Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

In This World of Tomorrow – the new play starring and cowritten by Tom Hanks, currently on at The Shed in Manhattan – Tom Hanks plays a classic, well, Tom Hanks character.  Bert Allenberry (Hanks) is the nicest guy in the room: he’s the kind of great guy who will escort a lady home in a taxicab, even if it will make him late. And in This World of Tomorrow being late matters a lot. Bert, you see, is a successful but dissatisfied scientist from the future who travels back in time to the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Once there he has complete free rein, except for one thing. He must return to his hotel at a certain hour to be whisked back to the future – or risk mortal bodily damage.    Love, of course, gets in the way.

Fiddler on the Roof is a study of Eastern European Jewry: it is based on Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s short stories and is set in a Yiddish-speaking village in early twentieth-century Imperial Russia. Yet, in the hit musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics only feature a handful of Yiddish words. Harnick later confessed that the creators downplayed the Jewishness of the story — something they thought might be too sticky; too specific — in order not to put off American audiences. As scriptwriter Joseph Stein said: “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.