Waiting For Godot
Opening Night: September 28, 2025
Theater: Hudson Theatre
Website: godotbroadway.com
Celebrated actors Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are real-life friends who are starring on Broadway as two friends searching for meaning in an absurd world. Waiting for Godot is the greatest play ever written about nothing. Nothing and everything. But mostly nothing. Seriously, nothing happens. Directed by Tony® and Olivier Award-winning visionary Jamie Lloyd (Sunset Blvd., A Doll’s House, Betrayal), this exhilarating, hilarious and deeply human new production of Samuel Beckett’s self-proclaimed “tragicomedy” asks all of life’s big questions—and answers none of them. It’s ridiculous! Life, and this play. But the wait is worth the wait.
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September 28, 2025
What’s curious in “Waiting for Godot” is that the textual distillation we have come to expect from Lloyd is largely missing. So is his interpretive stamp. For the most part here, he doesn’t seem to have anything to say. That’s disappointing on its own, because the play needs strong directorial focus to land with any force, but particularly so at a time when surely a good chunk of the populace could identify with Didi and Gogo’s sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of a relentlessly brutal world.
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September 28, 2025
Their finely tuned performances are unshowy and completely in service of the production. They’re neither vaudevillians clowning for our enjoyment nor thespians hamming up each ponderous line. Reeves and Winters’ work is quiet and grounded entirely in their genuine chemistry. When they share a quick hug at the top of Act 2, after a whole day of waiting has come and gone fruitlessly, it reveals a profound knowledge that they can find comfort in each other.
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September 28, 2025
Neither one of them is reinventing the wheel, and neither is Lloyd. Despite the absence of a tree—or maybe they’re inside the tree?—it’s a relatively straightforward Waiting for Godot that’s performed at an impressive clip and mostly lands the important beats without the slash and burn that’s become Lloyd’s trademark.
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September 28, 2025
Is Reeves any good? Eh, not really. This particularly meandering and stiff “Godot” is hardly an excellent adventure. Nor, by the way, is it a bogus journey. It’s, as Bill and Ted would say, most non-triumphant. Mediocre. And the leads, one of whom is way out of his depth, certainly face the music.
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September 28, 2025
As for the acting, there’s little doubt that Winter is the most natural (and more experienced) stage actor of the two, more versatile and, when necessary, capable to drawing real pathos from this grim, gorgeous work of art. You believe his every changing mood. Reeves, as they say, is Reeves, an exceedingly charming actor who projects more than he acts but always seems to have full control of an audiences’ attention (and affection). Yes, even when he seems to be trying too hard to be stentorian or angry or carrying out a bit of slapstick tantrum, he has us rooting for him.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2025
This production isn’t exactly cracking the material open in any new way, but soars in one particular aspect: the friendship between its leads. Reeves and Winter are old friends playing old friends and their dynamic oozes fondness and longfelt frustration. The love and safety that Didi and Gogo find in one another is so endearing.
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September 28, 2025
Lloyd’s production isn’t an embarrassing misfire but it’s underwhelming. This is a work in which the slapstick clowning and the tricky verbal non sequiturs should be merely the surface for roiling undercurrents of anguish, futility, despair and fear.
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September 28, 2025
The pleasant prospect of seeing Reeves and Winter together makes this production to some extent critic-proof—and anyhow, this is a play in which “Crritic!” is the worst insult that Estragon can think up. But although Reeves and Winter are the main reason most people will go to this Godot, it is this revival’s other assets—the direction, the set and above all Dirden and Thornton—that keep it from being an exercise in meta stasis. For me, those elements make the production worth seeing, but one nice thing about Waiting for Godot is that it just keeps coming. This is the play’s third Broadway revival in the 21st century, and there have been numerous Off Broadway versions in recent years, too. If you decide to skip this one, you won’t have to wait very long for another.
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September 28, 2025
This return match-up (“Together again at last!”) has turned the playwright’s vaudevillian clowns into comics of a cooler sort. If not stoner dudes — they are, after all, both 60ish now — they’re more like go-with-the-flow buds with their own relaxed rhythms, encircling speech patterns and genuine bond. Though the two actors have a kind of slacker ease in the nonsensical volleys, this lower temperature approach too often misses the work’s humor, horror and emotional resonance.
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September 28, 2025
Neither Winter nor Reeves is doing weak work, but a gray wash has been painted over them. Line to line, they only intermittently find deep connection or vibrant color in the text. Mostly, they dependably speak it clearly and on pace (even, to my ear, a little too fast). But places that earn chuckles could be getting gasps and guffaws; moments that feel generally meditative could be devastating, if Lloyd were more interested in character work and less in mise en scène.
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September 28, 2025
But a look only goes so far. It is not a performance, and Reeves very studied and mannered delivery of his lines is enough to ban the word “staccato” from Webster’s. Which leaves it to Winter to carry this tragicomedy act. It’s a lopsided routine, but this Didi’s longing gaze out over the audience not only makes us see that missing tree but the abyss that awaits us all.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2025
The “Matrix” actor suffers beautifully in his Broadway debut, although it’s the revelatory Winter who will haunt you long after the curtain falls. As the more intellectual and empathetic Vladimir, Winter achingly conveys his hopeful optimism and crippling realization that Godot, in fact, may never arrive. His crushing final monologue, in which Vladimir confronts his own nihilism, is as potent as anything you’re bound to see on Broadway this year.
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Broadway rookie Reeves (The Matrix, John Wick) shelves his surfer-dude charm to evoke melancholy as a man motoring on anxiety. He gamely throws himself around the set like a rag doll. Winter, who acted on Broadway as a kid in Peter Pan and The King and I, brings an impressive gravity as the deep-thinking Didi, who’s prone to contemplative dives.
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Robbie Butler’s striking lighting and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s sound design, with its artful use of echo, add drama, and Lloyd maintains a brisk pace, so that the production clocks in at just over two hours, including an intermission. But I would have rather spent a longer time with a Godot helmed by a director more concerned about what he wanted to say than how differently he could say it.
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The director at least seems to have reined in his more outlandish impulses for this production. There’s nary a video camera or screen to be found. And somehow the actors manage to remain in the theater while performing the show, resisting the impulse to wander over to Times Square to wait for Godot over there. But neither has Lloyd brought anything distinctive to it either, unless you count the undeniably striking scenic design by Soutra Gilmour that has the actors performing in what looks like a giant missile silo.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2025
It’s an interesting evening, this “Waiting for Godot,” spent in the company of very capable actors, for sure. Lloyd certainly has blown some cobwebs off a play that long has confounded anyone who has tried to sell it to regular folks.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 28, 2025
Lloyd’s take on Beckett is an especially disorienting, purgatorial one – at one point, Gogo and Didi approach a literal blinding light at the end of the tunnel, only to turn back. But it is more coolly strange than spiritually disquieting, seeming to strain for provocation without need.
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September 28, 2025
The production seems intent on reaching new audiences and making the play feel more accessible to people who know “Bill & Ted” and “The Matrix” rather than Beckett. Some will be hooked, and others will surely find the repetition unbearable and slip out at intermission. “Godot” has always divided audiences. Reeves and Winter may not save the world this time, but their endless adventure in Beckett’s wasteland is a strange, curious, and surprisingly affecting experiment.
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September 28, 2025
Reeves, Winter, and Lloyd have not produced a revolutionary or revelatory Godot (you’re still grateful to inhale the night air when Beckett’s existential trudge is done), but they have found a route to a non-disastrous, pleasurable one.
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