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Why Broadway didn't hate WAITING FOR GODOT | Review roundup of the Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter revival
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Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theater themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theater. I am based here in the UK but I travel frequently to New York to go and see as many Broadway and Off Broadway shows as possible. And ahead of my next visit back to Manhattan next month, about which I am very excited and during which I dare say I may try and see this production of Waiting for Godot. I have been following it very attentively. If you don't know, I am a professional theatre critic here on social media And I am always intrigued by the critical responses to various pieces of theatre which I have and haven't seen. In the case of Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway, starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter and directed by bold, visionary director Jamie Lloyd, very much the man of the moment, creatively speaking. After his work on Sunset Boulevard and Evita this summer at the London Palladium, I have proverbially staring across the Atlantic Ocean with such profound curiosity. And I will admit that when it opened recently on Broadway to what I would characterize as mixed positive reviews, at a glance I was a little surprised. I was more than a little surprised. Not just because of my own feelings about Waiting for Godot and the fact that it's a inherently absurdist piece of theatre that often proves divisive, especially with contemporary audiences, but also because Jimmy Lloyd has something of a proven track record for popular inconsistency. What do I mean by that? Well, in the few years since he's really come to super prominence and been one of the most talked about directors in the world when it comes to the theater. He has enjoyed terrific award winning acclaim for his production of Angela Webber's Sunset Boulevard, followed up with a decidedly less popular revival of Romeo and Juliet in the West End. But then after that, Sunset Boulevard opened once more on Broadway. Acclaim again. And then the Tempest happened with Sigourney Weaver. But it was a production which was also in many ways emblematic of much of his recent work. Sort of stripped back, aesthetically bold and perhaps with little regard for the labor of explicit storytelling. And so that impression of his recent work, combined with the track record for productions over the last few years and the fact that it's Waiting for Godot made me think that this seemed almost guaranteed to be something of a disappointment. And so positive reviews, and I was surprised. And yet this is a play that I personally and subjectively have such little enthusiasm for. I am still working my way up towards the idea that I would actually go and see it in my limited time in New York. And so to try and further convince myself today, we're going to read through some of those mixed to positive reviews and try and figure out from an overview of a whole bunch of different critical responses exactly what this production is like and what the general critical consensus is. I will try and infer from that whether I think this is something that I want to see. And you can do the same thing if you haven't had the chance to read the reviews already. So this is another Mickey Jo review roundup. We'll be reading from a handful of professional reviews, but there is always room to add more. Please feel free to share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. Below. If you have already seen Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway if I say Godot at any point during this, it's because I spent too much time talking to my American friends about it. It's Godot. They say Godot in this version. It's. It's Godot. Just, just embrace the fact that it's Godot. Because the idea of whether or not it ought to be is honestly the most boring discourse we could possibly have about this play. This is already, to my mind, a fairly boring play. Let's dig into these reviews. If you like listening to what I have to say about the theatre, you can subscribe here on YouTube or follow me on podcast platforms, but I think that plenty of introduction let's talk about why the critics liked Waiting for Godot. So I'm currently on the very helpful website didtheylikeit.com which creates aggregates of all of the various critical responses to newly opened Broadway shows. And by their metric, which isn't necessarily a one size fits all, they gathered seven explicitly positive reviews, 12 mixed and no outwardly negative reviews. Now broadwayworld.com is also usually good for a roundup up. Let's see if they said the same thing, because sometimes they do disagree about what constitutes a positive or a mixed review, etc. We will begin with the New York Times, which both websites agreed was a mixed review. This by Laura Collins Hughes While the Times still decides who their new chief theatre critic is going to be, no, it isn't going to be one Mickey Jo Theatre, but if it were up to me, I think Joe Weinberg would be an excellent choice. Or if she's interested in it. Sarah Holdren for now though, let us see what Laura Collins Hughes had to say about Waiting for Godot. Cue the air guitar is the curious slogan. I'm already intrigued. Jamie Lloyd's pristinely chic Broadway revival of the existential tragicomedy it is that casts the Bill and Ted stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as Samuel Beckett's clowns. If you don't know, these two have starred together before on screen and Jamie Lloyd loves to work with a celebrity, but more than that, loves to subvert their celebrity and do something that is sort of whimsical and self reverential. Does air guitar belong in a Samuel Beckett classic? I mean, I'VE seen it in the Seagull and Shakespeare. At this point, honestly, we may be reaching the moment in theatre where air guit no longer a ironic contemporary subversion. It may be the sort of millennial cringe answer to that. The raison d' etre of the current revival of Waiting for Godot, as I just explained, is the public reunion of the actors who portrayed them in a series of popcorn movies, starting with the 1989 time travel hit Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. And here they play Vladimir and Estragon, described as a weathered pair inhabiting a void that they cannot escape, parting and reconnecting again and again, they have been together seemingly forever, a bowler hatted double act. It's a little bit like the Good Place if you wanted to kill your Carrying on Reeves and Winter indulge in a burst of air guitar, Bill and Ted style. The riff is a surefire crowd pleaser and maybe equally sure to rankle the purists. Already I have heard some of them grumble rather fiercely, and I think for what it's worth, in 2025 and on Broadway, where any play revival sort of leans towards the more commercial anyway, I think the audience members that need to be won over and converted to the idea of Waiting for Godot probably outnumber those who are going to be purists about it, meaning that a production that goes out of its way to try and win them over and to try and find what little charm it can in the Beckett of it all is probably on the pathway to success. And the notion of crowd pleaser and Waiting for Godot in the same sentence is already something of a surprise if the show briefly acknowledges what it means for much of the audience to see Reeves and Winter together again, echoing their big screen history as they portray a different pair of friends. What of it? Clowns are meant to color outside the and dangerously, this already has me a little bit intrigued about seeing the show for myself. Oh no, who could have anticipated that this would happen? Now this is what I really want to know. Jamie Lloyd's pristinely chic looking production, which opened on Sunday night at the Hudson Theatre, breaks some other rules too, right from the start. There is no customary tree as part of the scenery, for one thing, and no country road. This Dee Dee and Gogo while away their endless days inside a kind of tapering tunnel that has an enormous gaping mouth at the downstage end where they perch on its lip nice and close to the orchestra seats. This is one of the first images of the this production, which was made public because it was seen during the curtain call. And my first connection to it was the end of the Grease movie when they're in the crazy house doing you're the one that I want, only bigger and more desolate looking. Other people say it looks like a human orifice and not one that you usually talk from, unless you're not saying anything of particular value. And again, having not yet seen the production, I'm not sure that I have connected to a real clarification on what the meaning of it is supposed to be, if indeed it is supposed to mean anything. This set design by Jamie Lloyd's frequent collaborator, Sutra Gilmour, other than perhaps the possibility that it's musing on the inherently circular nature of the plot, perhaps noted here, visually striking spareness is a hallmark of Lloyd's work with Sutra Gilmour. Exquisite minimalism is what New York audiences have seen them make together in Sunset Boulevard, as well as A Doll's House, Cyrano de Bergerac and Betrayal. Intelligent star powered re envisionings. All this is a Jamie Lloyd supporter here. And yet we said this was a mixed review. Here it comes. What's curious and Waiting for Godot is that the textual distance installation we have come to expect from Lloyd is largely missing. So is his interpretive stamp. In short, what is being said here is that he isn't finding an awful lot to say in the text. And you wonder whether the excitement about doing this and directing this was let's get Bill and Ted to do Waiting for Godot, end of sentence, like enough money made, enough creative inspiration fueled, or whether he had any sort of further emotional and intellectual attachment to the text and some sort of idea about where it was going to go. Because the thing that you need to know about the Jamie Lloyd rehearsal room that I have heard from actors and creatives who have worked with him is that it very much gets devised during that process. Unlike a lot of other directors, he doesn't necessarily arrive armed with a very strict set of instructions as to what this production is going to be. He empowers his actors to play in this sort of a free playground space. They are not sitting and reading at tables, they are miked, moving around a rehearsal room and inferring and devising and creating the piece as it's going to be. And it sort of takes shape in that moment. So months ahead, when this was already selling tickets for its first preview performance, who knows if Jamie Lloyd had any idea about what this was going to be? As this critic from the New York Times goes on to say, for the most part, he doesn't seem to have anything to say. That's disappointing on its own because the play needs strong directorial focus to land with any force. I agree, but particularly so at a time when surely a good chunk of the populace could identify with Dede and Gogo's sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of a relentlessly brutal, brutal world. In short, a lot of New York is significantly depressed and would more than likely vibe with a production of Waiting for Godot that held itself up as a giant theatrical mirror to reflect that anguish back at them in pursuit of some sense of catharsis or at the very least, recognition. I am intrigued by this paragraph. Despite Lloyd's practice of doing away with props, famously, which results in the genuine fun of watching Reeves eat an invisible carrot and talk with his mouthful, the production feels cramped inside its wooden tube. Its wooden. It's a wooden tube now. I think it looks like a toilet roll for an enormous, enormous toilet. When the passers by Pozzo and Lucky steal the show, you know something has gone seriously awry. And Pozzo and Lucky deftly melding the comical with the alarming saunter right off with this one. Let us read a different review. Let's go to one that is explicitly positive, because I'm curious. Let's check out David Gordon in Theatremania. Did they like it? Called his a positive review. Did Broadway World agree? Oh, just didn't list Theatomania's review. Okay. Is that a feud I need to know about? We'll find out later. For now, let us read the Theatomania article. Do Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter make Waiting for Godot an excellent adventure? Very good, Very good. Jamie Lloyd directs the cinematic pair, plus Brandon J. Durden and Michael Patrick Thornton in Samuel Beckett's existential nightmare. Whose nightmare is it? It's mine. Oh. David Gordon loves to talk about the other people that he meets at the theater. Here we go. The couple next to me were clearly on a date, dressed well, in love and perfectly comfortable. Ten minutes into the show, she was checking her email. By the time Act 2 started, they had vanished. This is the positive review. They obviously spent a lot of money sent to orchestra. Rogie seats cost $670.88. I do think when they're charging that much, there is no shame in pointing it out in a review. Mr. Gordon goes on to presume almost everyone in the Hudson Theatre came to see Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in the flesh. The Bill and Ted stars hatched this production themselves. It was Reeves, who first floated the idea to Winter and invited the hottest director around, Jamie Lloyd, to join them on an excellent adventure and instantly utterly fascinated about what may have inspired that idea in Keanu Reeves, and simultaneously just a little bit cynical about the possibility that that is something of a crafted PR story. In any case, the PR campaign has gone well because that little nugget has made it into the Theatre Mania review. And there was also a little note in the New York Times review about the evident preparation that they had done. So everything that they are doing to try and tell the story of getting ready for this production is being noted by the critics. Beckett's desolate country road has been reimagined by scenic designer Sutra Gilmour as a plywood cornucopia that's part stump, part tunnel, part skatepark full pipe in this curved, echoing playground. I'm now wondering, incidentally as a sidebar, whether it is meant to feel sort of a skate park or sort of like giant construction tunnel that two aimless youths hang out in. Is it meant to hint back at the Bill and Ted of it all and the implication that they have been waiting so long they have aged into adults? Is the air guitar meant to speak to a sort of a juven quality? Is that something that rings true throughout the production? I don't know, but it's what I'm now considering. The sound design provided by Ben and Max Ringham is customarily fantastic. Vladimir and Estragon slide up and down the walls, chomp on root vegetables and debate whether hanging themselves might be more productive than waiting around for Godot, their mysterious saviour. The arrival of despotic landowner Pozzo and his long suffering wheelchair using servant Lucky briefly shakes up the routine. But of course Godot never arrives twice and I'm not usually a fan of comparing performances with their predecessors, but sometimes it feels necessary or helpful to do so. That's what David Gordon goes on to do here. They don't have Michael Shannon's anger or Bill Irwin's facility with language. Terrific Bill Irwin. Or the sheer gravitas of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. To be fair, few among us do. But those who stayed didn't care. They're there for the nostalgic feels that come with seeing Reeves and Winter in the flesh. You have sort of said that already. Lloyd hands it to us on a silver platter, complete with chest bumps and synchronized air guitar. He does have a sense of humour about his celebrities, hence Nicole Scherzinger doing Pussycat Dolls choreography as Norma Desmond. Bill and Ted are alive and well and switching bowler hats. Oh, this is interesting. There's a whiff of superficial vanity about it. The difference is that unlike George Clooney and Denzel Washington and Robert Downey Jr. Whose Broadway turns last season felt like hard labour, Reeves and Winter are clearly enjoying themselves as they gleefully confuse the ever loving S out of their fans. Their chemistry isn't manufactured, it's the shorthand that comes with a friendship that's been running for decades. And when Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart were doing WA for Godot, I believe in rep with no Man's Land, I think that was happening at the same time, or at least very much in proximity. It was playing on their established partnership and that the two of them had worked together before. Reeves does better with the comedy, particularly the verbal parrying. Winter is most at home in the sadness when John Clark's unforgiving lighting catches him just so his face hollows out like realizing for the first and millionth time that life is pointless. Oh, neither one of them is reinventing the wheel and neither is Lloyd, despite the absence of a tree. Or maybe they're inside the tree. Ah, more thoughts about the possibility of the giant toilet roll. It's a relatively straightforward Waiting For Godot that's performed at an impressive clip and mostly lands the important beats without the slash and burn that's become Lloyd's trademark. Like in the previous review, David Gordon agrees that, unsurprisingly, the more interesting performances are provided by Durden and Thornton to career theatre vets who are always a pleasure to watch. And it is a heck of a thing. We have to acknowledge that for established screen actors, to be performing live on stage and to be doing it in Waiting For Godot, of all things like these, are very exposing roles in a very exposing piece of theatre. And I have to say, that didn't whatsoever feel like a positive review of that production, but instead one that let David Gordon's own distaste for Waiting for Godot that was quite heavily implied sort of sit there and exist, notwithstanding, while he acknowledged the inevitable whimsy of this version. How about Greg Evans for Deadline? He called it Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter's existential adventure. All of the puns on that one, he said. Of course it works. Two old friends known for their clownish escapades, always wanting to get back to somewhere they were anywhere but here, really. All the while using ever so odd verbiage to conduct idiosyncratic conversations that only sound a bit absurd on the surface. But actually speak to real emotion and maybe genuine friendship. I can't remember if the Bill and Ted movies were loaded with despair and suicidal ideation. I think not. I'll spoil it for you. They weren't to my recollection either. But the stars of those movies, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, probably had the chops ready to go as they demonstrate in Samuel Beckett's post war classic Waiting for Godot, directed by Jamie Lloyd and opening tonight at Broadway's Hudson Theatre. That is a hell of a first paragraph and one that sort of feels like it could have been pre written from the mind of a critic who immediately understood the connection between the Bill and Ted of it all and Waiting for God and understood that this sort of made sense. Bringing his impeccable austere design and movement sensibilities to a play that has great use for them, Lloyd and his creative partners Sutra Gilmour, John Clarke, Ben and Max Ringham and Cheryl Thomas for hair and makeup design, have created a production that's pure 20th century modernist elegance. All light and dark and ambient drone and forced perspectives. We have a lovely image of the set here taken by Andy Henderson and then commentary. So that set on an otherwise dark, empty stage sits a tunnel. A very, very large open ended tunnel, likely made of stone. They could not agree on the material of this tunnel that I find fascinating. The end furthest from the audience. Smaller. The forced perspective to give it a sense of distance. A tunnel to what? Who knows. But a bright light does occasionally shine at the far end. Something of a heavy handed metaphor, I expect. But you know, we need to at some point try and explain what the hell this play is talking about. The staging takes some liberties with Beckett's stage instructions for a road and a tree. No road this. And we're only told the character characters see a tree. When we meet the two, Reeves's estragon is complaining about his ill fitting boot, struggling to remove it. Nothing to be done, he says in what may be the most concise opening line indicator in all of modern history. You probably know the rest, but I'll sum up best I can. These two starving, bedraggled, sometime acquaintances, sometime friends ponder everything they can dredge up from their fading memories. Where were they yesterday? Why are they here today? We've sort of covered this ground already, you and I. Tiny people in my community camera. But I'm only reading through to try and get more of a sense of whether or not Greg Evans likes this play. Because it sort of is beginning to feel like if you like this play, then you are going to find enough to enjoy about it. And if you didn't like this play in the first place, then you are doomed to still not we're not really hearing an awful lot to suggest that this has the capacity to win over skeptics. They are waiting for Godot, a mystery man who at least Vladimir senses is the key to their lives. Neither has any idea what Goddo will tell them, nor whether he'll even show up. Every day Godot sends an emissary to announce his arrival on the following day, and every day after the emissary arrives with the same message. What's a human to do but wait for Godot and pass the time in despair and hope? Against hope, Reeves and Winter use every trick in their respective books to wile while waiting. They argue, they make up, they hug, they bellow, and they show affection. They dance, they do the show's famous vaudeville hat swap. Expertly, I might add. They climb, or attempt to climb the curved wall of the tunnel, only to come sliding down again. Which it gives us a little bit more insight as to what is going on with this set design, because that affords them a built in futility and a lack of escape. At one point, just after reciting Beckett's written line back to back, like in the good old days, Reeves and Winter look at the audience and immediately break into the famous air guitar riff from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, complete with sound effects. The audience goes wild, and why not? This is the sort of clowning Go Go and Dee Dee, long thought to be based at least in part on Laurel and Harp Hardy, might do. And it's nice to hear an uncynical interpretation of that moment, one that is clearly resonating with a majority of the audience. In days gone by, it wouldn't have been surprising to read a lot of critics resenting that being a part of this great and celebrated piece of theatre, and resenting the audience of tourists who don't know the play well enough to be there in the first place and aren't deserving of it. And also, I say it again, when is the last time you heard an audience going wild at all in a production of Waiting for Godot? As for the acting, there's little doubt that Winter is the more natural and more experienced stage actor of the two, more versatile and when necessary, capable of drawing real pathos from this grim, gorgeous work of art. David Gordon said something similar about his inherent sadness. You believe his every changing mood. Reeves, as they say, is Reeves an exceedingly charming actor who projects more than he acts, but always seems to have full control of an audience's attention and affection, even when he seems to be trying too hard to be stentorian or angry or carrying out a bit of slapstick tantrum he has us rooting for for him. And why not? He and Winter are limning their decades old friendship, good times and bad, and melding it with one of the greatest 20th century modern drama duos ever created. It's their Godo and damned if it doesn't work. So Greg Evans bought into the whole concept a little earlier on. There were a couple of paragraphs about the two fantastic supporting performances from Pozo and Lucky, noting that Thornton gets one of the play's tour de force moments when the servant is ordered by his cruel whip wielding master to think at which time Lucky begins to recite Godo's strangest monologue, a mishmash of intellectual sounding gibberish that at times will have you believe it makes sense. Thornton handles it beautifully. At Pozzo's command to dance, the wheelchair user simply raises his hand and does a few Fosse hat tosses and then a sort of Charlie Chaplin finger dance. It's a fine moment, and damn if that alone doesn't have me a little bit more intrigued to go and see it for myself. God damn it. Or should I say.
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Godo. Damn it. We've not yet read Sarah Holdren's review. Always a fantastic read in Vulture when the inevitable Bill and Ted reference arrives in the new Broadway Waiting for Godot, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter handle it with good grace. I won't say when, but for a flash of a moment, Samuel Beckett's immortal clowns, smelly and bruised, grizzled and incontinent, become wild stallions again. And of course, from a more skeptical perspective, the whole project could be described as cleaving close to the wisdom of the stripp in Gypsy, which is to say, a gimmick. Jamie Lloyd is, after all, the director who's brought us Charles Xavier in Cyrano de Bergerac, Loki in Bertrac. I had to think about that then, because we've just been talking about Ian McCullen and Patrick Stewart and I was like, patrick Stewart wasn't in Cyrano de bergerac. It's James McAvoy, Charles Xavier, who I never really think of as Charles Xavier. James McAvoy will always be James McAvoy to me, but he was a very sexy Cyrano. Loki in Betrayal. That one I get. And Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard. But there's also also something sweet, even in its own weird way. Becketan about the moment and going back to something that I said earlier. When the scholar Vivienne Mercier told Beckett that the two tramps sounded as if they had Both gotten their PhDs, the playwright asked how he knew they hadn't. How do we know they weren't once wide eyed goofballs who loved garage rock and historical babes? After all, they've had time to grow old. Celebrity vehicle though it may often be, Godot certainly isn't easy. It attracts pairs of actors who know and love each other other and who want to get down to some serious work. Winter and Reeves have got the love, and they've clearly put in the time. This linking to a feature piece about them being ready for Godot in the New York Times. That's the third time that that has been referenced in one of these reviews. Like I said, PR team earning their fee on this production. But we've spoken a lot about Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. I'm much more curious about what Sarah Holdren has to say about the Jamie Lloyd of it all, and she says that the hand of their director hovers heavily over the production production. Though Lloyd is often referred to as a minimalist, he's not a light touch, the natural heir of Ivo Van Hove. And he is that the last European it boy whose grand chili productions Americans eagerly anticipated at places like Bam and The Park Avenue armoury, then eventually on Broadway. Lloyd doesn't wait for a play to inform his aesthetic, like a bespoke coffin maker. Hell of an analogy. He builds a specific type of box. Various theatrical bodies have to fit inside as best they can. Some slot right in, others distort and cramp. Oh, I love reading this. One might think that Beckett' great hovering question mark of a play, fantastic description and a briefer description than anyone else, myself included, has been able to manage thus far, with its proximity to the abyss, would be a natural match for the director. His stages are consistently an expensive version of Empty. Oh, that's another great turn of phrase for a Jamie Lloyd set. An expensive version of Empty. His figure's always essentially modern and monochromatic. And so it is here. Lloyd's habitual collaborator, Sutra Gilmour, puts the characters in dark, clean, lined layers and envisions Godot's country road as a purgatorial skatepark. So Sarah Holdren also goes with Skatepark there. There you go. That's another vote in the Skatepark column. A huge, slick, full pipe of curving natural wood, which also speaks to tree worth pointing out, opening out at the audience like a portal or the cleanest imaginable sewer. For long stretches of the play's first act, Winter and Reeves stay seated, perched at the tunnel's opening, gazing out over the audience. Only after intermission do they really begin to explore its physical possibilities. Here this Godot finally sparks into its fullest life, as Ree and Winter scuttle about, banging into each other in awkward embraces and sliding down the sides of the big wooden tube like fried eggs glooping out of the pan. Good word. We can suddenly sense their vitality. The clawing, questioning, hopeful, against all odds spirit that spurs them on. Absurdly, even as the gravedigger puts on the forceps. And just as it's beginning to sound like it's going to be a positive review, Sarah Holdren has a little more to say about the direction. Lloyd's production contains too little of this vigour. He hasn't made room for it.
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It.
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Watching his Godot, one gets the sense that the looming, unseen title character is making all the decisions. This Dee Dee and Gogo really are rats in a maze, bugs in a jar, responding as best they can every time their tunnel is bathed in eerie yellow green light or a sinister hum fills the air. There is also a mention of the fall 2023 production starring Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks. This was a warm waiting for Godot, an argument for the great wells of humor and fleshy, gritty humanness that lie beneath Beckett's heightened rhythms and metaphysical pony wondering. The play's literary significance built up like barnacles on an ancient whale. Don't you just love reading a Sarah Holdren, the deity and Go Go that Sparks and Shannon created were full of blood and bile. Real people with no matter how obscured in its details by time and circumstance, a long and winding relationship. Winter and Reeves are endearing together. Reeves especially just makes you want to give poor stinky footed Estragon a hug, and it's clear that they're trying for full personhood. But in their world an oppressive invisible hand hand does exist. Lloyd himself is that force who's messing with the lights and filling the air with menacing rumbles and zaps, not to mention with pulsing Minor Key Club beats before and after the show, who's decided that there will be no tree on this country road and that all props, carrots, bags and baskets whip will be mimed in thin air. Not in fact Godot or for that matter, God. It's just the director, and this one has molded an environment that reduces Dee Dee and Gurgo into flatter versions of themselves. Themselves. Neither Winter nor Reeves is doing weak work, but a gray wash has been painted over them. Places that earn chuckles could be getting gasps and guffaws. Moments that feel generally meditative could be devastating if Lloyd were more interested in character work and less in mise en scene. And there is plenty more of this review to enjoy. Likewise, talking about the brilliance of the supporting cast members Brandon Durden and Mr. Thornton, but as always, what an absolute piece of writing from Sarah Holdren, something that feels quite expert in its diagnosis, especially in comparing and contrasting with previous productions and the tone thereof. It's all very well to simply compare the actors who are their predecessors, but to talk about the entire nature of a piece and the way that it's been conceived in comparison with another I think is much more interesting, especially with a play like Waiting for Godot that is very open to creative interpretation that is, like we read in the New York Times piece, sort of requiring of a strong directorial vision. We have time, I think, to check in with a few more of New York's critics. Let's see what Johnny Oleksinski has to say in the New York Post. Like Sarah Holdren, here's a great one for a turn of phrase, though it is usually a very different kind of a turn of phrase, and to give us some greater sense of clarity about where exactly everyone is falling with this The New York Post, one of the few New York outlets that actually does star ratings. We love them here in the uk. They aren't generally used on Broadway, but the New York Post does, though only out of four. And Johnny has given this two, which is not his harshest rating, though it would mathematically correspond to a two and a half star standard here in the uk. I question whether it might just end up being a three, because that's often what we tend to do. It is by definition middling. And he immediately points out over at the Hudson Theatre on 44th street, the crowd is waiting for Neo and John Wick and a of course Bill and Ted. In the sense that Keanu Reeves shows up for work at Waiting for Godot, the play that opens Sunday night on Broadway. They get what they came for. Celeb spotters will be satisfied that they forked over as much as $670. There's that price tag again to bask in the presence of the chosen one. But besides the famous faces of Reeves and his Bill and Ted co star Alex Winter, is the audience being treated to a top tier production of Samuel Beckett's absurdist tragicomedy? Is Reeves any good? To which the response is eh, not really. That's literally what he's written down. This particularly meandering and stiff Godot is hardly an excellent adventure. Nor by the way, is it a bogus journey. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It is, as Bill and Ted would say, most non triumphant mediocre and the leads, one of whom is way out of his depth. We will find out soon, I'm sure, which certainly face the music. The show could be about religion, war, politics, the meaninglessness of life, or nothing at all. Pick your poison. The duo's conversations are eccentrically banal. There's a musicality to the patter though, and a lot of humor and darkness for gifted performers to sink their teeth into. With the right casting, the strange, bleak chit chat can mesmerize and fascinate. This is another critic who believes in the power of Waiting for Godot and the capabilities of Waiting for Godot. Just not this one. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen did just that on Broadway 12 years ago. Was that 12 years ago? My God. The British vets were hilarious, touching and haunted in the the parts. But at this point I'm very curious to find out which of the two Mr. Oleksinski didn't feel was necessarily qualified for his role as D.D. winter, who's become an acclaimed documentary filmmaker in recent years. I didn't know that is the more impressive of the two. There you go. That's quickly answered. He carries around a poignant sadness. We've heard that a couple times. You wouldn't expect, given his silly body of work. He's quite moving. And the pair do have a natural rapport. Reeves, on the other hand, is is rough. And Mr. Oleksinski is a critic who, if he finds that about your performance, is going to let you know. He doesn't imbue any of Ghogo's lines with meaning. Only speed and breathiness. They're just memorized words that are read with the investment of stating one's Social Security number. The actor relies on a vacant stare. That's money when he's playing an assassin on the big screen. Not so much in live theatre. The guys race through dialogue. We've heard about the pace of the thing, like they have a train to catch. Instead of black SUVs idling outside side Act 1 is turned into a downer. Who's on first. Likewise, he echoes the praise for Brandon J. Durden's pompous Pozzo and his mostly silent slave, Lucky, played by Michael Patrick Thornton. Durden is appropriately blowhardy as the whip wielding master. And Thornton, great as ever, has carved out a unique niche on Broadway. This is his second time being one of the best aspects of a classic play revival led by an action movie star. He was also in the unforgivably heinous Macbeth with Daniel Craig. I'd rather see Thornton above the title. I told you, if Oleksinski doesn't like it, he's gonn, you know. The other big name here for theatre fans is Jamie Lloyd. Now, Johnny was a big fan of Sunset Boulevard. He calls it one of the British director's recent triumphs. And I forgot he also really loved Evita. But his work on plays like the torturous Romeo and Juliet in London. We are singing from the same hymn sheet there that managed to SAP the charm away from Spider Man. Actor Tom Holland is hit and miss. Acting aside, this is one of Lloyd's better dramatic efforts. He boldly does away with the typical Godot aesthetic of grey emptiness and an ominous tree in the back. Instead, designer Sutra Gilmore set is a bright giant wooden cylinder. That's another another point for wooden that looks like something Timothee Chalamet might pilot in Dune. There are none of Lloyd's usual screens or al fresco adventures either, which is to say actors leaving the theater and walking around outdoors. Unlike what the director did to Jessica Chastain in a Doll's House, which he makes sound like assault. He generally allows Reeves and Winter to actually walk around, but cool scenery doesn't go very far when one of the actors on it simply cannot handle bad it. And there's some speculation, as he also refers to the air guitar moment, that after the audience laughed, I could palpably feel them wishing they were watching that instead. That being Bill and Ted. And I think it's probably the most discussion that Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventure has had in years, to be invoked in all of these different reviews of a Broadway play suddenly reuniting its leading men. I will check in with Adam Feldman and Time Out New York, if only because this is another outlet which gives us a star rating. And this is three out of five and a pun title that actually made me out loud laugh Long time no tree is what we've gone with here that I enjoy. We start by talking about the 1989 movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter play a pair of dim teenage rockers who traveled through centuries and around the world, and even in the film's 1991 sequel, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey beyond this mortal coil. So there's a satisfying snap to the joke of casting them. The casting is more than just a stunt, though. The nostalgic affection that the audience holds for Reeves and Winter has certain salutary effects. Together again at last. We have to celebrate this, says Vladimir at the top of the play. The audience is there for the reunion party, and it arrives with the gift of a prior sense of these two men as friends when they mention having known each other a million years ago in the 90s. The last line hits differently than it did when the play made its Broadway debut in 1956. When they embrace, it has an extra level of sweetness. They have history with each other and with us. And this is beginning to suggest a little of the warmth that I think I have been craving from Waiting for Godot. I don't mind that it's existential. I don't mind that it's circular and absurdist. If the thing could have just a little bit more charm and just a little bit more. More wit and life to it. I just would love for a production that's a little less bleak, which is something that is echoed in some of the descriptions of this production. But I don't know whether I feel totally confident about that. Winter still sometimes looks boyish, but his face has more lines and his eyes are more sunken. Reeves in a grey Beard looks gaunt and at times almost haggard in a play that deals centrally with exhaustion and age. Watching these actors 35 years after the youthful exuberance of belligerent and Ted adds an extra degree of poignancy. Was Bill and Ted so huge that everyone saw it Like I've seen the film and it seems that all of these critics did. I'm curious if anyone had to go and watch it because it was evidently so central to this production. As for their performances, Reeves and Winter are very much giving it the old college try, which is to say that they're older, but from time to time their acting is a little collegiate. Winter is touching as Vladimir or Didi, who he imbues with lovely sincerity and feeling, especially in his longing for companion companionship with the Pricklya Estragon or Go Go. Only when Lloyd's staging gets self consciously serious does he slip into earnestness. But Reeves is often stiff and under expressive, which is something we've heard a couple times now. Beckett's language fits him as ill as his suit, which is short at the limbs but baggy at the waist. I wish that Lloyd's production leaned harder into the Bill and Ted resonance, says Adam Feldman. Aside from one signature air guitar riff, which the audience eats up, which has been plenty discussed, it doesn't fully commit to its bit. And to be fair, there is us one sort of a nod of that type in a Jamie Lloyd production, because he says that everything that he does is very much in service of the text, and so to distract too much from that would be uncharacteristic. So in much do about nothing, there was one Tom Hiddleston as Loki, cardboard cutout in Sunset Boulevard. There was the choreography moment. There was, to be fair, also a backstage image of Nicole circa Pussycat Dolls. Here is what has me dangerously close to actually going to see the show, though. Winter Reeves teamwork is at its best when at its goofiest. And Waiting for Godot, despite its rather bleak reputation, is loaded with dumb humour. Beckett offers his existentialism by way of vaudeville comedy. The lower the better. Burping, farting, stinky feet, bad breath, slapstick falls, pants falling down. The most memorable moments here are silly ones. Such an extended gag, I believe, that should be such as an extended gag in which they pass around their Laurel and Hardy style bowler hats. This revival's real strengths are elsewhere, however. Lloyd's choice that all of the props be mined, from turnips and lips to whips, emphasizes the ephemerality of the play's world. And sometimes yields fascinating results, and Sutra Gilmour's striking that's not how you spell Sutra Gilmour's surname. Beautiful set is radically different from the usual ones, which have tended to abide by the conventions set by the persnickety Becket estate. And we have one final musing on the meaning of this set, which continues an idea we heard earlier. The set's core elements are still, as the script specifies, a country road, a tree. But whereas other productions put the tree in the road, this one blows that whole idea inside out. The road appears to be inside the tree, which is rendered non literally, as a giant tube of polished wood. The passage of time is suggested by the movement of large suprematist shapes. And there's more to talk about here, including more praise for the two supporting performances. I do want to highlight this particular sentence. The pleasant prospect of seeing Reeves and Winter together together makes this production to some extent critic proof. And anyhow, this is a play in which critic is the worst insult that Estragon can think up. But although Reeves and Winter are the main reason most people will go to this Godot, no kidding, it is this revival's other assets the direction, the set, and above all Durden and Thornton that keep it from being an exercise in metastasis. Feldman concludes that this is a production worth seeing, but one nice thing about Waiting for Godot is the that it just keeps coming. This is the play's third Broadway revival in the 21st century, and there have been numerous Off Broadway versions in recent years too. If you decide to skip this one, you won't have to wait very long for another. And I think a big part of that is that it's one of the most obvious plays to produce with a pair of dramatic actors. Just like how if you have two compelling musical theater performers, you're going to want to do the last five years with them. But as we begin to hear more and more of the same sentiments echoed, some of them with a slightly more positive spin, which seems to just be the degree to which people have been won over by the notion of the direction and the extent to which people favorably compare it with previous productions and give way to the charm of the Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter of it all. I think we can conclude, reading through the reviews of the Broadway production, it takes very little for for me to want to go and see something for myself, and I think I have been rendered curious enough that I want to go and form my own opinion. I also live in the perhaps naive hope that I will eventually be won over by a production of Waiting for Godot. And there's parts of the way that this one has been described which make me just the littlest bit hopeful. But I'll remind you, it is the hope that kills you. So for an update on that, if I do see the play in New York next month, and if I do make a full review about it here on social media media, you know where you can find it. But before I do, and before you hit, subscribe and turn on the notifications below my face or follow me on whatever podcast platform you might be listening to this on, what I would love for you to do if you have seen the show already on Broadway, is to share your own thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. What did we think about Keanu and Alex? Did we think that one of them felt a little better predisposed to the role, to the material, than the other? What did we think of the direction? Did it have something to say? Say, did it need to have something to say? Have you seen Waiting for Godot before? Have you seen a better production? Let me know all of your thoughts in the comments as I continue to weigh my curiosity about this production with the value of a potential show slot. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me in rounding up some of the reviews of the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. What I will say is the production seems to be doing very, very well financially with a terrific advance, and I wish them the best in these trying Broadway times. The one thing that does seem to be working consistently for producers and investors alike is star power. And if that's what it takes to turn Waiting for Godot into an unexpected Broadway hit in 2025, then sure, the entity known as Godot may in fact never arrive, but a recoupment on the show's capitalization just might. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo oh my God. Hey. Thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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