Walter Kerr
| Walter Kerr | |
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Kerr with Helen Hayes
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| Born | Walter Francis Kerr July 8, 1913 Evanston, Illinois |
| Died | October 9, 1996 Dobbs Ferry, New York |
| Education | Northwestern University |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize |
| Spouse | Jean Kerr |
Walter Francis Kerr (July 8, 1913 – October 9, 1996) was an American writer and Broadway theater critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.
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.
Kerr was well known for panning musicals that were musically ambitious.
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."
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