Waiting for Godot

★★

“Even a bromance for the ages has its limits,” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves famously played two bantering slacker pals in the 1989 film comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and they’ve now been reunited on Broadway to play the two friends that Samuel Beckett condemned to an eternity of waiting for an elusive someone, but the actors’ easy chemistry isn’t quite enough. While Reeves, the bigger star, seems more skilled and relaxed, both actors “don’t really seem to be listening” to each other. They rush through Beckett’s dialogue instead of giving it the breathing room it needs, and the result is a “mildly amusing” staging of Godot that’s “caught in a sort of aesthetically pleasing but hollow limbo.”

Jamie Lloyd directs, and his reported skill as a star whisperer “isn’t much in evidence,” said Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times. Though Winter and Reeves asked to be cast and prepped for a year to play Vladimir and Estragon, “they appear still to be standing at a distance from them, intimidated.” When the secondary characters Pozzo and Lucky steal the show, “you know something has gone seriously awry,” yet that’s what the deft comic performers Brandon J. Dirden and Michael Patrick Thornton do here.

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While Reeves, Winter, and Lloyd haven’t produced “a revelatory Godot,” said Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast, they’ve “found a route to a nondisastrous, pleasurable one.” Where other actors who’ve played “Gogo” and “Didi” amped up the pair’s clowning, Reeves and Winter “mostly play on subtler forms of physical comedy,” especially when interacting with the set, which exchanges the customary tree for a giant minimalist tunnel. Better yet, “Reeves and Winter make you feel it when the men embrace, as if one is holding on to the life raft embodied by the other” as they “quietly care for each other, strange day after strange day.”