Are Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter a 'Godot' worth waiting for?

By Matthew Wexler

It’s a new season of starry actors serving drama on Broadway stages. Hitmaker Jamie Lloyd (Sunset BLVD., Evita) swaps Andrew Lloyd Webber for Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The fifth Broadway revival reunites Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, known for their teenage antics in 1989’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, for a more cerebral, existential journey.

For Winter, it’s a return to a familiar playground, having appeared as a child actor on Broadway in Peter Pan and The King and I. Reeves makes his Broadway debut, jumping full force into the demands of the stage and a grueling eight-show-week schedule. Does it pay off?

Expect a nod to Bill and Ted’s air guitar in Act II, a film reference that may rankle some and titillate others. Beckett specified a country road and a singular tree to set the stage for Vladimir (Winter) and Estragon’s (Reeves) comic pas de deux. Here, Lloyd’s longtime collaborator Soutra Gilmour invites audiences inside the tree itself: an enormous, forced-perspective wooden tunnel in which the action (or lack of action) unfolds.

Reviews have been mixed, with Laura Collins-Hughes writing for the New York Times that the actors “have not yet reached the point at which they can let that scaffolding fall away as they slip at last into the skin of their characters.”

Waiting for Godot has long attracted well-known actors interested in examining Beckett’s existential work. Past Broadway productions have paired Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen (2013) and Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin (2008). But it’s just as juicy for the director wanting to put their signature stamp on the piece.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in "Waiting for Godot." — Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in “Waiting for Godot.” Photo by Andy Anderson.

But word is that Lloyd may have missed the mark. Pulitzer Prize finalist and theater critic Sara Holdren writes for Vulture that the director “has molded an environment that reduces Didi [Vladimir] and Gogo [Estragon] into flatter versions of themselves. Neither Winter nor Reeves is doing weak work, but a gray wash has been painted over them.”

Adam Felman of Time Out New York offers a sharp take on whether Waiting for Godot should be on your Broadway bucket list: “The pleasant prospect of seeing Reeves and Winter together makes this production to some extent critic-proof—and anyhow, this is a play in which ‘Crritic!’ is the worst insult that Estragon can think up.”