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For fans of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and all of their subsequent bogus journeys, this week represented the best of times and the worst of times. The best of times: The film’s stars, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, are reuniting for the first time since 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music.
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The worst of times: Rather than teaming up for another Bill and Ted extravaganza, Reeves and Winter are headed to Broadway to costar in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, indeed.
It was all Reeves’ idea, according to Jamie Lloyd, who will direct Reeves’ Broadway debut. Surprisingly, at least to me, Winter appeared on Broadway twice as a teen in revivals of The King and I and Peter Pan.
“It was a no-brainer that this needed to be done,” Lloyd told The New York Times despite the idea occurring to absolutely no one before the John Wick star floated the notion. The director believes the play is a natural for Reeves and Winter. “Their instant chemistry and their shorthand and their friendship is going to be so valuable. This is a very deeply complex play, as we all know, but it’s also a very funny play, and they’re very witty people and their shared sense of humor in those movies and in real life is going to be very beneficial to the production.”
It’s not the first time comic actors have taken on Waiting for Godot as a means to strive for a little legitimacy. In 1987, Robin Williams and Steve Martin teamed up for a run at the Lincoln Center. The reviews were only so-so. “Audiences will still be waiting for a transcendent Godot long after the clowns at Lincoln Center … have come and gone,” wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times.
Can Reeves and Winter deliver a transcendent Godot? More celebrated actors have tried and failed, but anything is possible. Fans of Bill & Ted should know, however, that Beckett’s play isn’t exactly a laugh riot. Sure, Lloyd says the play is “very funny,” but the comedy falls more into the “bleak absurdist” category rather than “dumb guys traveling through time in a phone booth.”
Still, if Reeves and Winter ever sense the audience is getting a little bored, they can always bust out a little air guitar.
