Henry Hewes

Henry Hewes was born on April 9, 1917, and raised in Boston. He once said he was first smitten with theater when he and some school friends went to see a show backed by a classmate’s father in honor of his 10th birthday. The classmate was John F. Kennedy. But Mr. Hewes’s mother was also a theater producer, and after serving in the Air Force in World War II, Mr. Hewes abandoned his pre-med studies at Harvard to study theater at Columbia, where he graduated in 1949. His first theater-journalism job was as a copy boy at The New York Times, running Brooks Atkinson’s reviews to the composing room page by page. Encouraged by Atkinson, Mr. Hewes began writing profiles for the Sunday arts pages before moving over to the weekly magazine The Saturday Review to write supplementary reviews as second-string critic to John Mason Brown. Mr. Hewes eventually took over as the chief critic, and his tenure in that role lasted from 1955 to 1973. At The Saturday Review, Mr. Hewes became the first critic at a major forum to devote as much attention to regional and international theater productions as to Broadway and Off Broadway shows. His interest in regional theater led him to establish the American Theater Critics Association in 1974. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the regional theater Tony Award and the creation of the American Theater Wing’s design awards, now called the Hewes Awards. Henry Hewes was among the The American Theatre Critics Association, Inc. (ATCA) founders interviewed in UNDER THE COPPER BEACH: Conversations with American Theater Critics. A past president of the New York Drama Critics Circle and the Drama Desk, and the editor from 1960 to 1964 of the Best Plays anthology, Mr. Hewes was also proud of his suggestion to Tennessee Williams that he turn a certain short story into a play; the play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Mr. Hewes was elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 2002 [Information from Hewes's NEW YORK TIMES obituary, Charles Isherwood, July 20, 2006]