The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted's "Waiting for Godot"

"How could we not make cracks after Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that most righteous duo from the classic 1989 slacker movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," announced plans to star in a revival of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"? The director would be the British buzz merchant Jamie Lloyd, whose work sometimes lacks logical sense but never celebrities-he put Tom Hiddleston in a histrionic "Betrayal," Nicole Scherzinger in a bloody "Sunset Boulevard.""

"Yet Lloyd's longtime collaborator, the costume and scenic designer Soutra Gilmour, fills the Hudson's proscenium with a twenty-four-foot-high tunnel mouth, the circular opening to what looks like a stretch of gargantuan sewer built in forced perspective. This majestic fuselage dwarfs the actors, who shelter inside it like mice in a storm drain. Its plywood panels look, under cold lights, like marble."

Initial public reaction mixed celebrity jokes with skepticism about casting Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot under director Jamie Lloyd. Jamie Lloyd has a reputation for celebrity-driven productions and unpredictable staging choices. Soutra Gilmour's costume and scenic design installs a twenty-four-foot-high tunnel mouth in the Hudson Theatre, creating a forced-perspective sewerlike fuselage that dwarfs performers. The set reads as both a nod to Fascist architecture and a scatological joke, with plywood panels that read like marble under cold lights. The sculpture-like environment stabilizes the production and alters actor positioning and exchanges onstage.

Read at The New Yorker