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      Tom Hanks Will Perform His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’ Off Broadway

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      “This World of Tomorrow,” based on the actor’s 2017 short story collection, is scheduled to begin performances in October at the Shed.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, 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 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.”“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.” More

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      ‘Bowl EP’ Review: Sessions in Love

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      Nazareth Hassan’s play follows the tender romance (and acid-fueled hallucinations) two skateboarders share.The play “Bowl EP,” written and directed by Nazareth Hassan, is really more of a double LP.The titles of its discrete scenes (25 in total!) are projected as track names onto the sunken, in-the-round skatepark set of this exuberant premiere at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, co-produced with the National Black Theater in association with the New Group. The first half conjures a fun flirtation between two queer aspiring rappers, while the second is a jagged refraction of its ideas. At 80 minutes, the whole play pulses with a concentrated immediacy.The main M.C.s, if you will, are the jovial Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje) and the seductively internal Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus): two 20-somethings who skate absent-mindedly while spitting potential rhymes. While deciding on a name for their duo, they strike up a playful romance over an indeterminate period of time.The two are tender with each other, fooling around between skate tricks and occasionally revealing glimpses of inner turmoil. Hassan charts these low-key adventures through impish scene titles (projected in inventive typefaces by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor) like “picking a name for their rap group attempt four” and “skating and drinking.” The drained swimming pool that is Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek’s set, and the skateboarders’ “bowl,” often places the actors below the gaze of the audience, which is seated on all four sides, lending an analytical lens to the stage interactions.Substances, from the casual vape pen to MDMA, help the pair find inspiration and grow closer. But like most of what’s played off as typical youthful behavior, this recreational habit returns under a new light in the piece’s second half, which is triggered by an acid-fueled sex act between the couple.That jarring shift comes with the arrival of Lemon Pepper Wings, a pangender demon who haunts Quentavius’s mind, and is suggested to have once pestered Kelly. (Hassan, who is nonbinary, winks at the clunkiness of communicating gender by referring to the creature as every combination of “he/she/they.”)Lemon is played by Felicia Curry in a bravura psychedelic freakout of a commedia dell’arte performance that begins in full anime cosplay, plush head mask and all. (DeShon Elem’s costume design here wildly expands from D.I.Y. skater outfits.) Shattering the fourth wall — all four of them, in this case — as the “patron demon of the intimate,” Lemon cuts through the issues pushing the lovers together and pulling them apart.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: How Music Came Down to Earth, in ‘Goddess’

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      Amber Iman lives up to the title of a musical about the divine gift of song.If you’re going to call your show “Goddess,” you’d better have one handy. Luckily, the musical with that name that opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater stars Amber Iman, who fully fits the bill. Whether scatting or belting or just standing tall in gold eye shadow and regal gowns, she conveys the combination of power and ease that inevitably elicits words like “otherworldly.”When Saheem Ali, the director of “Goddess,” gives Iman and the rest of the talented cast a chance to display that otherworldliness, mostly while performing the songs by Michael Thurber and dances by Darrell Grand Moultrie, the show makes a strong case for live performance as a central expression of our divided nature. “What is human? What is divine?” goes one of Thurber’s better lyrics. “Do either exist until they intertwine?”But when merely talking, “Goddess” descends. The book by Ali, with additional material by James Ijames, is labored, with a conventional plot about a young Kenyan man torn between furthering his family’s political dynasty and baring his artistic soul. (He plays saxophone.) It doesn’t take long to get bogged down in banalities of both the domestic and the folkloric variety.Because yes, the goddess of the title is literal. Iman plays Marimba, a mythic East African queen who, we learn in a flashback, taught humans to sing and gave them their first instruments. But like Omari, the saxophonist, Marimba has parent problems. Her mother wants her to go into the family business, which to judge from Julian Crouch’s amazing puppets and masks is evidently Evil Incarnate. But Marimba, refusing to accept the mantle of war goddess, instead escapes to Mombasa to live under a new name, Nadira, in an underground nightclub called Moto Moto.Arica Jackson, left, plays a spunky nightclub owner and Nick Rashad Burroughs, seated in the chair, is its exuberant emcee.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt is there that Nadira becomes a queen in the secular sense: a star. Singing Thurber’s mélange of music, which encompasses smooth jazz, R&B, theatrical pop and an aura of Afrobeat, she draws an audience that is similarly diverse. Moto Moto, run by the spunky Rashida (Arica Jackson) and emceed by the exuberant Ahmed (Nick Rashad Burroughs) becomes a hotbed of heterogeneity (there’s even a shaman) in a culture that is otherwise intolerant of mixing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bus Stop’ Review: Travelers Find Shelter From a Storm

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      Intimacy is at the heart of this rare revival of William Inge’s 1955 play, about stranded passengers learning from one another and about themselves.When a blizzard strands stagecoach passengers in a lodge in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” violence and mayhem erupt. Death looms.Eight people are also marooned by a snowstorm in William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop,” but what looms for them is life: Some take stock, others try to figure out what awaits.Best known for its movie adaptation starring Marilyn Monroe, “Bus Stop” isn’t seen much in New York these days, so Classic Stage Company, the National Asian American Theater Company and Transport Group should be thanked for this revival.The director Jack Cummings III staged Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic” in repertory for the Transport Group in 2017, and is familiar with the delicate bard of the Midwest, whose deceptively plain work captures the lives of working people. The most consequential decision here is to forgo amplification, creating a sense of intimacy at the Kansas diner where four bus passengers and their driver (David Shih) wait out the weather. The diner’s owner Grace (Cindy Cheung) and a waitress, the high school student Elma (Delphi Borich), are used to parades of customers, but maybe not for such extended stays. Conversations stop and start as the visitors chat among themselves and with the locals, who include the sheriff, Will (David Lee Huynh). Elma, for example, is fascinated by Dr. Gerald Lyman (Rajesh Bose), a former professor whose flowery verbiage evokes a broader, more literate world than hers — and a more perverse one, too, as he has a taste for underage women.But the most striking of the newcomers is Cherie (Midori Francis), a nightclub singer who has been whisked away by Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen), a smitten young cowboy who plans to take her to his Montana ranch, whether she likes it or not.The story line is rattling to a contemporary audience. But the beauty, humanity and complexity of Inge’s writing is that he makes us understand what drives Bo and, even more important, who Cherie is, and why she stays with Bo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Creditors’ Review: Who Pays the Price for a Bankrupt Marriage?

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      Liev Schreiber stars in an update of the bleak Strindberg classic about a husband and wife and the man who seeks to destroy them.If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist?I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself.His excess of rage found its way into plays — “Miss Julie” (1888) and “The Dance of Death” (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive.The contradiction is at its most vexing in “Creditors,” a follow-up to “Miss Julie” that flips the earlier play’s love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense.That “Creditors” is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play’s balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman’s thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account.The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of “dead languages,” are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi’s professional failures, connecting them to Tekla’s galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what’s to stop her from doing the same to her second?The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them “The Roommate,” “The Moors” and “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg’s three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse’ Review: Down the Y2K Clickhole

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      In Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s fizzy new musical, an internet sleuth searches for a pop star wannabe who went missing along with her low-rise jeans.The image is instantly familiar: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears crammed into a car, caught in a paparazzi flash, on the cover of The New York Post. That iconic photograph, from 2006, and the inside article’s headline — “3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse” — conjures a time when Calvin Klein boxers peeked out from low-rise jeans, pop star aspirants pinned their hopes on MTV’s “Total Request Live,” and a juicy tabloid meltdown could end a career.In “The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse,” a deliciously fizzy new musical from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley that opened Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, something is different in this version of the photo. The painted tableau of the three bimbos that looms briefly onstage contains a previously unnoticed detail: a slim wrist, at the edge of the frame, dangling a charm bracelet that spells out “Coco.”Now, in 2025, a Zillennial internet sleuth who goes by Brainworm (Milly Shapiro) fills us in: Coco was a one-hit wannabe who had uploaded her own music videos to YouTube in the hopes of going viral, or at least bacterial, before she disappeared. We see the red-maned Coco (Keri René Fuller) appear onstage in a midriff-exposing top, belting out a murderously upbeat tune. “I don’t think therefore I am!” she sings before needling her listeners: “the less you try / the more they cry out for ur bag of tricks / (they’re dumb as bricks).” The song is catchy as hell, and plays like an underdog bid for MTV immortality.Brainworm enlists the help of two other “worms” — teenage shut-ins who also spend their waking lives online — to track down Coco: Earworm (Luke Islam), who sports cat ears and decodes pop culture and fashion, and Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk), who sifts through media and politics from his Nebraska bedroom. Like Brainworm, who identifies as an “intersectional feminist” and specializes in tracking down missing girls, they are descendants of PerezHilton.com and Tumblr true-crime threads.Soon, they fall into a clickhole of clues. An obituary for Coco surfaces, which mentions that she “went on a bender and spiraled out of control.” Grainy flip-phone photos are studied. Is that a knife jammed into a clothing rack? Could it have been used as a murder weapon? And what to make of the “Coco” charm bracelet Brainworm received from an anonymous sender? Is it a hoax?In their search, the worms leave no monogrammed outfit unturned. (Cole McCarty’s costumes revisit the era’s rhinestone-studded jeans, velour tracksuits and garish, faux-glam accessories.) And lyrics to Coco’s song are obsessively analyzed. The best of the musical’s tunes, which includes Coco’s ecce bimbo opener as well as more speculative numbers sung by the worms in places like Walmart, have the tingle of soda pop reaching a tender spot at the back of your throat. (The music director Dan Schlosberg leads a small but mighty band upstage.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Irishtown’ and ‘The Black Wolfe Tone,’ Where Are the Rolling Hills?

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      Two plays at Irish Repertory Theater, one featuring a “Derry Girls” star, explore the real and the mythical in cultural identity.In the rehearsal room of the Irishtown Players, the posters on the walls are a sampler of the company’s performance history: 20th-century classics, almost all. Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” is up there, of course, and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” too, and Conor McPherson’s “The Weir.”The only unfamiliar title, “The Happy Leper of Larne,” almost winks from its frame, suggesting a maudlin-cheery cousin to “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”For the Irishtown Players — the fictional Dublin troupe at the center of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s new backstage comedy, “Irishtown” — “The Happy Leper” was a hit. Now some producers are bringing the company to Broadway in the author’s follow-up play. But with mere weeks until they leave for New York, the playwright, Aisling (Brenda Meaney), has gone rogue. Her just-delivered script is a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault, set in England.To Constance (a flawlessly funny Kate Burton), the ranking company member, such a play is not Irish at all.Poppy (Angela Reed), the play’s British director, points out that by definition it is, because Aisling is.“Yes,” Constance allows, her voice rising theatrically, “but where are the rolling hills, where is the bar, why is everyone alive?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct’

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      A new play about a middle-age professor and his teenage student forces you to ask: Who’s grooming whom?We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you’ve heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman’s venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty’s labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson’s long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman’s manhandling of an actual lawn mower.Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a “world class college.” He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac.” Currently he is separated from his third.Soon another cliché enters: the “grossly underwritten” sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to “expose their mediocrity.” That’s Beatty’s Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.“The erotics of pedagogy,” Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.It is here you may say to yourself: I’ve seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays (“Oleanna”) and novels (“Disgrace”) — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man’s point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie’s lines are more like this: “I shouldn’t / I don’t know why I / Said that / Sorry I’m mm.”The thrill of this production, our critic writes, is that it doesn’t tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More