On Tuesday evening, 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. Hank’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 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.
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.
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 writes about culture and style for The Times.
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