Tom Hanks Returns to Broadway in This World of Tomorrow

Tom Hanks is headed back to Broadway — and he brings a time machine. Short sentence. Big news.

According to Playbill, Hanks will star in This World of Tomorrow, a new stage piece about time travel that he co-wrote with James Glassman, inspired by a short story from Glassman's 2017 collection Uncommon Type. The play, currently scheduled for fall 2027, will premiere at one of the Shubert Organization’s theaters in New York; the exact house has not yet been announced.

Tom Hanks will return to Broadway in Fall 2027 in This World of Tomorrow. It’s been more than 14 years since he last trod Broadway boards — a run that earned him a Tony nomination for Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy — and the prospect of Hanks back onstage feels like a rare cinematic star crossing over into live-theater intimacy.

In the play Hanks plays Brett Allenbury, a scientist from the late 21st century who slips back to one specific day: June 8, 1939, at the New York World’s Fair in Queens. There he meets Carmen, played by Tony-winner Kelli O’Hara, who reprises the role she first inhabited when the show premiered off-Broadway at The Shed in 2025. The story tracks Brett’s repeated returns to that single day as he searches for love — a collision of nostalgia, technology and the human impulse to choose which life to live.

That mix of longing and invention is exactly what director Kenny Leon sees as the play’s heartbeat. Leon, who returns to direct the Broadway production after helming acclaimed revivals like A Raisin in the Sun and Fences, said he’s eager to dig deeper into this modern American romance about love and time. He also flagged the onstage chemistry between Hanks and O’Hara as a central draw — and who could argue?

Hanks’s stage return arrives at a moment when his film resume looks like a highlight reel of recent hits and steady work. He won back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994), and has been nominated for his turns in Big (1988), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Cast Away (2000), and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). More recently he appeared in Here (2024), featured in The Phoenician Scheme (2025), and reprised his voice role as Woody in Toy Story 5 (2026).

From a practical standpoint, This World of Tomorrow made its first public impression in 2025 at The Shed with Hanks and O’Hara leading the cast. The Broadway transfer will likely expand staging and design, and it will almost certainly intensify audience interest simply because the leads are two actors who know how to make small, truthful moments read large in a theater.

What remains to be revealed: the rest of the cast, the production designers, and whether the Broadway staging will lean into spectacle or intimacy — or find a balance between both. Given the subject matter, expect inventive scenography. Expect moments where clockwork and heartbreak meet onstage.

Tickets and casting details will surface in the months ahead. For now, Broadway regulars and movie fans alike can mark their calendars and imagine an evening in which past and future collide under the same footlights — a live experiment in memory, choice, and the small miraculous details that make a life worth revisiting.