Walter Kerr

Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theater critic. He also was a writer, lyricist, and director of several Broadway musicals.

He became a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune in 1951, then began writing theater reviews for the New York Times in 1966. He wrote for the New York Times for seventeen years. Kerr won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978.

In 1990, the old Ritz theater on West 48th Street was renamed the Walter Kerr Theatre in his honor.

Kerr's books include:

• How Not to Write a Play (1955)

• Criticism and Censorship (1957)

• Pieces at Eight (1958)

• The Decline of Pleasure (1962)

• The Theatre in Spite of Itself (1963)

• Tragedy and Comedy (1967)

• Thirty Plays Hath November (1969)

• God on the Gymnasium Floor (1971)

• The Silent Clowns (1975)

His wife, Jean Kerr, 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). It must be said that Kerr did not have much of an ear for music, as many of the shows he panned over his long career included the musically ambitious shows of Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein's comic opera Candide and musically ambitious West Side Story, and Frank Loesser's "musical with a lot of music" [sic. opera], The Most Happy Fella.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.