Mel Gussow

Last updated

Mel Gussow
Born
Melvyn Hayes Gussow

(1933-12-19)December 19, 1933
New York City, New York, U.S.
DiedApril 29, 2005(2005-04-29) (aged 71)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation(s)Theater critic, movie critic, author
Notable credit(s) The New York Times ; Newsweek ; Army newspaper Heidelberg, Germany [1]
SpouseAnn Meredith Beebe Gussow (19??–2005; his death)
ChildrenEthan Meredith Gussow

Melvyn Hayes "Mel" Gussow (GUSS-owe; December 19, 1933 – April 29, 2005) [1] was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.

Contents

Biography

Gussow was born in New York City and grew up in Rockville Centre, Long Island. [1] He attended South Side High School. [2] and Middlebury College, where he served as editor of The Campus, and graduated in 1955 with a BA in American literature. He earned an MA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.[ citation needed ]

Gussow was a writer for the Army newspaper in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was stationed for two years. [1] He was hired by Newsweek , where he became a movie and theater critic. His first Broadway play review was of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962. This review began a lifelong relationship with the play's author, Edward Albee, that included Gussow's 1999 biography of the playwright entitled Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. [1]

Gussow joined the New York Times in 1969 and over his 35-year career wrote more than 4,000 of the newspaper's reviews and articles. [1] He authored eight books[ citation needed ], including a series of four which were considered "conversations" with playwrights Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Times arts reporter Jesse McKinley notes that Gussow's interview collections became "staples of college drama curriculums and the libraries of gossip-loving theater fans". [1]

In the late 1960s and in 1970, he and his wife Ann and son Ethan, actor Dustin Hoffman, and several other families lived in apartments in a townhouse at 16 West 11th Street. On March 6, 1970, the townhouse next door to theirs was destroyed by an explosion of dynamite that killed three and injured two members of the Weathermen organization. In an article written by Gussow on the 30th anniversary of the disaster, Gussow reported an FBI finding that "had all the explosives detonated, the explosion would have leveled everything on both sides of the street." He and his family remained residents of Greenwich Village after the explosion, maintaining a home on West 10th Street. [3]

Gussow was married to Ann, who survived him, along with their son Ethan, who married Susan Baldomar in 1998. [1] [4]

Death

Gussow died on April 29, 2005, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital from bone cancer at the age of 71. [1] [5] He had kept working until just three weeks before his death, writing at that time an obituary along with New York Times colleague Charles McGrath of Canadian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow. [6]

In 2008, Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame at the same time as actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, the actors John Cullum, Lois Smith and Dana Ivey, the director Jack O'Brien, the playwright Peter Shaffer, and the librettist Joseph Stein. [7]

Archive

The papers and audio/video recordings of Mel Gussow were gifted to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. The extensive collection of over 200 boxes consists of article and manuscript drafts, interview notes and transcripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, subject files, clippings, and published material. More than 900 sound recordings of Gussow's interviews with actors, playwrights, writers, and directors are held in the Ransom Center's Sound Recordings Collection. [8] In 2018, the Ransom Center began releasing the interviews online as part of their digital collections. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Miller</span> American playwright and essayist (1915–2005)

Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Albee</span> American playwright (1928–2016)

Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Three Tall Women (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvey Fierstein</span> American actor and playwright

Harvey Forbes Fierstein is an American actor, playwright and screenwriter. He is best known for his theater work in Torch Song Trilogy and Hairspray and movie roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, and as the voice of Yao in Mulan and Mulan II. Fierstein won two Tony Awards, Best Actor in a Play and Best Play, for Torch Song Trilogy. He received his third Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical, for the musical La Cage aux Folles and his fourth, the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. Fierstein also wrote the book for the Tony Award–winning musicals Kinky Boots, Newsies, and Tony Award–nominated, Drama League Award-winner A Catered Affair. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2007.

<i>Torch Song Trilogy</i> Collection of three plays by Harvey Fierstein

Torch Song Trilogy is a collection of three plays by Harvey Fierstein rendered in three acts: International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First! The story centers on Arnold Beckoff, a Jewish homosexual, drag queen, and torch singer who lives in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The four-hour play begins with a soliloquy in which he explains his cynical disillusionment with love.

Three Tall Women is a 1990 two-act play by Edward Albee, which premiered at Vienna's English Theatre in 1991. It is about three women — a woman in her 90s, a woman in her 50s, and a woman in her 20s — who are unnamed in the play but referred to in the script as A, B and C. In the first act, B and C are a caretaker and lawyer for A, respectively, while in the second act they have become personifications of A from earlier in her life. The character of A, the oldest woman, is based in part on Albee's own mother.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Winter (author)</span> 19th-century American critic and writer

William Winter was an American dramatic critic and author.

Jerome Weidman was an American playwright and novelist. He collaborated with George Abbott on the book for the musical Fiorello! with music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. All received the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dana Ivey</span> American actress

Dana Robins Ivey is an American actress. She is a five-time Tony Award nominee for her work on Broadway, and won the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play for her work in both Sex and Longing and The Last Night of Ballyhoo. She originated the title role in Driving Miss Daisy and was nominated for a Drama Desk award for Best Actress in a Play. Her film appearances include The Color Purple (1985), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), The Addams Family (1991), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Addams Family Values (1993), Two Weeks Notice (2002), Rush Hour 3 (2007), and The Help (2011).

Peter Glenville was an English film and stage actor and director.

Kevin Adams is an American theatrical lighting designer. He has earned four Tony Awards for lighting design.

Samuel French, Inc. is an American company, founded by Samuel French and Thomas Hailes Lacy, who formed a partnership to combine their existing interests in London and New York City. It publishes plays, represents authors, and sells scripts from their Los Angeles, UK, and online bookstores.

Thomas Babe was an American playwright, "one of Joseph Papp's most prolific resident playwrights at the New York Shakespeare Festival," with seven of his plays premiered at the Public Theatre. His work during the mid-1970s and through the 1980s explored many elements of American history and cultural mythology. He was fascinated by the concept of the traditional hero figure—and the reality behind it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gotham Book Mart</span> Former bookstore in Manhattan, New York (1920–2007)

The Gotham Book Mart was a famous Midtown Manhattan bookstore and cultural landmark that operated from 1920 to 2007. The business was located first in a small basement space on West 45th Street near the Theater District, then moved to 51 West 47th Street, then spent many years at 41 West 47th Street within the Diamond District in Manhattan, New York City, before finally moving to 16 East 46th Street. Beyond merely selling books, the store virtually played as a literary salon, hosting meetings of the Finnegans Wake Society, the James Joyce Society, poetry and author readings, art exhibits, and more. It was known for its distinctive sign above the door which read, "Wise Men Fish Here". The store specialized in poetry, literature, books about theater, art, music and dance. It sold both new books as well as out-of-print and rare books.

Charles Thomas Cole was a playwright and screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for Smooth Talk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H.M. Koutoukas</span> American dramatist

H.M. "Harry" Koutoukas was a surrealist playwright, actor and teacher. Along with Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen and Robert Patrick, Koutoukas was among the artists who gave birth to the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Bosoms and Neglect is a play by American playwright John Guare, first staged in 1979 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

Audrey Violet Wood was an American literary and theatrical agent. Wood was influential in the careers of several of the most recognized dramatic playwrights of the mid-20th century, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Robert Anderson and Arthur Kopit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Gordon</span> American professor, director, and writer (1947–2018)

Melvin Irwin Gordon was an American professor, director and writer.

John Waldhorn Gassner was a Hungarian-born American theatre historian, critic, educator, and anthologist.

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door (1920–25) separated the back office from the main area of Frank Shay's Bookshop in Greenwich Village from 1920 until 1925, where it served as an autograph book for nearly two hundred and fifty authors, artists, publishers, poets, and Bohemian creatives. Notable signatories include Upton Sinclair, the Provincetown Players, John Sloan, Susan Glaspell, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. The door has been held in the permanent collections of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin since it was purchased in 1960.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 McKinley, Jesse (May 1, 2005). "Mel Gussow, Critic, Dies at 71: A Champion of Playwrights" (Web). The New York Times . Retrieved April 9, 2011. Mr. Gussow was survived by his wife, Ann, and his son, Ethan, both of Manhattan, and by a brother, Paul.
  2. ↑ Gussow, Mel (November 12, 1997). "At Lunch With: Doris Kearns Goodwin" (Web). The New York Times . Retrieved April 9, 2011. In common with Ms. Goodwin, I grew up in Rockville Centre. Her older sister, Jeanne, was a classmate of mine at South Side High School
  3. ↑ Gussow, Mel (March 5, 2000). "The House On West 11th Street" (Web). The New York Times . Retrieved February 25, 2009.
  4. ↑ Staff (September 27, 1999). "Weddings: Susan Baldomar, Ethan Gussow". The New York Times. Retrieved April 9, 2011.
  5. ↑ Staff (May 4, 2005). "Paid Notice: Deaths: Gussow, Melvyn" (Web). The New York Times . Retrieved April 9, 2011.
  6. ↑ Gussow, Mel (April 6, 2005). "Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89" (Web). The New York Times .
  7. ↑ Andrew Gans (January 28, 2008). "Fierstein, Ivey, O'Brien and More Inducted Into Theater Hall of Fame Jan. 28; Tune Hosts". Playbill.com . Archived from the original on February 6, 2008.
  8. ↑ "Mel Gussow: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center". norman.hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved April 9, 2016.
  9. ↑ Cunningham-Kruppa, Ellen (April 3, 2018). "Theatre critic Mel Gussow's legendary interviews available online". sites.utexas.edu. Retrieved April 16, 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.