Tom Hanks To Lend A Hand In Raising Money for the Hanna Theater

 The Plain Dealer on Cleveland.com is reporting that actor Tom Hanks will be lending a hand to help raise money for The Great Lakes Theater Festival. In its early years the festival performed the Lakewood High School Theater where Hanks came as college intern in 1977 and was paid a small weekly sum to act in bit parts. Since then the festival has performed in one of the theaters in Cleveland's Playhouse District every year. This year they are performing at "The Hanna" which they aim to renovate for the festival.

Hanks has apparently never forgotten that job as his first real break and therefore will be lending his persona and time to helping the theater raise the 3.2 million it needs to make the 19.2 million dollar goal to renovate.

The Hanna" is named after Senator Mark Hanna and was one of the leading regional theaters for some time.

Tom Hanks stated last week of the project, "I'm the honorary chairman, the generalissimo, the public face of this stupendous project to finally give Great Lakes a permanent home in the historic Hanna in the world-famous PlayhouseSquare. If you had told me, back when we were performing in that gymnatorium, or whatever it was, in Lakewood, where we had to draw a curtain across the back of the house to get it down to a thousand seats, that Great Lakes would be going into a cozy, first-class theater, with 540 great seats, a theater that in its heyday hosted the great luminaries of the stage, a theater named for one of the most powerful figures in American political history, well, I would have asked what planet you were on, and now I'm get to help that dream become a reality."