The journey to Broadway for a stand-up comedian typically involves years of fame and success — it’s not exactly where one makes their breakout. Yet that’s exactly the path Alex Edelman has found himself on, as his show “Just for Us” has made its way from off-Broadway in 2021 to the Hudson Theater for a limited eight week run this summer.
The 34-year-old Boston native has quickly become one of the most must-see rising acts in comedy, with his show drawing famous audience members from Ben Stiller and Jerry Seinfeld to Steve Martin and Billy Crystal.
The show is centered around what happened when Edelman, who is Jewish, decided to attend a meeting of white nationalists in Queens, New York, after reading about it on Twitter. In the telling of the story, he draws heavily on his upbringing in a modern Orthodox Jewish family in Massachusetts and tells various family stories. His family, naturally, was all present for opening night of the Broadway show — “the craziest night of my life” — and while they’d heard the material before, performing in front of them as they sat amid celebrities took on new meaning.
“They were sitting within eyeshot, so that was my first time actually looking at them while I did the jokes about them,” Edelman says over Zoom from the back of an Uber, en route to the theater one recent evening. “It was really surreal: imagine doing jokes about your family in front of your family — who were laughing, thank God — and also, like, Oscar Isaac. Imagine how weird that is. That’s literally like a weird dream that you’d have. Like you’d look down and check that you weren’t in your underwear.”
Edelman conceived the show in 2018 and it went through several extensions around downtown New York theaters starting in 2021 before he learned of the Broadway opportunity, which he was initially hesitant about.
“I don’t know, maybe I had a more narrow conception of what Broadway is than what it actually is. Broadway feels like it’s for ‘Funny Girl,’” he says. “Also, I’m stunned by, if you’ll excuse the basic term, sort of the hipness of Broadway audiences. Like Broadway audiences are a good deal more interested and interesting than what I thought they were going to be. I always thought ‘Oh, this is a downtown show.’”
There was also the whole bit of accepting that Broadway was in his grasp at this stage of his career.
“Who am I to go to Broadway?” Edelman says. “I’m like, how many times does a comedian get a chance to go to Broadway? It’s extremely rare. It’s so nice. I love it so much. It’s so much fun.”
Despite feeling any imposter syndrome, Edelman is making sure to make it fun for himself. Each night ahead of the show, he and his team have 15 minutes of what they call “f–k around time,” where they’ll bring out a mini portable basketball hoop and take turns shooting away. He has a snack bar set up in the theater from Russ & Daughters, complete with rum cordials. And he commits to standing outside and meeting audience members after each show, to hear their experience and have a moment to connect.
The show ends its eight-week run in August, but Edelman isn’t dwelling on what comes after that.
“Eight weeks feels very good. I’m not going to do much longer than this, but it has been magic. To get here is very improbable. This never happens to a young comedian. So I have to appreciate this moment while it’s happening, instead of being like ‘Oh God, what’s gonna happen next?’” he says. “But it is really special. I’m really blown away by it.”