At long last: Bill S. Preston and Ted "Theodore" Logan are Waiting For Godot

Today, in “Ideas that actually make more sense the more you think about them” news, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves (known, permanently, in our brains, as Bill & Ted, no matter how many hard-hitting documentaries or European gangsters they shoot) have announced a new collaboration: A Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

Okay, now, sit with it. You’ve probably just hit the first “What a silly joke” phase of grappling with this idea; now, you’re thinking about the faux-stoner affect the two perfected across the three B&T films; your brain is mapping it on to Beckett’s perpetually confused, intermittently confident Estragon and Vladimir, and… Yep, there you go.

Winter and Reeves both got their start in theater, with Winter appearing on Broadway in the late ’70s in revivals of The King And I and Peter Pan. (In 2018, Winter revealed he’d been sexually abused while working as a teenager on Broadway; he said in a later interview that adopting the role of the child-like Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989 was “therapeutic” for him as he processed the trauma.) Per The New York Times, the new version of the play will see Reeves (who came up with the idea for the whole thing) play Estragon, while Winter will play Vladimir. (Gogo and Didi, to their friends/companions/fellow participants in existential bleakness.) The play is being directed by Jamie Lloyd, who recently directed Jessica Chastain in a revival of A Doll’s House. Lloyd called the basic idea “a no-brainer that needed to be done,” and while “needed” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, we can’t deny that seeing a version of Beckett’s classic that plays on Reeves and Winter’s long friendship and easy familiarity with each other is a genuinely cool idea.

Honestly, the most annoying thing about the announcement is that Patton Oswalt already beat us to the perfect casting for Pozzo, the cruel slavemaster who the pair periodically encounter: William Sadler, who played Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and 2020’s Face The Music.