Walter Kerr

Biography

Kerr was born in Evanston, Illinois and earned both a B.A. and M.A. from Northwestern University. He taught speech and drama at The Catholic University of America. After writing criticism for Commonweal he became a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune in 1951. When that paper ended, he then began writing theater reviews for The New York Times in 1966, writing for the next seventeen years.

He married Jean Kerr (née Collins) on August 9, 1943. She was also a writer. Together, they wrote the musical Goldilocks (1958), which won two Tony Awards. They also collaborated on Touch and Go (1949) and King of Hearts (1954).

He was portrayed pseudonymously by David Niven in the 1960 film Please Don't Eat the Daisies, based on Jean Kerr's best-selling collection of humorous essays.

Criticism

Kerr was well known for panning musicals that were musically ambitious.

Stephen Sondheim

Many of the shows he critiqued were those of Stephen Sondheim. About Sondheim's Company, Kerr wrote that it was too cold, cynical and distant for his taste, though he "admitted to admiring large parts of the show."

About Sondheim's Follies, he wrote " 'Follies' is intermissionless and exhausting, an extravaganza that becomes tedious for two simple reasons: Its extravagances have nothing to do with its pebble of a plot; and the plot, which could be wrapped up in approximately two songs, dawdles through 22 before it declares itself done... Mr. Sondheim may be too much a man of the seventies, too present-tense sophisticated... The effort to bind it up inhibits the crackling, open-ended, restlessly varied surges of sound he devised with such distinction for Company."

He praised A Little Night Music, writing that "The score is a gift, the ladies are delightful, and producer Harold Prince has staged the moody meetings with easy skill."

He expressed mixed sentiments about Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, praising the music but deeming it too lilting for the show's grisly subject; his conclusion- "What is this musical about?" He wrote a follow-up article on his observation that the musical contained a plot from Molière's The School for Wives, posing the question who, of all of the authors who had revised the tale of Sweeney Todd over the years, had put the plot into the story.

Nevertheless, in 1977, he wrote of Sondheim "I needn't tell you that Stephen Sondheim is, both musically and lyrically, the most sophisticated composer now working for the Broadway theater."

Leonard Bernstein

In reviewing Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story he focused on the dancing: "the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons... The dancing is it. Don't look for laughter or—for that matter—tears."

In his review of the original 1956 Broadway production of Candide, he wrote that it was a "really spectacular disaster". However, in reviewing the 1973 revival of Candide he wrote that it was a "most satisfying resurrection. [...] 'Candide' may at last have stumbled into the best of all possible productions... The show is now a carousel and we are on it quite safely... The design of the unending chase is so firm, the performers are so secure in their climbing and tumbling...that we are able to join the journey and still see it with the detachment that Voltaire prescribes."

Frank Loesser

Of Frank Loesser's "musical with a lot of music" [sic. opera], The Most Happy Fella he wrote: "the evening at the Imperial is finally heavy with its own inventiveness, weighted down with the variety and fulsomeness of a genuinely creative appetite. It's as though Mr. Loesser had written two complete musicals—the operetta and the haymaker—on the same simple play and then crammed them both into a single structure."

Other criticism

Kerr was also notable for his lack of enthusiasm regarding the plays of Samuel Beckett. For instance, of Beckett's Waiting For Godot he wrote "The play, asking for a thousand readings, has none of its own to give. It is a veil rather than a revelation. It wears a mask rather than a face."

Notoriously he is credited with one of the world's shortest reviews, "Me no Leica" for John Van Druten's I Am a Camera in the New York Herald Tribune, December 31, 1951.

Awards and honors

Walter Kerr won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978 for "articles on the theater".

In 1983, Kerr was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

In 1990, the former Ritz Theater on West 48th Street in the Theater District, New York was renamed the Walter Kerr Theatre in his honor.

Works