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The wait is over! Last August, it was announced that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who played lovable slacker doofuses in the 1989 time-travel comedy Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and its 1991 and 2000 sequels, would reunite to play the inertial tramps in Samuel Beckett's masterwork Waiting for Godot. But no specific theater or dates were given for this revival, which rialto wags instantly dubbed Bill and Ted's Existentialist Adventure, and after more than eight months, skeptics wondered if the production might never come to pass—which would have been, I think we can agree, bogus.
This week, however, Waiting for Godot's producers nailed many of the details down. Directed by England's Jamie Lloyd, who also helmed the recent Broadway revivals of A Doll's House with Jessica Chastain and Sunset Blvd. with Nicole Scherzinger, the production will run at the Hudson Theatre—which has a fascinating history—from September 13, 2025, through January 4, 2026, with an official opening on September 28. Reeves will play the role of Estragon and Winter will be Vladimir; casting for the play's other two major roles has not yet been announced.
Waiting for Godot, which Beckett wrote in French, debuted in Paris in 1953; his English version premiered in 1955 and reached Broadway the following year, where it starred Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall. The show depicts a pair of men in a barren landscape, killing time as they await the long-delayed arrival of a mystery man named Godot (spoken as God-oh in Beckett's preferred pronunciation). In one celebrated exchange, Vladimir suggests, "Well? Shall we go?" Estragon replies, "Yes, let's go." And the stage directions say: "They do not move." The play's stasis, absurdism and lack of a conventional plot delighted some critics but confused many audiences, and the original Broadway production ran for only two months, though it returned to the Great White Way for one week in an all-Black production the following year.
Waiting for Godot subsequently came to be recognized as a signal achievement of 20th-century drama, and helped Beckett win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Since then, it has been staged frequently Off Broadway, most famously in a 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. Not until the 21st century did it return to Broadway: first in a 2009 Roundabout production with Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin, then in 2013 with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. With the Reeves-Winter revival, Waiting for Godot will become Broadway's second-most-frequently revived show of the past 25 years, behind Macbeth but tied with The Glass Menagerie, Glengarry Glen Ross and Gypsy.
Tickets for Waiting for Godot go on sale exclusively to American Express cardholders at 10am ET tomorrow (Wednesday, April 16) via the production's website, GodotBroadway.com. At 10am ET on Monday, April 21, tickets will also become available to those who have signed up for the show's "priority list" on that same website. The general public can have a go starting at 10am ET on Wednesday, April 23.
Casting the actors who played the extremely mobile Bill and Ted as the extremely stuck Estragon and Vladimir is a funny idea, which doesn't necessarily mean that it will work. Star casting on Broadway this year has so far yielded performances ranging from terrific to just fine to not great to unfortunate. Will good things, this time, come to those who wait? We're no time travelers: Only September will tell.
