Peter Vaughan, theater critic, dies at 76

Peter Vaughan, a longtime theater critic and reporter for the Minneapolis Star and the merged Star Tribune, has died at his French home in the Loire Valley. His 77^th birthday would have been Friday.

Vaughan moved to France with his wife, Dana Wood, after retiring from the Star Tribune in 1997. They lived in a country manse in Saint-Senoch, in central France, where Vaughan was able to indulge his tastes for good wine and food.

Born in London, Vaughan and his mother moved to St. Paul when he was a child. His father, Tom Vaughan, was an amateur theater enthusiast who became a critic himself after he retired from an academic career.

Peter Vaughan graduated from St. Paul Academy and received degrees from Yale and the London School of Economics. He started his career at the Minneapolis Star as a reporter, winning an award in 1974 for working on a team that investigated the value and reliability of auto repairs. It was as a theater critic, though, that he was remembered best.

"Guys like me and Lou [Bellamy] over at Penumbra, owe our careers to him," said Jack Reuler, who founded Mixed Blood Theatre about the time Vaughan started to cover Twin Cities theater. "His own personal world view fit in with what our mission was."

Bob Lundegaard worked with Vaughan at the newspapers and shared an enthusiasm for the arts and sports. The two played a regular tennis match each week for more than 10 years, Lundegaard recalled.

"He was very enthusiastic about theater – he'd review three or four shows a week," Lundegaard said.

He also had dry sense of humor. At a breakfast with Rohan Preston, his successor at the Star Tribune, Vaughan was asked how he kept up with the plethora of theaters producing shows.

"Your job is to kill half of them off," Vaughan said without missing a beat.

In a valedictory when he left the Star Tribune, Vaughan called theater "a unique forum to probe the political, social and personal forces that shape our lives."

"Probably the most disappointing aspect of Twin Cities theater is how often good, even exceptional work, is ignored by audiences," he wrote. "One might argue that we have too much theater and that the
exceptional often gets lost, but I fear that too often, people shun theater for the very reasons I am attracted to it."