Tom Hanks, Playwright (Part 2)

 

[Below are three reposts that constitute Part 2 of “Tom Hanks, Playwright.”  The first piece is excerpts from the interview of well-known film star Hanks by Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s Late Show, on 3 November 2025.  Following on that posting are two reviews of the Off-Broadway production, the première of This World of Tomorrow, the play cowritten by Hanks with James Glossman, which ran at The Shed from 18 November to 21 December 2025.

[In Part 1, which I recommend reading before the installment below, I posted three articles from the New York Times announcing the coming production, covering the opening night, and presenting Hanks’s own discussion of his inaugural venture as a dramatist.  Those articles contain information that will be referenced below and explanations and commentary from me, including the background and details of the play, that I have not repeated in the second part.]

STEPHEN COLBERT INTERVIEWS TOM HANKS
3 November 2025
(Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Season 11, Episode 31)

[Below are excerpts from the guest appearance of Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS-TV; Channel 2 in New York City) of 3 November 2025.  Hanks talks extensively about This World of Tomorrow, which was in previews at the time of the broadcast, but he talked also about a number of other, unrelated subjects as well.  I have, therefore lifted only the passages concerning the Off-Broadway play for this posting. (Omitted sections of the show are marked with ellipses.)

[There is no video of this LSSC episode that’s in one take, so this post is taken from YouTube, which posted the show in segments, four of which are devoted to the Hanks interview.  (When the show was broadcast. Colbert did his customary opening, including a monologue, before the first break and after the Hanks interview, he had a musical guest, Mavis Staples, a rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist, who performed the last segment of the show.)

[The YouTube videos are broken into separate posts at each point in the show when Colbert takes a commercial break.  (The link above, for those who want to view the whole interview, is the first segment (“It’s ‘Tom Hanks Riding The Subway’ Season In New York City”); the following three segments are at: #2 – “‘They Are Gonna Have A Real Hard Time Firing Me’ - Tom Hanks On His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’"; #3 – “If You Could Spend 12 Hours In The Past, Where And When Would You Go? - Tom Hanks”; #4 – “Why The Original ‘Toy Story’ Movie Had To Be Thrown Out - Tom Hanks.”  I didn’t look for videos of the opening or closing segments, Colbert’s monologue and Staples’s performance.)

[The transcript published on Rick On Theater is based on the verbatim transcript from YouTube, which is computer-generated.  It’s full of inaccuracies, omissions, and mistranscriptions, so I emended it myself from the audio of the recordings, creating a hybrid.  It’s more accurate and complete than the ones accompanying the YouTube videos online.]

Stephen Colbert: Hey, welcome back, everybody! Give it up for Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, everybody!

Ladies and gentlemen, my friends – you know my first guest tonight, because he is Tom Hanks!

[cheers and applause]

Tom Hanks: Thank you, thank you!

. . . .

Hanks: I’m doing a play right now called – down at . . . uhh –

Colbert: I’m doing it right here [takes out playbill for this world of tomorrow].

You’re in town – you’ve cowritten and starred in a new play, This World of Tomorrow.

There you are – there it is. It’s at The Shed –

Hanks: It’s at The Shed. Directed by Kenny Leon and cowritten by James Glossman. I can’t tell you how much we love the cast.

But – you say you’re on Broadway and everybody knows where Broadway is. We are on Broadway right now. 

[The Ed Sullivan Theatre, where The Late Show is recorded, is a 1927 theater at 1697 Broadway at West 53rd Street, formerly a legitimate Broadway house first named Hammerstein’s Theatre (and then under various names). The Columbia Broadcasting System leased it in 1937 as a radio studio; it was converted for television use in 1949. The theater housed The Ed Sullivan Show from 1953 to 1971, as well as other CBS shows; it was renamed after Sullivan (1901-74) in 1967. The Sullivan was purchased by CBS in 1993 and has housed The Late Show since that year, first under David Letterman, then under Colbert since 2015.]

Colbert: You’re literally on Broadway.

Hanks: Anybody in the world can come to New York and say, ‘Take me to Broadway.’ Or they can walk to Broadway themselves if they know where it is.

You come to New York and say, ‘Come to The Shed,’ and they’re like, ‘What? For discount garden tools?’

It’s an art installation – it’s a space for art and it’s downtown in Hudson Yards. But letting everyone know where The Shed is, is a bit of a challenge. So if I could have a slight shuffle beat.

[scats a beat for the band. the band joins in.]

Yeah, okay.

Ready?

[rhythmic chant. hanks, seated, keeps time with hand and arm gestures as he shifts his upper body and makes animated facial expressions.]

It’s The Shed
Off the High Line
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the Highline
In Hudson Yards.
Wanta see
A show
At The Shed?
Well, just head down
To Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
Off the Highline
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.

There you go.  So, come on down!

[The High Line is an elevated public park and greenway in New York City, built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. It extends from Gansevoort Street at Washington Street in Greenwich Village to West 34th Street and 12th Avenue near Hudson Yards.

[The Vessel is an interactive public landmark and art installation in Hudson Yards. The structure is 150 feet tall (equivalent to about 12-15 stories) and consists of 154 interconnected flights of stairs, nearly 2,500 steps, and 80 landings, forming a massive, climbable, honeycomb.

[Hudson Yards is a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan, built over a functioning rail yard, a storage yard for Long Island Rail Road trains. The 28-acre site includes, aside from The Shed and the Vessel, a landscaped public plaza, high-rises with both residential apartments and corporate offices, and a seven-story mall with shops and restaurants. Most of the offerings are strictly high-end.]

Colbert: We have to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody. Stick around.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody, we are back with the star of This World of Tomorrow at The Shed, Mr. Tom Hanks.

Tell the people what it’s about, if you don’t mind.

Hanks: it’s from a collection of short stories. Jim Glossman – I published some short stories. And Jim Glossman said we could string these together under the theme of – let’s just say time travel.

It’s about a guy who decides to – a franchise out of what is now the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Renamed the Row NYC in 2014, the Milford Plaza Hotel (at 700 Eighth Avenue, between 44th and 45th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan) opened in 1928 as the Hotel Lincoln. It changed hands many times, and was renamed by each new owner. In 1956, it became the Hotel Manhattan; in 1969, it operated as the Royal Manhattan; and it reopened in 1980 as the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Somewhat typical of the reviews the hotel received over its lifetime, New York magazine said in 2022 that “the reason most people stay here is location; its proximity to the city’s brightest [Broadway theater] marquees ensures theatergoers can be in bed shortly after the curtain drops. Otherwise, the 1,300 rooms are slightly antiquated."]

You may not know this. The Milford Plaza Hotel used to be the Lincoln Hotel and it’s at Eighth Avenue and West 45th Street, and Room 1114 has what is called volume authenticity to allow access to a 12-hour time-bond echo to June 8th, 1939.

[I tried to decipher what Hanks is saying here, thinking he’s using standard or recognized mainstream science fiction terms. According to one source, he isn’t. He’s using terms like “volume authenticity” and “time-bond echo” as technobabble—invented scientific language—to explain the mechanics of his character’s time travel.

[“Volume authenticity” is a fictional scientific requirement in the play. It refers to the idea that for a “time jump” to work, the physical space (i.e., Room 1114 of the Milford Plaza) must perfectly match the historical details of the destination date. The more “authentic” the room’s physical “volume” (decor, smell, newspapers, and atmosphere) is to 1939, the easier it is to “tether” to that time.

[“Time-Bond Echo” is the play’s term for the actual window or “link” between two points in time. It describes a temporary connection (a bond) that allows someone from 2089, the play’s “present,” to interact with the “echo” of 8 June 1939.

[In the play, there is also a 12-hour limit for Bert Allenberry’s (Hanks) technology to allow him to access this “echo” before he is pulled back to his own time, which is why he must keep returning “again and again” to the same day to see the woman he loves (Kelli O’Hara).]

So you can go back to the World’s Fair on June 8th, 1939. And I play a fellow who does that again and again and again, because he just cannot get enough of the World’s Fair.

Now – this is a game around the dinner table. I’m gonna tell you right now, okay – here’s the rules of the game. You get to go to any time in the past you want to for 12 hours. Name the place, name the event. However, homicide is not allowed. You can’t go back and – you know.

Colbert: April 1865, Ford’s Theatre and I prevent a homicide. Is that legal?

[laughter and applause from the audience.]

[President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-1865) was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-65) on 14 April 1865 as he and the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), were attending a performance of Our American Cousin, an 1852 farce by English playwright Tom Taylor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

[Ford’s Theatre ceased presenting plays for 103 years after Lincoln’s death. It became a museum dedicated to Lincoln until 1968, when it was restored and reopened. The presidential box remains as it was in the 1860s, but is never occupied. Since its reopening, the theater has not restaged Our American Cousin, and has said that it never will out of respect for the assassination.

[(This vow is attributed to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1920-2010; in office: 1961-69), whose department includes the National Park Service, which is responsible for the physical stewardship, preservation, and historical interpretation of the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which includes the government-owned theater building. The non-profit Ford’s Theatre Society oversees the site’s artistic programming and educational initiatives.)]

Hanks: Here’s the problem with that. I believe that show was sold out.

Colbert: So I cannot get a ticket.

Hanks: And those laws [are] adhered to. You don’t just get to appear magically. You have to eat the food and go to the bathroom and take a shower – and if you break a leg, you’ll have a broken leg.

So those are the rules. But the fellow I play cannot stop from going back to 1939, for reasons that are evident once you come see the play.

Colbert: That is the World’s Fair, 1939. Did you have a particular fascination with the World’s Fair?

Hanks: Something about the World’s Fair.

Here’s a question. There was a line from the “Futurama,” which was the most attended attraction at the fair, run by our good friends at General Motors.

Colbert: Cars of the future.

Hanks: It was 1939, showing you what 1960 was going to be like and it had this fabulous line that said: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” And if you think about it, that’s a great theme that Jim Glossman and I’d been working on.

[The General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was titled “Highways and Horizons.” The core attraction and most popular attraction at the fair was a massive, immersive diorama and ride called “Futurama.” Designed by theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), the exhibit presented an idealized model of the world 20 years into the future (around 1960), characterized by vast suburbs and extensive, automated highway systems.

[Visitors sat in moving, sound-equipped chairs that conveyed them over a massive, 35,000 square-foot scale model of the American countryside and cities. The Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair’s overall theme of “The World of Tomorrow” and is credited with popularizing the concept of modern interstate highways.]

You cannot do anything about our infinite past. That’s gone, baby, gone, right? And the future’s going down the pike. Who knows what’s gonna go happen [sic]?

But the present, we have a little bit of control over that, don’t we? And we also know what you’re hurrying future’s going to be, don’t we [a reference to Paramount’s cancellation of The Late Show after May 2026]. And you can’t do nothin’ ’bout the things that got you in trouble, my friend.

So you’re just going to have to make hay right here, right now.

Colbert: Exactly.

Hanks: That’s right.

. . . .

Colbert: We have to take another break here, but stick around. We will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody! We’re back with the star of This World of Tomorrow, Mr. Thomas Hanks.

You’ve done lots of theater.

Hanks: I’ve done just enough, sir, to call myself a professional actor.

Colbert: And last time you were live on stage here in New York, it was 2013.

Hanks: Yes, we did Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy at the Broadhurst Theatre – yes.

Colbert: Now you’re back at The Shed, and we know where that is.

Hanks: Where’s The Shed again? Well, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s –

[chants as the band comes in.]

By the Vessel
And the High Line.

Colbert: Is it different to go on stage knowing that you wrote it?

Hanks: Yes, it is. Number one, because they are going to have a real hard time firing me. If I screw up.

Colbert: Have you gone up on your own line?

[In theater, ‘to go up’ means to forget one’s lines on stage during a performance or rehearsal.]

Hanks: Oh, God, yeah, year. I disappeared the other night, as a matter of fact. And when it happens, Kelli O’Hara on stage, or Ruben Santiago-Hudson – they all just kind of look at me and go, ‘Come on, Man.’

Colbert: If you don’t know it –

Hanks: ‘If I learn my lines – You haven’t – [why] haven’t you learned yours?’

The huge difference between film and stage is, in film, the director is the governor of the story. He can change it, not say it, don’t say that, don’t say this.

On the stage, if it’s not on the page, it is not on the stage. The writers are the definitive arbiters of what is being said.

So, on one hand, you have a discussion. ‘What – what sounds better: “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a problem,” or, “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a situation”’?

We had some previews the other night. Kenny Leon said when we’re in rehearsal, the play is ours; when we are performing, the play is theirs. Meaning, that audience gives you something that is just undeniable. And we were out there and we had a difference between blah-blah-blah-blah problem – and the audience was like hmm [making a hand gesture indicating “flat”] – blah-blah-blah-blah situation, and they go, ‘Oh, a situation?’ And this is where you start playing around with it. It’s a very, very malleable, exciting thing.

And being one of the cowriters is just a pleasure and a joy, but it is also as terrifying an experience as I have ever had.

Colbert: Why terrifying?

Hanks: Well, because you just wake up and – ‘problem,’ ‘situation,’ ‘problem,’ ‘situation’ [making hand gesture of weighing two alternatives].

And will they know how to find us. You know how they find us – well,

[chants and snaps his fingers.]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: We’re gonna take another break here.

Hanks: I think we should.

Colbert: We’ll be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody.  You know who that is, that’s Tom Hanks.

. . . .

Colbert: So, Tom – wonderful to see you, as always.

Hanks: Thank you so much.

This World of Tomorrow is currently in previews at The Shed [30 October-18 November 2025]. And where’s The Shed?

Hanks: I will tell you right now, The Shed is . . .

[chants]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.
By the Vessel
In the High Line

Colbert: Officially opens November 18th.

Hanks:

[continues]

This World of Tomorrow
Is a play you all can see
Where? At The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the High Line
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: Tom Hanks, everybody.

We’ll be right back with a performance by Mavis Staples.

*  *  *  *
TWO REVIEWS OF THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW

“THE WORLD OF TOMORROW REVIEW –
TOM HANKS RETURNS TO THE STAGE 
FOR TIME TRAVEL CHARMER”
by Benjamin Lee

[Of the two reviews of This World of Tomorrow I selected to repost, the one from The Guardian of 18 November 2025 was the more positive.  The critical reception of the play was mixed, most giving some form of praise for the performances accompanied, but less enthusiasm, as you’ll read in the second example, for the production (that is, directing and design) and the script.]

The actor indulges his love of the past in a breezily enjoyable play about a man falling for a woman from the 1930s, played by a standout Kelli O’Hara

Tom Hanks [b. 1956] is a star who’s always had one foot squarely in the past. As an actor he’s forever been likened to James Stewart [1908-97; years active: 1932-91], a reincarnation of the charming, essentially good American everyman, a from-another-era lead who’s increasingly been more comfortable in period fare (in the last decade, he’s appeared in just four present-day films [see note below]). As a producer, he’s gravitated toward historical shows such as Band of Brothers [2001; HBO], John Adams [2008; HBO] and The Pacific [2010; HBO] his directorial debut was 60s-set music comedy That Thing You Do! [1996; Twentieth Century Fox] and his undying obsession, outside of acting, is the typewriter, collecting and writing about its throwback appeal.

[Between 2015 and 2025, Hanks’s “present-day” films (out of 19 productions, including the animated Toy Story 4) have been A Hologram for the King (made in 2016, set in 2010; Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions, Saban Films), Sully (made in 2016, set in 2009; Warner Bros. Pictures), Inferno (made and set in 2016; Sony Pictures Releasing), and A Man Called Otto (made in 2020, set in 2020 – with flashbacks to 1960s and mid-2010s; Sony Pictures Releasing).]

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow [sic], his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

[Several press outlets mislabel the play by substituting ‘The’ for ‘This.’  As I note in Part 1, the play’s title, This World of Tomorrow, is distinct from the official motto and theme of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was “The World of Tomorrow.”  The choice by Hanks and Glossman was deliberate to distinguish their creative work from the historical event it depicts and to shift the focus from a broad, corporate vision of the future to a specific, personal reality experienced by the characters.]

The gimmick here is that while time travel might be possible in the future, it comes with hard restrictions. Firstly, it’s prohibitively expensive, leaving it up to the select few to take advantage (asides about the state of the world in 60 years time are . . . not optimistic). Secondly, it’s only possible to go back to specific places at specific times, reliant on certain spaces remaining the same and certain “echoes” allowing for movement. Hanks plays Bert, a scientist whose trips to the 1939 world fair in New York become more frequent after he meets Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), a local woman treating herself to a day off with her precocious niece (Kayli Carter, a 32-year-old actor fighting a losing, and increasingly grating, battle playing an 11-year-old).

It’s not just love at first sight that keeps him going back, it’s also his fetish for nostalgia (Newspapers! Lower prices! People saying “swell”!) and the alluring promise of a future that never really came. Each time he returns to the present, after a strict cutoff of 11pm [sic], he regales his skeptical colleagues with ideas of how to forge ahead differently. While whimsy is mostly prioritized [sic – British spelling], the dark shadow of reality often threatens to intrude. Bert’s fawning over the past is briefly interrupted when Black colleague and longtime friend M-Dash (played by the wonderful Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who tries hard to add weight to a lightly written dynamic) tells him that the idea of travelling back is less appealing for him, a sharp reminder that the good old days weren’t that good for many people (as he predicts, almost all of the service jobs during Bert’s visits are taken on by Black workers). It’s also the summer of 1939, just weeks away from the second world war [German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, marking the start of World War II in Europe], and Nazism has already started to appear in the US, the dreaded swastika showing up on pin badges.

But Hanks, as ever, chooses light over dark and his focus, with co-writer James Glossman, is the thrill of an impossible romance, a choice that takes a little time to convince (the setup, like in his classic romcoms Sleepless in Seattle [1993; TriStar Pictures] and You’ve Got Mail [1998; Warner Bros.], could have easily warped into a creepy thriller). Before intermission, it’s hard to fully understand why Bert would make the expensive, and increasingly dangerous, choice to keep going back for Carmen, as effervescent as O’Hara might be (like many an adaptation, the writing often suffers without the gap-filling depth of a narrator).

Yet in a far superior second half, after she’s gifted with a piercing monologue, we’re whisked along with them. Visually, the journey is smooth throughout thanks to Tony-winning director Kenny Leon guiding the way. While his recent take on Othello [2025; Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway; see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1” (27 March 2025)] might have underwhelmed on many levels, his decisions here are far more astute, working with what seems like another blockbuster budget but this time allowed to spend it on more than just A-list casting. The stage is filled with rectangular pillars switching between various video-screened backgrounds, from a futuristic conference room to a pokey Bronx apartment, and despite one hiccup (a prop that wouldn’t budge that Hanks himself helped to save), it felt as sleekly transporting as something the actor would have made for the big screen. Its commerciality does also make it an easy fit for a Hollywood transfer, perhaps one that could easily tighten the script, excising the scene-sinking niece and some extraneous diner and home scenes (it’s over two hours and could benefit from being under).

Hanks, who was last on the New York stage in Nora Ephron’s 80s-set newsroom drama Lucky Guy, develops real last-act chemistry with O’Hara, who manages to perfect period intonation without becoming schtick-y. He’s comfortably in his wheelhouse here (also nailing the delivery as expected), but there’s none of the autopilot laziness we often get from actors known for sticking to certain character types. He might be stuck in the past, but it’s hard not to get stuck there with him.

[Benjamin Lee is the east coast arts editor at Guardian US, based in New York.  He was previously deputy editor of the style and culture website ShortList.com.]

*  *  *  *
“DAWN OF A DULL DAY:
TOM HANKS IN THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW”
by Jackson McHenry 

[The review on Vulture (the online platform of New York magazine) that was posted on 18 November 2025 was a largely negative assessment of the Hanks-Glossman play.  As you’ll read, reviewer Jackson McHenry had numerous objections to This World of Tomorrow, both to the script and Kenny Leon’s production.]

Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so [sic] keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day [1993; directed by Harold Ramis; Columbia Pictures], Midnight in Paris [2011; directed by Woody Allen; Sony Pictures Classics], and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers [2016; directed by Morten Tyldum; Sony Pictures Releasing], all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.

There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times [see Part 1] that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-driven drama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?

Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.

Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.

[Jackson McHenry is a Vulture critic covering theater, film, and TV.  He’s been covering theater, film, and television since 2015, with a focus on arts and entertainment, pop culture, and cultural movements.  In addition to Vulture, Jackson’s work has been featured in Variety, Magzter, and Entertainment Weekly.]

Tom Hanks, Playwright (Part 1)

 

[In 2013, Academy Award-winning film actor Tom Hanks (1994, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Philadelphia; 1995, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Forrest Gump) made his Broadway début in the limited run of the Broadway show Lucky Guy, Nora Ephron’s last play.  (Ephron died on 26 June 2012; rehearsals for the production began on 14 January 2013, 6½ months later.  Hanks had also starred in two films written by Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and You’ve Got Mail from 1998; Hanks costarred in 2017’s The Post, which director Steven Spielberg dedicated to Ephron’s memory.)

[Lucky Guy ran at the Broadhurst Theatre from 1 April to 3 July 2013 (with two extensions from 16 June and 30 June), a total of 33 previews and 104 regular performances.  It was Hanks’s last New York stage appearance (though his last stage performance was as Falstaff in Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’s 2018 Henry IV).  Hanks (b. 1956) took home a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance for Lucky Guy. 

[In May 2023, the renowned actor published a novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Alfred A. Knopf).  It’s “about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film . . . and the humble comic books that inspired it.”  It became a New York Times Bestseller and was recognized by National Public Radio as one of the “Best Books of the Year” for 2023.  The Library Journal put the book on its “Lead Holds” list, indicating significant reader demand.  (See “Tom Hanks, Novelist“ [22 May 2023].)

[Before the novel, Hanks published Uncommon Type (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), a collection of short stories inspired by his vintage typewriter collection. The stories are linked by a common theme: each involves a typewriter in some way.  They aren’t about the typewriters themselves, but about something that might have been written on them.  Uncommon Type was a national bestseller and included in USA Today’s 10 Best Books, NPR Best Books of 2017, and Barnes & Noble Best Fiction of 2017. 

[Now, based on the stories from Uncommon Type, Hanks has written a play (in which he also stars).  This World of Tomorrow was coauthored by Hanks and playwright, adapter, director, and theater teacher James Glossman and directed by Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon (Best Direction of a Play for A Raisin in the Sun, 2014, and multiple nominations).  The play had a limited Off-Broadway run in the Kenneth C. Griffin Theater at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan (ov-er a functioning rail yard); it started previews on 30 October 2025, and opened on 18 November with a closing date of 21 December.

[The story of This World follows Bert Allenberry (Hanks), a scientist from the year 2089.  Disenchanted with his high-tech future, he uses a portal to travel back repeatedly, on a quest for true love, to 8 June 1939, to the site of the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where he falls in love with a bookkeeper named Carmen (Kelli O’Hara). (The fairgrounds were revived 24 years later for the 1964 World's Fair, for which it was redesignated Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the name it bears today.)

[If anyone thinks that it’s no coincidence that Hanks and Glossman’s play is entitled This World of Tomorrow and is plotted around repeated visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, whose official theme and motto was “The World of the Tomorrow,” you’d be absolutely right!  Here’s what Hanks, himself, said in Vogue that makes this clear:

“I’ve always had a fascination for the 1939 World’s Fair because it was so blatant for its optimism,” Hanks reflected. “It was called The World of Tomorrow, and it was viewed that all humans would have a common future—a shared one of opportunity, growth, and possibility powered by the four freedoms that everybody in the world was entitled to” (Paul Chi, “Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, and More Helped to Fête Tom Hanks’s Return to the Stage in This World of Tomorrow,” Vogue 19 November 2025).

[(Sidebar: The “Four Freedoms” invoked by Hanks may refer to the celebrated set of fundamental human objectives articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45] in his 6 January 1941 State of the Union address, but the 1939 World’s Fair celebrated a slightly different set of Four Freedoms: Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Assembly.

[[Conceived by the Fair’s Board of Design, the idea to promote the liberties enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was prompted by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial, a nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the creation, ratification, and implementation of the United States Constitution, 1937-39. The notion was championed by New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [1882-1947; 99th Mayor of New York City: 1934-46].).

[(The fair opened on 30 April 1939, the 150th anniversary of the first inauguration—in New York City, then the nation’s capital—of George Washington [1732/O.S.: 1731-1799; President of the United States: 1789-97], the first chief executive under the newly-ratified Constitution. President Roosevelt gave the opening address that day, noting in his speech the First Amendment’s freedoms, clearly having taken notice of the Four Freedoms sculptures by Leo Friedlander [1888-1966], which La Guardia had dubbed “the heart of the fair,” across the Court of Peace from the speaker’s rostrum.

[(Roosevelt surely saw the Fair’s successful use of the Four Freedoms terminology and was doubtlessly inspired to repurpose the phrase to transform the Fair’s celebration of domestic American democratic values into a global manifesto of universal rights for people “everywhere in the world.”

[(Two years later, in what became known as the “Four Freedoms speech,” the Four Freedoms FDR enumerated, symbolizing America’s ideals, became: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

[(Delivered 11 months before the United States entered World War II, the speech provided a moral justification for American intervention and a vision for a post-war world order. The Four Freedoms became a foundational cornerstone for the United Nations (established in 1945) and were enshrined in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948.)

[This first installment of the two-part post primarily consists of articles, all from the New York Times, about Hanks’s composition of the script (as described by himself) and his participation in the production, but in Part 2, to be published on Saturday, 3 January 2026, I will post excerpts from Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Hanks on The Late Show of 3 November and a selection of reviews of the performance.]

“TOM HANKS PLANS TO STAR 
IN A NEW PLAY THAT HE WROTE”
by Michael Paulson

[This short notice in the New York Times on 22 May 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]) was an early announcement of Hanks’s plans to mount a play he’d written on a New York stage.  It was posted on the paper’s website as “Tom Hanks Wrote a Play, and Will Star in It Off Broadway This Fall“ on 21 May.]

The work is scheduled to run for eight weeks at the Shed in Manhattan.

Tom Hanks, the acclaimed film actor, has written a new play about love, longing and time-travel, and is planning to star in an Off Broadway production of it this fall.

The play, This World of Tomorrow, will be staged in a 550-seat theater at the Shed, a performing arts venue on Manhattan’s Far West Side that has been helping Hanks develop the work over the last year. The play is scheduled to run for just eight weeks, from Oct. 30 to Dec. 21.

This World of Tomorrow is about a scientist from the future who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — searching for love. It is based on elements of Hanks’s “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories published in 2017.

Hanks, who will play the scientist, will lead a cast of 10 to 12 performers [it turned out to be 11], some of whom will take on multiple roles. A two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received [a] Tony Award nomination.

Hanks wrote the new play with James Glossman, a playwright and director with whom he has collaborated on other projects, including “Safe Home,” which had a production in 2022 at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (It was also based on “Uncommon Type” stories.) The director of the new play will be Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, said Hanks’s team approached him last year when they were looking for a place to develop the show. Poots leapt at the opportunity, he said, thinking “he’s one of the most beloved and trusted storytellers of our time.” Poots called the play “a classic love story,” but also noted that, because parts of it take place in 1939, “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism.”

[Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce (‘leader’) of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer (‘leader’) of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor (prime minister) of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo (‘leader’) of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936.

[Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) officially became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922 and de facto leader of the USSR by 1929 by consolidating power after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924. He held the post of Premier from 1941, ruling as a dictator until his death.

[In Japan, a powerful military faction, of which Hideki Tojo (1884-1948), then a colonel, was a founder and central figure, gained control as early as 1931, promoting aggressive expansionism in Asia. The military seized control of foreign policy, leading to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. Tojo, by then a general, was Vice Minister of the Army from 1938 to 1940 and then Minister until 1944 and was a leading advocate for the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  As Prime Minister (1941-44), Tojo consolidated immense power, at times holding multiple ministry positions, creating a virtual military dictatorship. He was responsible for the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II.

[Tojo’s leadership was characterized by a commitment to aggressive territorial expansion to secure vital resources for the Japanese Empire. As PM, he created a one-party system, ending democratic political processes, and through his control over the levers of state power, he suppressed dissent and oversaw the indoctrination of Japanese youth with extreme militaristic and ultranationalist values.]

This World of Tomorrow is one of three upcoming theater pieces to be staged at the Shed. It will present, in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” starring André Holland, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 28. And from June 17 to Oct. 19 it will present “Viola’s Room,” an immersive audio production narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It was created by Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”

[Sleep No More ran at the McKittrick Hotel in New York from 7 March 2011 to 29 September 2024. It was an immersive theater work created by the British troupe Punchdrunk. It was based primarily on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (from which the title is drawn), with additional inspiration taken from noir films (especially those of Alfred Hitchcock) and the 1697 Paisley witch trials, an incident in Britain that resembles the Salem, Massachusetts, occurrence of 1693.

[(The six-story McKittrick was a performance venue themed as a 1930s hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, built in 1939 and used as an industrial warehouse (which also occasionally housed popular nightclubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s). The building was given a fictional name (taken from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo) and past as a hotel that was shut down six weeks before it was scheduled to open. It was transformed into the immersive theater space for Sleep No More and reopened in 2011 and closed in 2025, a week after Sleep No More closed.

[(The former “McKittrick Hotel” has hosted several major events and creative takeovers throughout the year since it closed as a performance and nightclub space, including hosting a limited engagement for a new immersive production from Artemis is Burning titled The Death of Rasputin [Governors Island: 17 April-29 June 2025; former McKittrick Hotel: 31 October-1 November 2025]; the building is also scheduled to host a major New Year’s Eve celebration on 31 December.)

[The audience for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which can be categorized as immersive theater, promenade theater, and environmental theater wandered at their own pace throughout a set populated by actors. It was not interactive theater because the presence of the audience rarely had any bearing on the story or the performers. The production won the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience and special citations at the 2011 Obie Awards for design and choreography.]

[Since April 2015, Michael Paulson has been the theater reporter of the New York Times.  From 2000 to 2010, Paulson covered religion for the Boston Globe, where he was part of the Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  Since 2010, he’s worked at the New York Times, where he initially continued his religion coverage.  His work at the Times reflected his early politics roots and continued to tie religion to national issues.   Paulson has covered theater at the New York Times.]

*  *  *  *
“DAZZLING OPENING NIGHT WITH TOM HANKS”
by Sarah Bahr

[The second New York Times report on Tom Hanks and James Glossman’s play covered the night of the play’s official opening performance.  It ran in the print edition of 23 November 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section, but online, as “A New York Night Out With Tom Hanks,” it was posted on 19 November, the day after the opening.]

Stars flocked to celebrate the actor’s Off Broadway show, ‘This World of Tomorrow.’

On Tuesday evening [18 November], more than 400 actors, directors and designers circulated under soft purple lighting inside the Shed, a performing arts center in Midtown Manhattan, to toast Tom Hanks and his new Off Broadway show, This World of Tomorrow.

“It’s the greatest thrill of my life,” Mr. Hanks, the 69-year-old veteran film star, said of performing in the play, which tells the story of a scientist from the future (played by Mr. Hanks) who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — in search of love.

It was opening night for the production, based on Mr. Hanks’s 2017 short story collection, “Uncommon Type,” which was adapted for the stage with the playwright and director James Glossman. It is directed by Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”

And fellow stars, who entered alongside enormous projections of Mr. Hanks’s likeness, turned out. The illustrious crowd included the actors Meryl Streep, Martin Short and Steve Martin as well as the recently retired [on 22 October 2025] ballerina Misty Copeland.

“I’m a huge ‘Toy Story’ fan, so I’m excited to see him,” Ms. Copeland said of Mr. Hanks, who voiced the cowboy Woody in the “Toy Story” films and who is a two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”). Mr. Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received a Tony Award nomination.

[Hanks was in four Toy Story films, all produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures: 1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019.  Toy Story 5 is due to be released on 19 June 2026, also produced by Pixar and Disney.]

The evening, which doubled as the Shed’s annual fund-raising gala and raised $2.1 million for the organization, honored one of its founding board members, Lew Frankfort, a former chief executive of Coach [Coach New York; American company specializing in luxury accessories such as handbags].

It began with a cocktail reception, where guests — who included Ms. Copeland, a board member of the organization, and Mr. Hanks’s wife, Rita Wilson — munched on chips and nuts before sitting down to a dinner of curated small plates like quail eggs, sweet potatoes and cocoa-braised short ribs.

Around 8 p.m., guests filtered into the Griffin Theater for the evening’s performance. For about the next two hours, Mr. Hanks and his co-star, the Tony Award-winning stage actress Kelli O’Hara, who plays his love interest, gallivanted around a World’s Fair set that included projections of the fair’s General Motors Futurama exhibit and the illuminated water fountains in the Lagoon of Nations.

After the show, attendees were welcomed back to the world of today with hot dogs and ice cream bars, featuring some decidedly 21st-century trappings, including cilantro and an apple cider sorbet.

[Sarah Bahr is an editor on the New York Times’s Flexible Editing desk and covers culture and style for the paper, writing about theater, film, TV, music, visual art, pop culture, parties, and nightlife.  She earned a master’s degree in English from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.  She worked for the Times as a multiplatform editing intern in Summer 2019, and has contributed to USA Today, Forbes Travel Guide, The Indianapolis Star, and Indianapolis Monthly.  She’s thrilled to return to New York, where in 2019 she saw 30 shows on and off Broadway in just 10 weeks.]

*  *  *  *
“WRITING A PLAY IS ELECTRIFYING (AND TERRIFYING)”
by Tom Hanks 

[Hanks’s own account of his first experience as a dramatist was published in the New York Times of 15 December 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]).  Online, the article was posted as “Tom Hanks on the Electrifying (and Terrifying) Experience of Writing a Play“ on 14 December.]

Tom Hanks looks back on the process of creating This World of Tomorrow with James Glossman.

At the very first rehearsal of the new Off Broadway play This World of Tomorrow our director, Kenny Leon, stopped us after two minutes — two minutes. “I don’t want to hear how you are saying the lines,” he told us actors. “I want to hear what you are saying.”

We may have been focused on our dialects, but he was listening for the language of the play. And that language? It had evolved from prose on the page, my prose.

The play was based on a collection of short stories I’d written, and now my words were being spoken by the members of our all-star cast, including Kelli O’Hara, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Jay O. Sanders. I was not only acting along side them, but I was also responsible for what was coming out of their mouths. Would my words inspire them? Would they help my castmates convey the language Kenny was listening for?

In our rehearsal room, the rewriting never ended. The script that my collaborator, the playwright James Glossman, and I had pored over for months now sounded completely different coming from the cast. It was a little surreal to hear Ruben as a tech genius from the future explaining the perils of time travel or Kelli as a bookkeeper from the Bronx telling the story of her magical day at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Both sounded just as we had imagined but also completely different as we went from table reads to rewrites to rehearsals and more rewrites before finally freezing the script.

These words have been with me for over a decade. My stories were published in 2017 in a collection titled “Uncommon Type.” Then, over the past three-and-a half years, in the form of a script adapted from two of these stories. I’m no stranger to commitment. I’ve devoted months of my life to working on films and, back in 2013, the Broadway play “Lucky Guy.” But this would be different; this was years.

After quieting some internal doubts, I embarked on this endeavor, partly fueled by a desire to bring to life onstage a sense of lives caught between the certainties of the past and the unknowable future. I wanted theatergoers to ponder the possibilities of each present moment.

It all started during the Covid shutdown, when Jim presented a staged reading of my work at a fund-raiser for Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (Though we had never met, Jim and I had traveled in concentric theater circles in the 1970s and ‘80s.) His reading combined two stories from my book: “The Past Is Important to Us,” about a tech titan of the future who takes a sort of time travel vacation to 1939, and “Go See Costas,” inspired by my father-in-law’s escape from the Communists in postwar Bulgaria and his arrival in New York City.

[Though regions varied with respect to the imposition and withdrawal of closures due to the COVID pandemic, most areas of the U.S. issued shutdown orders in March 2020. In New York, the most restrictive closures began on 22 March. The order was lifted statewide on 15 June 2021.]

Jim thought the stories could work as pieces of theater: Two men leaving their pasts behind them, starting new lives in a new world and being changed by what they find in pre- and post-World War II America. I saw no reason to deny Jim that challenge.

What he called “Safe Home” evolved from a one-time reading into a full production at Shadowland. Opening night was in July 2022 [15 July-7 August], and I was rather thrilled by the production — though the play was crammed to the rafters with ideas and plot, and burdened with dialogue, monologues and explanations.

Still, given our overlapping pasts and affection for the prose of the short stories, we felt a desire to revisit the work. But where to begin — again? Jim and I exchanged pages for two years, rewriting each other, struggling to produce coherent dialogue, debating phrases and scenes. This is a science fiction story, but even we realized we were really pushing the logic of the science, the reasoning, the physics.

Then at an invaluable weeklong workshop in 2024 at Portland Stage in Maine, it became clear that James and I needed to work together in person in order to wrestle the play into shape. We settled on my agent’s offices in the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Would it be the crucible of creativity we needed?

[The Portland Stage workshop was part of the troupe’s annual Little Festival of the Unexpected (21 May-6 June 2024). Performances of See You Tomorrow, the new title of the play that would become This World of Tomorrow, were offered on 12 and 14 June.]

We revisited our research about the 1939 World’s Fair, and kept landing on a didactic bit of narration: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future . . . [.]” This came from the designer Norman Bel Geddes’s “Futurama,” a vast design for a future world, presented by General Motors in what was the fair’s most popular attraction.

We forged ahead, developing back stories for each character, figuring out which speeches resonated, and testing the number of jokes audiences would tolerate. We wanted to get the era right. One character played by Sanders owns a Greek diner just off Sheridan Square [heart of Greenwich Village]; another, Carmen Perry (O’Hara), works at a handbag factory, and lives with her brother’s family in the Bronx. Virginia, Carmen’s niece (Kayli Carter), is the president of her school’s radio club and obsessed with the advent of television. I portray a wealthy tech entrepreneur from 2089 who meets these characters when he travels back in time.

Sometime in the summer of 2024, we let some trusted minds read the latest rendering of our work. Debating innocuous wording was slightly excruciating (Do audiences respond better to “we have a situation” or “we have a problem”?), but the reactions landed like a gut punch: “Interesting!” “Huh?” “You might have something here.” Translation: There is more work to be done.

Somehow the manuscript made its way to Alex Poots and Laura Aswad at the Shed, who offered an official workshop — a staged reading. Jim and I gulped at the reality of what this deep throw would mean, then thought ‘Well, yeah, why not?’ We slapped the date on our calendars and rushed headlong into more revisions.

Now, how is this for timing? The reading of This World of Tomorrow was held at the Shed the day after the 2024 presidential election [5 November]. Just as we were taking an audience back to 1939 — which held its own uncertainty around war and the financial rebound from the Great Depression [1929-39] — there was a looming uncertainty, in 2024, of what the next four years would mean for the United States. Then came the realities of our endeavor: constructive criticism of what remained cloudy in the play’s narrative, theme and language.

As Jim and I dove back into the script, we were guided by notes from Alex and Todd Kreidler, the dramaturg and associate director; the reactions of the folks who attended the workshops; and friends who had read (and reread) it. Despite the work to be done, the Shed offered this fall for a production. Jim and I agreed to take the leap.

As rehearsals began at Gibney Center downtown [a dance venue with two facilities: Lower Manhattan and Union Square], missing beats were revealed. More revisions were made. The writing felt endless. New pages greeted the team each morning. Oftentimes the actors’ work the day before informed these new passages, their stone-cold authority illuminating moments that needed adjustments. Kenny kept stopping us, wanting to hear what the play was saying, in the language of the theater.

Previews arrived, and I eventually surrendered all but my actor hat. Jim and I handed over the final script to the cast to perform.

It’s electrifying to be a playwright — as terrifying a creative experience as I’ve ever had. It has also been a pleasure and an honor to join a cast and crew with such dedication, joy and brass. Some days, amid the rush of performing for a live audience, I feel as if our reality is forcing us to engage with the play’s themes: Staying present by embracing the moment, while also hurrying toward our inevitable future — the play’s final performance on Dec. 21.

[These three articles on This World of Tomorrow by Tom Hanks and James Glossman cover the announcement of the play’s arrival in New York City, the opening performance, and coauthor Hanks’s discussion of his inaugural experience as a writer of plays. 

[The second installment of “Tom Hanks, Playwright” will include excerpts from the transcript of Hanks’s 3 November 2025 guest shot on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  It’ll be posted on Sunday, 4 January, and I hope all ROTters will come back to read it.  Hanks is always an affable and amusing talk show guest, and this was no exception (though I have excerpted only the parts of the show in which the celebrity talks about the play).

[Part 2 will also include reviews of the Off-Broadway première of This World of Tomorrow.]

'Merrily We Roll Along,' Part 2

 

[Following on the reviews, both by Jesse Green, of the Broadway and Off-Broadway productions of Merrily We Roll Along that turned the legendary flop into a Tony-winning hit, I’m now posting the notices of two more revivals, Off-Broadway productions from 2019 (another review by Green) and 1994 (remember: I’m working backwards chronologically), then Frank Rich’s review of the 1981 première, and finally. Brooks Atkinson’s notice for the 1934 non-musical Merrily We Roll Along by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

[As I did in Part 1, I’ll give the record book details of each production (which are all included in my production history run-down at the beginning of the first part).  Then, after the 1934 review, I’ll make some observations to address the question my friend Kirk Woodward raised about what Maria Friedman, the director of the 2022/2023 revival, and her collaborators did to produce that success from the problematic book with the beloved score that’s been undead for over four decades.] 

“A BARE-BONES REVIVAL IN WHICH LESS IS LESS”

by Jesse Green 

[Review-writer Jesse Green seems to have made something of a study of Merrily We Roll Along productions, which makes his notices good measuring devices for looking at what has happened to the play over time.  Below is his review of a 2019 Off-Broadway revival of the musical which appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on 20 February 2019.

[As I’ve been doing since the first installment of this two-part post, I’ll now present the record book on this incarnation of the Sondheim-Furth musical:

The Roundabout Theatre Company of New York City presented the production of Merrily We Roll Along by its resident company, Fiasco Theater, at the Laura Pels Theatre in Manhattan’s Theatre District.  After previews starting on 12 January 2019, the show opened on 19 February and ran through 14 April (54 performances).

(Fiasco Theater, founded in 2009, styles itself as a company that “produce[s] stripped-down, actor-driven productions . . . with an emphasis on musicality and language . . . presented by partner theaters” [such as RTC].  In the words of New York Times review-writer Alexis Soloski—of a 2024 staging of Shakespeare’s Pericles—the troupe employs a “poor-theater playbook—a mostly bare stage furnished with charisma, invention, spirit and song.” )

The show was directed by Noah Brody and choreographed by Lorin Latarro.  The scenic designer was Derek McLane, costume designer was Paloma Young, lighting designer was Christopher Akerlind, and sound designer was Peter Hylenski.  The music was orchestrated by Alexander Gemignani.

The reduced cast—six actors in all, with doubling by those who weren’t playing the three central friends—included Jessie Austrian (Mary), Manu Narayan (Charley), and Ben Steinfeld (Frank).

The production didn’t win any awards, but received five nominations, including for the 2019 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical and the 2019 Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Revival.

[Note, if you will, Green’s remark that “[o]n the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal . . ., I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time.  Maybe it never will be . . . .”  Then look back at what he had to say three and four years later (see Part 1).]

There are few moments in musical theater as heartbreaking as the one near the end of “Merrily We Roll Along,” when the reverse chronology of the storytelling lands us on a Manhattan tenement rooftop in 1957.

We have already lived backward through 23 years of disillusion, as three friends, Frank, Charley and Mary, first seen as hardened adults in 1980, gradually grow younger, shedding their cynicism. Now singing “Our Time” — an anthem that sounds like what dew on a cobweb looks like — they appear in all their unpolluted promise, anticipating important lives and unbreakable bonds.

The only thing sadder than this moment in “Merrily” is “Merrily” itself. A show with one of the richest scores of the 1980s, by Stephen Sondheim — but one of the most problematic books, by George Furth — it has spent the 38 years since its flop Broadway opening on its own backward trajectory to find its best self. On the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal, which opened on Tuesday at the Laura Pels Theater, I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time.

Maybe it never will be — and I speak as someone who’d gladly patronize a dedicated “Merrily” repertory theater, perhaps on that rooftop, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity. Even if all the productions I’ve seen since 1981 have fallen short in some way, each one has added to my understanding of the show, and human nature.

Until now. The current production, a six-actor, eight-musician, one-act reduction by Fiasco Theater, in residence at the Roundabout Theater Company, seems not so much stripped-down as emaciated. All of the contrasts of idealism and greed, gloss and substance so central to the story’s effectiveness are flattened under the pressure of forcing it to stand without enough legs.

Purists may focus on the prickly new orchestrations (by Alexander Gemignani) and iffy singing (by almost everyone). And yes, these are problematic, even though you can sense how they reflect the production’s priorities. Fiasco, known for imaginative, fat-free stagings, does not aim for fancy or swell.

That minimalist aesthetic has worked just fine in recent takes on “Cymbeline” and “Measure for Measure” — and, for that matter, “Into the Woods” [1987], also by Mr. Sondheim, with a book by James Lapine. Fiasco’s story-theater format was marvelously effective in conveying the complex morality of that tale, regardless of how well any one song came off.

But “Merrily” was written when Mr. Sondheim was still mining the rich seam of his peak Broadway style. By the time he wrote “Into the Woods,” six years later, having reconsidered his threat to leave the theater entirely, he had adjusted his palette in response to cerebral new collaborators and stories.

“Merrily” can’t really reach its potential by superimposing that later approach. As indicated by Derek McLane’s warehouse of a set, stuffed with the detritus of decades of showbiz, it is a story about theatrical artists, vivid and nostalgic. Frank (Ben Steinfeld) is a Broadway composer who sells out to Hollywood; Charley (Manu Narayan) is his word man, who loudly doesn’t; and Mary (Jessie Austrian) is a writer trying to figure out where she fits in, which we learn right from the drunken start is nowhere.

Especially as run in reverse, their conflicts over love and work and what it means to stay friends must be dense enough to support the score, which in its original orchestration by Jonathan Tunick had great Golden Age schmaltz in its veins. [Tunick, a longtime musical arranger for Sondheim, also did the orchestrations for the 2022/2023 New York revival and won a Tony for that work. See Part 1.]

Here, something has flipped. The songs, with all their polish removed, no longer reflect the coherent Broadway world of the story but instead try to excavate its various interior workings. Often radically reconceived, harshly truncated or left to dribble away, they no longer ennoble the characters or provide much pleasure for the audience.

So “Now You Know,” Mary’s deliciously brassy effort to buck up Frank and bring down the curtain at what used to be the end of Act I, is rendered here as a mid-show dirge, exposing subtext that was better off sub.

Or take the bitter torch song “Not a Day Goes By,” sung by Frank in the original production. Reassigned to his betrayed wife, Beth (Brittany Bradford), on the eve of their brutal divorce, it makes better sense, in theory; but because of the reverse chronology, it’s pretty much the first thing out of her mouth and thus seems to come from nowhere.

“Why is that lady singing?” you may wonder — just as the conceptual set often leaves you asking, “Where are we?” and the use of three actors to cover the entire ensemble (the original cast numbered 27) has you trying to sort out who’s who.

I’ll let completists detail the many other changes: more cuts than additions, it seemed to me, except for a new scene, near the end, adapted from one in the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play on which the show is distantly based. (Utterly unmusicalized, the scene lays an egg.) The director Noah Brody has also interpolated a lot of business during the inter-scene rewinds; some is succinct and clever (at one point even the lyrics are sung backward), but some just seems like doodling.

Say what you will about the original production, with its just-turned-professional cast and bizarre costume concept, but I found that “Merrily” more coherent and moving than any I’ve seen since. Of course, I was just out of college then, the age of the characters when they sing “Our Time.” So perhaps I’m guilty of the same sin Mary nails in the song “Like It Was”: blaming “the way it is / on the way it was. / On the way it never ever was.”

Even so, one has to stand in awe of Mr. Sondheim for his willingness to allow intelligent younger artists to futz with his classic work. (Look for the gender-switched “Company,” now in London, to make its way to New York soon.) One day someone may even get “Merrily” right.

[The “gender-switched” Company ran on Broadway from 9 December 2021 to 31 July 2022. Directed by Marianne Elliott, who had staged the London production, with Katrina Lenk as a woman named Bobbie (instead of a man named Bobby) and several other characters whose genders were shifted, the show won the 2022 Tonys for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical, as well as the 2022 Drana Desk Awards for Outstanding Revival of a Musical and Outstanding Director of a Musical. Sondheim supported the show’s concept and saw a preview performance 11 days before he died on 26 November 2021. It went on tour around the United States after departing Broadway.]

In the meantime I find myself nodding in agreement when Frank says of Mary, “We go way back,” and she instantly zings: “But seldom forward.”

[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  (Further details in Part 1.)]

*  *  *  *

“REWORKED MUSICAL SHOWCASES SONDHEIM

BUT STILL HAS FLAWS”

by Frank Scheck 

[The review below, of another Off-Broadway revival of Merrily, is by Frank Scheck from the Christian Science Monitor of 23 June 1994.  I had had a half-baked idea of doing all New York Times notices for this series, just for the consistency, but it turned out that the Times, the “paper of record,” didn’t cover the York Theatre staging.  Hence, the CSM review.

[The book on this restaging of Merrily We Roll Along is as follows:

The York Theatre production was mounted at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan’s Midtown on the East Side.  It ran from 26 May to 17 July 1994 (54 performances).

The show was directed by Susan H. Schulman, with choreography by Michael Lichtefield.  The scenery was designed by James Morgan, costumes by Beba Shamash, lighting by Mary Jo Dondlinger, sound by Jim van Bergen, and projections by Wendall K. Harrington.  The musical director was Michael Rafter.

The principal cast included Malcolm Gets (Frank), Adam Heller (Charley), and Amy Ryder (Mary).  (Gets would play Frank again at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 2012, nearly 20 years later.  See the production history in Part 1.)

The York Theatre revival won the 1995 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, receiving two addition Lortel nominations.  It was also nominated for the 1995 Outer Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical.

[Scheck describes this production as “extensively revised,” but it wasn’t trimmed to the degree that the 2019 Fiasco Theater’s version was (see above).  Sondheim, however, did compose new songs for York’s revival.  Director Susan Schulman also broke the standard set by Harold Prince in 1981 by casting actors about a decade older than the youngsters who played the characters in the première.  Read what Scheck made of that.]

“Merrily We Roll Along” was a quick flop on Broadway in 1981, but since then this Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical has assumed the status of legend. Over the years numerous attempts have been made at reviving it, and now the Off Broadway York Theatre Company, which presented a magnificent chamber-size version of “Sweeney Todd” [1979] a few seasons back [1989], is trying its hand at resuscitating this difficult piece.

The show has been extensively revised, and the production features three new Sondheim songs. It is cast with performers mainly in their 30s, unlike the original Hal Prince-directed version, which cast youngsters in all the major roles. (This meant that the children played characters who were in their 40s at the beginning of the play and by the end of the show were college age.)

Like the Kaufman and Hart play on which it is based, “Merrily” presents its tale in backward chronological fashion. It begins in 1976, as we witness the fractured relationship between its three main characters, and in succeeding scenes illustrates exactly how their dreams and ambitions were thwarted. We see their first meeting and the full flowering of their optimism and idealism in a climactic scene at the end.

The show chronicles the relationship between composer Franklin Shepard (played by Malcom Gets), his best friend and lyricist-collaborator Charley Kringas (Adam Heller), and their pal Mary Flynn (Amy Ryder), who loves Franklin from afar. The two men start out with ambitious plans to write musicals that will change the world, but after initial blazing success, they lose their way.

Franklin becomes embroiled in a nasty divorce from his wife Beth (Anne Bobby) and has an affair with, and eventually marries, the shallow but beautiful actress (Michele Pawk) who stars in their show. He winds up a Hollywood sellout. Charley, who has become increasingly disenchanted with Franklin’s attention to everything but the work, goes off on his own, winning the Pulitzer Prize but losing his best friend. In probably the clearest example of dissipation, Mary, who at the beginning of her career is an acclaimed novelist, winds up a drunken drama critic.

The show seems much more successful now than it originally did at making us care about these characters. Their transformation, culminating in their painful-to-witness hopefulness at the end, is powerful and moving. But the backward structure doesn’t work now as it didn’t work then. It too obviously makes the points that we need to make for ourselves; the ironies and connections between events are hammered home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Since we know how the characters are going to end up we don’t care as much about how they got there. It also isn’t easy to empathize with the problems of rich and successful artists, no matter how creatively unfulfilled they may be.

What does still work, and what seems even stronger, is Sondheim’s glorious score, putting his current amorphous doodlings for “Passion” [1994] to shame. Anyone who has ever doubted this composer’s gift for melody or emotionalism need look no further than “Old Friends,” “Not a Day Goes By,” or “Good Thing Going.”

Susan Schulman’s direction is necessarily hampered by the low budget and awkward theater space, but she has done careful, considered work that makes the show work probably as well as it possibly can. The cast is generally uneven, but the leading performances are quite skillful: Malcom Gets is particularly powerful playing a character who can be quite unsympathetic, and Adam Heller and Amy Ryder bring a strong comic flair to their roles.

The York’s “Merrily” will not revise anyone’s opinion of the work enough to consider it a neglected masterpiece, but it does provide an excellent opportunity to reappraise its strengths and weaknesses and to hear that marvelous score again.

[Frank Scheck has been covering film, theater, and music for more than 30 years.  He was previously the editor of Stages magazine, the chief theater reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor and a theater critic and culture writer for the New York Post.  His writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Daily News, Playbill, Backstage, the Hollywood Reporter, and various national and international newspapers.  He’s provided on-air commentary for the BBC, MSNBC, and the Fox Business channel, among others.]

*  *  *  *
“STAGE: A NEW SONDHEIM, ‘MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG’”
by Frank Rich 

[Back, now, to the New York Times, here’s Frank Rich’s review of the première of Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, published on 17 September 1981.  For the record, here is the book on the original production of the musical:

The Broadway and world première of the musical adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along started previews at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre on 8 October 1981, with opening night on 16 November.  After an almost universally bad reception from both the press and the audiences, the show closed on 28 November, after 44 previews and 16 regular performances.

The director was Harold Prince, until this failure, a frequent (and successful) collaborator with Sondheim.  The show was choreographed by Larry Fuller and the score orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick.

The scenery was designed by Eugene Lee, the costumes by Judith Dolan, the lighting by David Hersey, and the sound by Jack Mann.

The cast of 27 (mostly new, young professionals) included Ann Morrison as Mary Flynn, Lonny Price as Charley Kringas, and Jim Walton as Franklin Shepard as the three friends, and featured Jason Alexander as Joe (Frank’s producer) and Giancarlo Esposito as the valedictorian.

The production won a 1982 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics and was also nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music.  It received a nomination for the 1982 Tony for Best Original Score.

[This is where the phenomenon that was Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along began.  Part 1 of this series covers some of the ups and, mostly, downs of the saga of this legendary flop, until it rose to its greatest success so far in the 2022 Off-Broadway and 2023 Broadway revivals.  See, now, what Timesman Rich, sometimes known as “the butcher of Broadway,” thought of the play at its début.]

As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals. Usually the heartbreak comes from Mr. Sondheim’s songs — for his music can tear through us with an emotional force as moving as Gershwin’s. And sometimes the pain is compounded by another factor — for some of Mr. Sondheim’s most powerful work turns up in shows (“Anyone Can Whistle” [1964], “Pacific Overtures” [1976]) that fail. Suffice it to say that both kinds of pain are abundant in “Merrily We Roll Along,” the new Sondheim-Harold Prince-George Furth musical that opened at the Alvin last night. Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful — that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles.

“Merrily We Roll Along” has been adapted by Mr. Furth from the second George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart collaboration, a Broadway curiosity of 1934. [The first collaboration was Once in a Lifetime (1930), the center of Hart’s autobiography, Act One (1959).] While the new version is rewritten and updated, it repeats the defects of the original text — even as it adds more of its own. Now, as before, “Merrily” is about three best friends who reach the top of the Broadway-Hollywood showbiz whirl only to discover, in two cases, that their lives are empty, petty and loveless. The gimmick is to tell the story backwards. The central plot begins with the principals at a present-day party, where they’re at their lowest, most jaded ebb. We end up at a high-school graduation, where the hero vows to uphold all the pure ideals we’ve spent the evening watching him betray.

Mr. Furth blunts the shock effect of the original play’s structure by enclosing it within a conventional flashback, and, even so, he fails to solve its major dramatic failure. We never do learn why the characters reached the sad state they’re in at the outset. While a busy story — often built around unconvincing, melodramatic twists — does tell us how the three friends fell apart, that’s not enough.

We keep waiting for some insight into these people — that might make us understand, if not care, about them — but all we get is fatuous attitudinizing about how ambition, success and money always lead to rack and ruin. Like Kaufman and Hart — but unlike Harold Pinter in the similarly designed “Betrayal” — Mr. Furth abandons his emotional issues entirely once he moves far back in time. Act II is all anticlimactic plot exposition — an undramatized, breathless recap of the red letter events that first brought the friends to fame.

There’s another difficulty as well, for the book’s tone often seems as empty as its characters. Mr. Furth’s one-line zingers about showbiz, laced with unearned nastiness, are as facile as those he brought to “The Act” [1977 Liza Minnelli vehicle by Furth and composer-lyricist team of John Kander and Fred Ebb] and “The Supporting Cast” [1981]. He defines the show’s principal female character, an alcoholic writer (Ann Morrison), by giving her labored retreads of the wisecracks he wrote for Elaine Stritch in his book for the Sondheim-Prince “Company” [1970]. Meanwhile, the emotional basis of the friendship between the two heroes, a composer (Jim Walton) and a lyricist (Lonny Price) — or between them and the heroine — is never established at all. We’re just told, repeatedly, that they’re lifelong friends.

Perhaps the libretto’s most unfortunate aspect, however, is its similarity to James Goldman’s far fuller one for the Sondheim-Prince “Follies.” That 1971 musical also gave us bitter, middle-aged friends, disappointed in love and success, who reunite at a showbiz party, then steadily move back through time until they become the idealistic kids they once were. Forced to contemplate the esthetic gap that separates these two like-minded shows, we see that not only the characters are rolling backward this time out.

“Follies” had everything the new version does not — most notably a theatrical metaphor that united all its elements, from its production design and staging and choreography (by Michael Bennett [1943-87; conceiver of A Chorus Line (1975)]) to its score. It also used the effective trick of assigning each major character to two actors, one middle-aged and one young, so that past and present could interweave at will to potent effect. With one passing exception, the roles in “Merrily” are always played by young actors, no matter what the characters’ ages or how high the toll in cuteness.

While Mr. Prince often finds brilliant unifying concepts for his shows, even the ones that don’t work, he’s come up with a flat one here — school. Eugene Lee’s set is a high tech jungle jim [sic] of bleachers, surrounded by gym lockers, that looks as if it’s left over from “Runaways” [1978 musical by Elizabeth Swados about street children who ran away from home]. When it is augmented by skyline projections, it becomes a decimated version of the set from “Company” — a parallel that’s reinforced by the staging of the party scenes and the dramatic uses of platforms. As has been true of some other recent Prince shows, the choreography, by Larry Fuller, is uninspired to the extent that it exists at all.

Although Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics seem less airborne than usual, as do Jonathan Tunick’s brassy, Jule Styne-esque orchestrations, the score only occasionally falls to the show’s level. There are two songs, “Rich and Happy” and “It’s a Hit!,” that are as glib as the book, and one parody number about the Kennedys (a 60’s composition of the heroes) that may be intended as a satirical pastiche of such parodies, but is unfunny in any case.

The other, sublime numbers give the three appealing principal players their only opportunities to reveal their talent. Mr. Price, in the most sympathetic role, is a charming, Woody Allen-esque fellow who brings fire to the show’s angriest song (“Franklin Shepard, Inc.”) and a plaintive undersell to its most conventional ballad (“Good Thing Going”). Mr. Walton, likable, if less than charismatic, as an innocent-gone-sour, gives a rush of sweetness to “Not a Day Goes By,” a relentless song of unrequited love that matches its equivalent, “Too Many Mornings,” in “Follies.” Miss Morrison’s heroine, attractively plump and sassy, sparks what may be the show’s richest song, the trio “Old Friends.”

With the exception of Sally Klein, as a jettisoned first wife, the rest of the cast is dead wood until the penultimate number, an ironic, idealistic anthem titled “Our Time.” At that point, Mr. Sondheim’s searing songwriting voice breaks through once more to address, as no one else here does, the show’s poignant theme of wasted lives. But what’s really being wasted here is Mr. Sondheim’s talent. And that’s why we watch “Merrily We Roll Along” with an ever-mounting — and finally upsetting — sense of regret.

[Frank Rich served as chief theater reviewer of the New York Times from 1980 to 1993.  He first won attention from theater-goers with an essay for the Harvard Crimson (“Theatre: The Last Musical,” 26 February 1971) about the Broadway musical Follies by Stephen Sondheim during its pre-Broadway tryout run in Boston.  (Follies had its Boston tryout at the Colonial Theatre from 20 February through 20 March 1971.  It opened on Broadway on 4 April.)  In his study of the work, Rich was “the first person to predict the legendary status the show eventually would achieve,” according to Ted Chapin in his book, Everything Was Possible — The Birth of the Musical Follies (Knopf, 2003).

[Before joining the New York Times, Rich was a film and television critic for Time, a film reviewer for the New York Post, and film reviewer and senior editor of New Times Magazine.  In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of the Richmond (Virginia) Mercury.  Rich is currently writer-at-large for New York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the “Daily Intelligencer.”

[Richard Linklater announced in 2019 that he would film an adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along over the course of 20 years, allowing the cast to age with their characters (a style Linklater used in Boyhood).  Actors Ben Platt, Paul Mescal, and Beanie Feldstein portray Charley, Frank, and Mary.  Feldstein played one of the students in the school production of Merrily in the 2017 film Lady Bird.  (She also did Fanny Brice in a Broadway revival of Funny Girl in 2022.)

[In addition, the 2013 Menier Chocolate Factory production in London was filmed for broadcast to select cinemas, and on 18 June 2024, the producers of the current Broadway revival announced that RadicalMedia, the company that filmed the original cast of Hamilton for Disney+ and Come from Away for Apple TV+, would be filming that production.  

[Also, there’s a 2016 documentary of the ill-fated 1981 début production directed by original cast member Lonny Price (Charley Kringas), Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.  Along with Price, the other members of the central trio—Ann Morrison (Mary Flynn) and Jim Walton (Franklin Shepard)—plus others, such as Jason Alexander (Joe), appear.  The film, distributed by Atlas Media Corp., opened on 18 November 2016 in New York City, after premièring at the New York Film Festival in October.

[The original Broadway cast of Merrily recorded the show the day after their final performance.  The recording was released by RCA as an LP album in April 1982, then compact disc in 1986.  A 2007 remastered CD release from Sony/BMG Broadway Masterworks includes a bonus track of Sondheim performing “It's a Hit.”

[A cast recording of the York Theatre Off-Broadway production, which included extended cuts and dialogue, was released in 1994 by Varèse Sarabande, and a recording of the 2012 Encores! concert revival cast was released by PS Classics as a two-CD set, featuring Colin Donnell, Celia Keenan Bolger, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Betsy Wolfe, and Elizabeth Stanley.

[The recent Broadway revival announced just after the end of the performance on 14 November 2023, that a digital cast recording would be available for streaming within hours on the 15th.  The physical CD was released on 12 January 2024.]

*  *  *  *
“ANATOMY OF WORLDLY SUCCESS IN ‘MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG,’
BY GEORGE S. KAUFMAN AND MOSS HART”
by Brooks Atkinson 

[Since so much of the Sondheim-Furth musical was derived from the non-musical, Merrily We Roll Along, I am posting the New York Times review of the première of the play, published on 1 October 1934.  The reviewer was the renowned Brooks Atkinson, arguably the most respected theater writer of his time, often called the conscience of the theater.

[As I have with all the productions in this series, I’ll present the record for this show:

Merrily We Roll Along, the straight pay by George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and Moss Hart (1904-61), the writing team whose second collaboration this was, following Once in a Lifetime (1931), débuted at the Music Box Theatre from 29 September 1934 to 9 February 1935 (155 performances).

Kaufman staged the production himself (as he often did) with scenic design by Jo Mielziner and costumes designed by John Hambleton.  (I haven’t found a record of the other production artists.  It wasn’t common to list them in the playbill in that era.)  Mielziner (1901-76) was described as “the most successful set designer of the Golden Age of Broadway” (Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time [2010]).

The cast of 55 included Walter Abel as Jonathan Crale (Charley Kringas in the musical), Kenneth MacKenna as Richard Niles (Franklin Shepard), and Mary Philips as Julia Glenn (Mary Flynn).

No awards were made, but the major theater awards for the most part hadn’t started being presented on 1934.  (The Tonys started in 1945 and the Drama Desk Awards were first presented in 1955.  Only the Drama League had started giving their awards—in 1922—but they weren’t established until 1935.)

[The non-musical Merrily was the basis for George Furth’s book for the musical version.  The book, as you’ve read above and in Part 1, was the main problem with the musicalization, so it’s useful to see what Kaufman and Hart wrought that haunted theatergoers, reviewers, and Sondheim enthusiasts for over four decades.]

After fumbling around over inconsequential tasks for the past four weeks, the theatre has acquired stature again with the production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which was put on at the Music Box Saturday evening. This anatomy of worldly success, written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, is the first resolute, mature-minded drama of the season. Four years ago at this time Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart were making impudent faces at Hollywood in a hilarious satire labeled “Once in a Lifetime.” They still write brilliantly comic dialogue when the time is ripe for laughter. But “Merrily We Roll Along” is a reflective drama with a concern for the integrity of the characters it discusses. Having put their hands to a somber theme, the authors do not cheapen it with flippancy. They are looking anxiously into the background of a group of smug and successful worldlings and they see things that are likely to move you deeply. Mr. Kaufman has staged the drama with the same fidelity to high-minded purpose. Obviously, “Merrily We Roll Along” is a skillful piece of play-writing and staging. But it is also a fine one that dares to stand in principle. After this declaration of ethics it will be impossible to dismiss Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart as clever jesters with an instinct for the stage.

Their characters are the sort of moderns they know at first hand—creatures of the successful theatre, actors, producers, a playwright, a female wit and an artist. Some of them can be recognized out of the lore of the demi-monde. In the first scene you see them assembled in an ostentatious Long Island mansion, drinking, flattering and patting their egoes [sic]. It is fashionably decadent, and when the scene closes in a foul brawl of drunken abuse you are relieved to know that the time sequence of the play moves backward. From 1934 it goes back by easy stages to 1916 in a search for the sources of degeneracy. Gradually the chief characters emerge as Richard Niles, popular playwright; Julia Glenn, writer of trifles, and Jonathan Crale, non-conformist painter. Amid the mob of sycophants and triflers they are the ones who began their apprenticeship with devotion to high enterprise. But Crale, who has great gusto for living, is the only one who has preserved his integrity by making no facile compromises along the way. As a whole, “Merrily We Roll Along” is the rebuking story of how proud youth debases itself into shoddy middle age.

By telling their story backward the authors create a mood of private introspection. They recover the different periods by isolating small bits if evidence—short skirts in the costuming, fragments of popular songs, political gossip, military uniforms. Although their temper is pensive they enjoy the humors of remembrance and toss in neatly phrased gibes about familiar events. When they retreat as far back as 1925 to a sketch of life in Jonathan Crale’s disorderly studio their humor is broad, hearty and sympathetic. But their case study of the middle-aged charlatans who have succeeded in 1934 is in essence a pitiless, painful dissection of character, animated by an earnest concern for the common malevolence of living. You are likely to hold your breath from fear and horror when you see by what normal cupidity a cynical playwright can descend from a fervent college idealist. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart have reminded us of the exalted impulses we lose when we connive to keep alive.

If “Merrily We Roll Along” reflects great credit upon the authors, it performs a like office for the actors. There is not a slovenly stroke in the acting. Most of it represents the players at the peak of their careers. Mary Philips, Kenneth MacKenna, Jessie Royce Landis and Walter Abel have never appeared to better advantage or in better form. In less strategic parts Cecilia Loftus, Adrienne Marden, Granville Bates, Malcolm Duncan, George Alison, Wilfrid Seagram and Grant Mills disclose genuine feeling for the idea they represent. Jo Mielziner has fitted the production to a wardrobe of versatile settings.

Although the cast is enormous and the production complicated, the performance is vigorous, resilient and impeccable. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart have written a drama of which they may be proud. It restores a reviewer’s pride to be able to say so.

[The 1934 Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along received mostly good notices but was a financial failure and has not been revived on Broadway.  The financial demands of the large-scale production—it had a cast of 55!—made the show expensive.  A touring production planned to follow the 1934 production was cancelled.

[Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984) wrote for the New York Times from 1922 to 1960.  Atkinson became a Times theater reviewer in the 1920s and his notices became very influential.  He left the drama desk during World War II to report on the war, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times.  He returned to the theater beat in the late 1940s, until his retirement in 1960.  In his obituary, the Times called him “the theater’s most influential reviewer of his time.”

[Atkinson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.  After his retirement, he became a member of The Players, a social club established by actor and theater-owner Edwin Booth (1833-93) in his Stanford White townhouse on Gramercy Park to bring actors into contact with men of different professions such as industrialists, writers, and other creative artists.  The former Mansfield Theatre on Broadway was named the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in his honor between 1960 and 2022.  It was renamed for actress-singer Lena Horne in 2022.

[If readers recall from my closing comments in Part 1, my friend Kirk Woodward wondered what Maria Friedman did with her 2022/2023 production of Merrily We Roll Along to make it work so much better than all the musical’s previous incarnations had over 41 years.  From what I can glean from my superficial reading, Kirk seems to be at least partly correct in his guess that the improvement is due to “attention to detail.”​  

[Friedman, according to Jesse Green, jettisoned unwieldy ensemble scenes and substituted solo ones with Jonathan Groff.  She made his character (and his performance) the centerpiece of the revised production, and she focused the narrative that (according to Frank Rich) was diffuse and pointless so that it makes (some) sense and seems more rational.

[One criticism put it that the authors never got around to developing the underlying point of the play.  I think this is what Jesse Green, in his review of the Broadway production, meant by “the absent spine” of the play in its earlier interpretations, which was “revealed” only in the refocusing for the 2022/2023 revival.

[Rich also points out that in the première, the emotional lives of the characters aren’t revealed, we’re only told they’re friends.  As I understand it, there’s no context for the closeness of the three focal friends, and without that, the dissolution of their friendship, the cause of the unhappiness that’s the center of the drama, isn’t emotionally engaging to the audience.

[The remedy for this, it seems is the shift in Friedman’s reworking from focusing on what Green calls (in the New York Theatre Workshop review) “the triangle” of Charley, Frank, and Mary to “its apex,” Frank.  This can happen because Friedman made Jonathan Groff’s performance—and therefore his character—the center of the play (that is, the apex of the triangle) in a way “it has never been previously.” 

[Apparently, that shift in focus, from the three friends to Frank as the prime mover of the drama, makes the shaky, famously “problematic” plot cohere—at least to a greater degree than ever before.

[In addition, there may be some benefit from the casting—especially Groff, whom Green said was the best Frank he’d ever seen.  Daniel Ratcliffe gets praise ​for his character portrayal as well—his Charley became the sort of anchor that keeps the whole plot from flying off in all directions the way reviewers of previous versions of Merrily have found.  But it wouldn’t have been possible if Friedman hadn’t put Groff in the role she was going to make the engine that drives the plot.

[It also sounds to me as if the reason Sondheim’s score has always been so cherished, despite the “problematic” book, was that the composer had the right understanding of what drives the story and the characters, whereas Furth got too caught up with the mechanics of telling a plot in reverse order.

[Friedman stressed the “insight of the songs,” using them as the guide to the nature of the play, rather than let the book take the lead.  She deemphasized everything else and boosted the songs, observed Green.  This put Sondheim in charge of the play’s dynamic, and he, apparently, nailed it.

[What Mary Friedman did, whatever it was, she apparently had Sondheim’s blessing, if not his input.]