At the top of the show, the tarragon of Keanu Reeves and the Vladimir of Alex Winter make a reference “from the 1990s” to their life spent together. It doesn’t matter that “Bill & Ted’s excellent adventure” was released in 1989. Maybe they talk about the 1991 suite, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”. The comic book duo does not really reproduce their bill and the TED characters until the second act benefits from a very brief riff on their aerial guitars, a moment that delights this audience at the Hudson Theater, when the last Broadway renewal of “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett opened on Sunday.
What is lacking with regard to chemistry between this gogo and Didi, as they are called each other, are not really apparent until Pozzo and Michael Patrick Thornton by Brandon J. Dirden appears. They make their entry into the back of the stage, which designer Soutra Gilmour has become a gigantic tunnel.
Or maybe it is the interior of the tree that director Jamie Lloyd relegated somewhere in the first of the second balcony. Gilmour’s set and Jon Clark’s lighting create several eclipses of the sun and the moon worthy of “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick, and against one of these spectacular lighting displays that Pozzo, needing to wear black sunglasses, pushes the booming Lucky Lucky.
Lucky has only one very famous logorrhea attack, and yet, even in his silence, the tragic co-depence of these two men is more clearly and quickly established than everything that happens in the previous half hour between Reeves and Winter. It is also great to see Dirden and Thornton, two real theater animals, attack their roles with such an obvious relish, this frightening reference to “Silence of the Lamb” being the least.
This pozzo is a sun that bursts while pushing back on its orbit, and this chance is the black hole that sucks all behind. An additional attraction is that Dirden brings an old flavor of the South American to its representation. This good actor is intended to play Big Daddy or Boss Finley.
Regarding the broken link in this set, what Reeves has for him is a look. Late Theater illustrator, Al Hirschfeld, would have attracted it with a minimum of very long lines. This gogo is so tall and thinly to suffer from a severe desiccation, the small black glass pearls, the body so hungry for another of the Didi carrots that the hair sprang on his face in a sort of shaggy protest. Gilmour’s costumes focus on this sharpness physical by making Gogo’s costume too small, the costume of Didi too large. Of course, there are Laurel & Hardy Black derbies, also worn by Pozzo and Lucky. Gogo and Dido are not so large and thin that they are large and short. They are also the stomach and the brain, the identifier and the ego.
But a look is going so far. It is not a performance, and Reeves has studied very much and high the delivery of its lines is sufficient to prohibit the word “staccato” of Webster.
Which leaves the winter to wear this act of tragicomerie. It is an unbalanced routine, but this look of Didi on the public makes us not only see this missing tree, but the abysses that await us all.
Jamie Lloyd tries to compensate for the lack of dynamism between the two training sessions by exaggerating the tunnel game to reduce the comic effect. Most times, he sends Reeves and winter, as well as Dirden, who goes up to the sides of the tunnel to slide down. I have never been sorry for hamsters.
