Bill & Ted’s excellent purgatory
This review is about the Broadway debut of my guru; so there will be a lot of me in it. My Godot today was Amazon. My plans for this NYC trip changed about half a dozen times to the point that I didn’t believe I would make it. Down to the wire with my departure date, I ordered the Wyld Stallyns for delivery at the hotel. It was delayed a day and would arrive the morning of the show. I woke up to a delay, followed by confused Amazon customer reps who didn’t understand how a tank top could be so important. By the time the package arrived there wasn’t an employee in the hotel that didn’t know about it. Needless to say, I had to come correct when I finally made it down to the lobby.
I needed the shirt because it tied three decades together. I watched Bill & Ted when I was a kid. A kid with my personality should not have been allowed to continually rent a film about time travel and C students making it work by grabbing historical figures from centuries before and throwing them on a high school stage.
Point Break came next and that’s when the cultish follow began. He was just always cool. When I found out he was making his Broadway debut in an absurdist drama along with his best friend I had to be there.
He may not be the first film actor you picture on the stage, but anyone who questions it should go back and watch John Wick 4. He carried an entire film while only saying about 35 words.
Waiting for Godot is heavy. It’s about purgatory and waiting for a God that may not exist. I think it was right up Reeve’s alley. He’s well read. Since my teens, I’ve highlighted writers he’s name-dropped in interviews. The two that come to mind are Marcel Proust and Alina Reyes. He’s the Baba Yaga in a 38L suit who’s well-read in existentialism and literary eroticism. Is he even real? I learned tonight that he is.
I was unfamiliar with Beckett’s plays before. I’m a student of Bergman and Beckett refused the film adaptations of his work by Bergman. After sitting through his plays; I can say that where Beckett revels in the absurdity of the meaningless of life, Bergman acknowledged it but strived for understanding.
Back to Godot, our two characters can’t figure out what’s going on or why they are where they are. They come across characters that have adapted to purgatory and created their own dogmas about it, but these two guys aren’t having it.
There’s a scene where they’re fighting a wave of energy that tries to crush them and they stand back-to-back, turn towards the audience and smile before playing air guitar and making their classic air guitar sound effect. It was a single moment in the play, but when it happened the entire theatre went crazy. An audience member yelled out, “Stay excellent!” We were there for our time travelers and we were learning about Beckett along the way.
I respect the play, but I loved seeing Bill & Ted all grown up. Their Godot characters were two lost souls that didn’t know whether to carry on or jump into the abyss. It’s probably bleak and tragic with any other cast, but with the two guys from San Dimas on stage, hope was never far away for the audience members. If anyone could break through the chains of purgatory, it was the Wyld Stallyns who’d beaten death in chess.
Beckett might be famous for the monologues on the meaningless of the universe, but there is a generation out there that grew up on believing in the rock song that would save the universe. If two students flunking history class can cut class to hop into Dr. Who’s phone booth with George Carlin and get back with historical figures for their presentation without getting caught by their parents, that is a super power called luck. Then a futuristic destiny tells them that they will create a ballad that will heal the universe Captain EO-style. No amount of purgatorial depression can hold back those two guys.
The play ends sharply on an ambiguous note with the lights going completely dark. The applaud started as soon as everyone in the audience had the chance to say inside their mind, “Of course they made it though, right?”
The power of hope for Bill and Ted allowed a 2025 audience to sit through a two-hour play about the meaningless of life without touching their phones. That’s why I had to wear the tank top. There was energy in that room tonight. It showed that regardless of the content, the happy memories and beliefs from our childhood can conquer anything. I air guitar to that.
