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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
Lifestyle
Kevin E G Perry

Keanu Reeves set to reunite with Bill & Ted co-star Alex Winter on Broadway

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Bill & Ted stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are set to reunite on Broadway in a new production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The production will open in New York in late 2025, and will be directed by Olivier Award-winner Jamie Lloyd. The theater has not yet been announced.

Reeves will play Estragon with Winter as Vladimir in Beckett’s existential classic.

In a joint statement, Reeves and Winter said: “We’re incredibly excited to be on stage together and work with the great Jamie Lloyd in one of our favorite plays.”

Lloyd added: “It is a real honor to be collaborating with the brilliant Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter on Samuel Beckett’s sublime masterpiece – one of the greatest plays of all time.”

Reeves and Winter first starred together in 1989’s sci-fi comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, playing two slackers who travel through time in order to complete their history homework.

In the 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which was partly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the pair faced off against death itself. They returned for another sequel, Bill & Ted: Face the Music, in 2020.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves announcing ‘Bill & Ted: Face the Music’ in 2019. (YouTube / Orion Pictures)

Waiting for Godot has previously been produced by a number of other famous duos. A 1983 production paired Robin Williams and Steve Martin, while Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan teamed up to perform the play in 2009 and then in subsequent revivals.

In a four-star review of Bill & Ted: Face the Music, The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “Can a song save the world? It’s the oddly profound question at the heart of the otherwise dopey, rambunctious Bill & Ted Face the Music. But that’s always been a part of the DNA of these films – an exquisite mix of philosophy, history, and the ‘woah, dude’ cant of two Californian slackers.

“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and its sequel Bogus Journey, didn’t stand out as the funniest, wittiest or even most original films of the late Eighties and early Nineties, but there was always a stirring earnestness to the adventures of Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S Preston, Esq (Alex Winter).

“As they rocketed through time, space and the afterlife, often with the aid of a rickety time-travelling phone booth, their motto of ‘be excellent to each other and party on, dudes’ became its own kind of escapism.

“If only life really were that simple. Bill & Ted Face the Music, a long-brewing third instalment, doesn’t change a single ounce of this formula. It’s gloriously uncool, unmodern and uncynical.”

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