-in-progress. Although the differences he noticed were bigger to him than they were to the audience who wasn’t seeing it from an inside perspective, there were more than a few points that became more challenging as time went on, especially when it came time to film.
“The main story took forever to get right. We would beat it out, try to figure out the right way to express exposition without losing laughs, and try to figure out how to make the characters come alive and try to give narrative closure to a story that really didn’t come easy,” says Edelman. “The hardest bit for me to nail down was the Christmas story, because it really is such a physically demanding bit to perform. There were times where it kept getting bigger, and then we’d have to trim it back, and I would just be fucking gassed by the end of it. The Christmas bit was no picnic.”
Within that ever-changing landscape, from the very beginning in 2018 to when the show really started to find its identity in the early innings of 2021, and ultimately its worldwide run through the beginning of 2024, Edelman is steadfast in stating that the show never got stale for him. In many ways, that could be attributed to the fact that it was, at its core, a story he just loved to tell, and how the real-life experience that inspired the show helped Edelman to feel that he was constantly growing, both personally and creatively, within it.
Having done a couple of solo shows in the past, Edelman has been blown away by just how engaged his audience has been with this show in particular, and it was that level of interest that also kept him locked in as well, as he sees it to be hard not to reciprocate that level of love and good will.
“It was never an easy show to do. It was always hard, and it never got super easy or chill. Maybe that’s because it went from sixty [minutes] to ninety, but there was a night in northern California, when I was performing at Berkeley, where I kind of relaxed and thought ‘I got this,’ and the show kind of got away from me,” says Edelman. “It never got stale for me, and I think the reason for that is because as soon as I would not keep my eye on the ball, it would kind of bite me, and I would lose my place and have to pause and get my bearings, like I had to do at that show at Berkeley. A show that challenges you never gets old, because you can’t afford to let it.”
In that same spirit of not letting things get stale for him, Edelman is already in the building stages of his next show. However, he’s looking to take a breather from the immense preparation of a one-man show format and return to his proper stand-up roots. Of course, he’s bringing with him all the lessons he’s learned while doing things in the way of the one-man shows, which he feels is just a part of his approach that has been strengthened during his time doing solo shows – for instance, his newfound appreciation for the headset microphone.
“I was always a one-handed mic guy, and I always thought [a headset] was cheating, or that only Mike Birbiglia or Billy Crystal did that. But after Billy suggested that we go to the headset mic, and where it was something I was pretty resistant to do, it sort of opened up my whole performance style, which was really fantastic and fun,” says Edelman. “I learned a shit load [using it], and when I went back to doing new material recently, I realized that my style has opened up, and I think it’s because I was able to use my full body for once. So, now that I’ve put the mic back into the equation, I feel like a much better performer.”
When it comes to the technical aspects of the show that you see in the special, many of them were put in place by Edelman’s longtime friend, collaborator and the show’s original director Adam Brace, who sadly passed away in 2023, just weeks before the show debuted its sold-out run on Broadway. Of course, Edelman could wax on until the sun comes up about what Brace meant to him on a personal level, but it does make him happy that the technical details that Adam encouraged and put in place early on in the show’s inception were honored and executed by the special’s director Alex Timbers, and the rest of the team that brought the smash-hit show to the masses.
“People always tell me that Adam is with me, and I don’t know if it works that way, as if it’s like AI and I just take the aggregate of everything I learned and apply it, but at the same time, Adam had an ethos that shows should be minimal and intentional in their artistic interventions,” says Edelman. “Like, try to do a lot with a little, and that applied to stagecraft, set design, lighting, specifically before we elevated it to Broadway. Once we got to Broadway and shot the special, I was relieved to be able to watch Alex Timbers and others execute that part in the spirit of Adam.”
The show has moved audiences, and sparked a vast array of discourse over the last few years, and the release of the special has continued, or maybe completely reignited those elements, but Edelman’s vision was simple at the start. He just wanted to entertain people. The structure of the show was always meant to encourage cohesion, but everything else was aimed at simply telling and supporting the jokes.
With a plethora of guidance from Birbiglia, Brace and Timbers (all of whom Edelman feels he “owes big time” for their contributions and advice) about adhering to the aspects of drama, narrative and character work, he was able to deliver the show with plenty of “satisfactory heft.” Still, through it all, the vision was to entertain and get people laughing – and it remains that way as he looks to the future for what to tackle next.
“It’d be nice to create something that, again, gives people a lot of laughs but also a big extra oomph. I’m not sure what that oomph is yet, but I’ll ask Mike [Birbiglia] and see if he’s got any ideas,” says Edelman. “If anyone out there knows, meet me at midnight on May 23 outside of Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side. Come alone. Bring fifty dollars and an old pair of shoes.”