E-Mail This Article to a Friend Elliot Norton 1903-2003 BY CAROLYN CLAY

The final curtain fell for long-running Boston theater critic Elliot Norton on Sunday July 20 after a neat 100 years, almost half of it happily spent in an aisle seat. Norton, who was a critic for 48 years, beginning in 1934 with the Boston Post and ending in 1982 with the Boston Herald, was as legendary for his longevity as for his uncanny acumen as a "play doctor," physician to such diverse patients as The Odd Couple and Oklahoma!, both of which were revamped during their pre-Broadway tryouts in Boston. He was also, from 1958 to ’82, the star of the award-winning WGBH television program Elliot Norton Reviews. He retired from his teaching job at Boston University’s School of Theater Arts (where from 1954 to 1974 he helped instill a love of Shakespeare and a healthy respect for dramatic criticism in future theater professionals), in his words, as "a kid of 75."

Norton began his romance with the stage as a Boston Latin School boy in the 1910s, paying $1.10 (or so he said, and he was seldom inaccurate) to sit in the balcony of the Old Howard or the Boston Opera House, where he saw John Barrymore play Hamlet. It was a lifelong infatuation that seemingly no thespian sin could dent. And for a younger critic, for whom Norton was first a teacher and then a generous colleague, it was a joy and an inspiration to behold. Even after his retirement, he showed up at the theater until the final years of his life. He relished the news and the gossip and could remember greatness he had witnessed (and put a word in on) decades earlier. The clinkers faded faster. What’s remarkable is that Norton, an intelligent man keenly curious about the artistic mind and process, never grew jaded.

The critic-to-be had started young, freelancing for Variety while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He went to work in 1926 as a reporter and "rewrite man" for the Post before being tapped to turn his passion into a profession. It was a happy conjunction. Norton’s particular skill for zeroing in on a play, gauging its artistic and commercial worth, and knowing just how that might be increased coincided with Boston’s glory years as a tryout town. And when he proffered his opinion, blunt but never unkind, Broadway producers, playwrights, designers, and performers, many of them turning up on his TV show after praise or a trouncing, listened. And rewrote. And pruned. And, famously in the case of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, brought back the Pidgeon Sisters.

In his long career, Norton won just about everything but the Cy Young Award (a lifelong Red Sox fan, he would have liked to win that too). His honors included the 1963-’64 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the 1962 George Foster Peabody Award for Elliot Norton Reviews, and a special Tony Award bestowed in 1971. He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1988. Upon his retirement in 1982, the Elliot Norton Awards, Boston’s answer to the Tonys, were established in his name.

Norton had many virtues besides those of an astute oddsmaker. He hailed from a school of journalism uncomfortable with showing off; though his reviews occasionally reflected his drollery, they were written in a sturdy prose more notable for what it said than for how he said it. In person, his wit was quick and sometimes wicked. He was also unflappable. According to an anecdote told by the critic himself, when a piqued producer David Merrick came on his show and demanded to know why Norton didn’t presage his opinions — not, after all, holy writ — with "I think," Norton replied: "The name of the show is Elliot Norton Reviews. If I said, ‘I think,’ it would be redundant."

Mr. Norton is survived by three children, three grandchildren, a grieving theater community, and the classic American shows his faith, tweaking, and good-sense advice helped to make immortal. A funeral Mass is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. this Friday, July 25, at St. Patrick’s Church, Main Street in Watertown. Burial will be at Mount Auburn Cemetery.