They played slacker buddies in three “Bill & Ted” films, and next year they plan to reunite for Beckett’s classic tragicomedy.
Call it Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure.
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, the actors who incarnated a pair of slacker musicians for three “Bill & Ted” films, are planning to reunite for a Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot.”
The production, planned for the fall of 2025, will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, one of the hottest directors of the moment, whose work is characterized by a spare aesthetic and an emphasis on psychological intensity.
Lloyd said that the project was Reeves’s idea, but that as soon as the actor approached him, “it was a no-brainer that this needed to be done.”
“Their instant chemistry and their shorthand and their friendship is going to be so valuable,” Lloyd said of Reeves and Winter in an interview. “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.”
In “Godot,” Reeves will play Estragon and Winter will play Vladimir, who banter and bicker while waiting for a mysterious figure who never arrives. “Those characters take solace in their companionship as they stumble toward the void,” Lloyd said, adding, “that’s going to be the central thesis of the production, with Keanu and Alex’s own friendship.”
“Waiting for Godot,” by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, was first staged in French in 1953 and then in English in 1955. The play was first performed on Broadway in 1956, and has been revived there three times since, most recently in 2013 with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.
Reeves, the prolific film star of the “Matrix” and “John Wick” series, will be making his Broadway debut with “Godot.” He likes a challenge: In 1995, he played Hamlet in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Winter, who writes and directs in addition to acting, appeared on Broadway twice in the 1970s, when he was a teenager, in musical revivals of “The King and I” and “Peter Pan.”
The two first worked together in 1989 in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A second film, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” arrived in 1991, and a third, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” in 2020.
Lloyd, based in London, has become a regular presence in New York. Last year he directed a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, and this fall he will direct a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” starring Nicole Scherzinger.
The “Waiting for Godot” revival is being produced by Lloyd’s production company, as well as ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live (J.J. Abrams’s company) and Gavin Kalin Productions. ATG is a British theater company that has a long relationship with Lloyd and operates seven Broadway theaters; the production said that “Godot” would be staged in one of those ATG theaters.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
