{"id":46361,"date":"2025-11-20T18:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/46361\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T18:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:46:13","slug":"this-world-of-tomorrow-go-for-tom-hanks-stay-for-kelli-ohara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/46361\/","title":{"rendered":"This World of Tomorrow: Go for Tom Hanks, Stay for Kelli O\u2019Hara"},"content":{"rendered":"

November 18, 2025 10:29 pm <\/p>\n

By Melissa Rose Bernardo<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606 Kenny Leon directs a 150-year-spanning sci-fi-tinged New York play<\/p>\n

\"TomTom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow. Photo: Marc J. Franklin<\/p>\n

For a play so obsessed with the future, there\u2019s something decidedly old-fashioned about This World of Tomorrow, the peculiar, anodyne drama by Tom Hanks and James Glossman that just opened at The Shed in Hudson Yards.<\/p>\n

Hanks (in an embarrassingly bad hairpiece) stars as Bert Allenberry, a seemingly average Joe taking in the wonders of the 1939 New York World\u2019s Fair. \u201cNever has the world held a brighter promise of things to come. The present is but an instant between an Infinite Past and A Hurrying Future,\u201d he reads from his trusty guidebook. He\u2019s accompanied by Cyndee (Kerry Bish\u00e9), who\u2019s less impressed and more concerned about taking off her very chic, extremely uncomfortable shoes.<\/p>\n

On an adjacent bench, Carmen Perry (the sublime Kelli O\u2019Hara) and her rambunctious niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, who\u2019s terrific but unconvincing as an 11 year old), stop for a moment and a polite chat.<\/p>\n

[Read Frank Scheck\u2019s \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606 review here.<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Then, suddenly, we\u2019re in the far-off future in Salina, Kansas. \u201cWelcome back to 2089,\u201d says M-Dash (the genial Ruben Santiago-Hudson). Turns out the 150-year time-traveling trip was something called a Chronometric Adventure, and it cost $225 million. \u201cMy birthday present for the boss,\u201d shrugs Cyndee, who also shares an \u201cIntimate Relations Contact\u201d with Bert. It\u2019s never clear what Bert, Cyndee, and M-Dash do, or where exactly they work. A tech company? It\u2019s someplace where they can easily summon ELMA, the External Learning Machine Associate (Jamie Ann Romero)\u2014sort of the their own personal Google, but smarter. And once they start talking about \u201cNeura-Link network,\u201d \u201cImpulse coding,\u201d and \u201cNewtonian Sequencing,\u201d we can\u2019t help but wonder, how soon can we get back to 1939?<\/p>\n

Bert wants to go back as well, officially to see more of the World\u2019s Fair but clearly to see more of Carmen. We get a glimpse into her home life with her overprotective brother, Max (Jay O. Sanders, in an even worse hairpiece), sister-in-law, Sylvia (Romero), niece Virginia.<\/p>\n

With each trip to 1939, Bert re-meets Carmen and gets to know more about her. Consequently, every return to 2089 becomes more and more frustrating. The past is so much more intriguing. Remember when New York had nearly a dozen newspapers? Bert gets them all delivered to his hotel room in one massive pile and reads all the names: The New York Daily Mirror, The New York World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Age, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Worker, the Brooklyn Eagle, The Journal-American, and The Amsterdam News.<\/p>\n

Hanks, who starred in Nora Ephron\u2019s play Lucky Guy on Broadway in 2013, is very comfortable onstage. Still, we can\u2019t shake the feeling that This World of Tomorrow would be better off as a movie. (Groundhog Day, Time and Again\u2014you get the drift.) Or as a book, where the characters could get more attention. That\u2019s where it all started: Hanks and Glossman based the play on three short stories from Hanks\u2019 2017 collection Uncommon Type. We leave the show wanting more of Bert and Carmen\u2019s story\u2026where do they go from here?<\/p>\n

This World of Tomorrow opened Nov. 18, 2025, at The Shed and runs through Dec. 21. Tickets and information: theshed.org<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"November 18, 2025 10:29 pm By Melissa Rose Bernardo \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606 Kenny Leon directs a 150-year-spanning sci-fi-tinged New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-46361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}