Bob Wilcox, the founder of “Two on the Aisle,” passed away in his sleep on October 5 at Missouri Baptist Hospital.

Bob and his wife Agnes came to St. Louis from New York for teaching jobs in the early 1980s. They met as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.

Bob started reviewing theater for The Riverfront Times in the late 1980s. A little later, he was invited to start a local origination theater review program for cable television in the city of St. Louis. The result of that invitation was “Two on the Aisle.” It was patterned after the syndicated movie review program featuring Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. Both shows featured newspaper critics and clips from what they covered.

The clips used in “Two on the Aisle” were shot especially for the show. They were edited into reviews recorded in the studio to illustrate the reviewers’ comments as they spoke. Bob’s first co-host was his Riverfront Times colleague, Harry Weber, who left the show in 1992. His replacement, Gerry Kowarsky, was a freelance theater reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at that time, so the format of two newspaper critics discussing the latest openings was preserved.

KDHX-TV was the first producer of “Two on the Aisle.” When KDHX discontinued its television operations in 2011, the show was picked up by HEC-TV, which produced it until February 2020. In its final year, “Two on the Aisle” covered around 180 productions. When theater returned after the pandemic, the station began publishing the critics’ text reviews on hecmedia.org.

Bob was especially qualified to be a theater critic. As a Ph.D. in theater and drama, he had a scholar’s knowledge of the repertory and its history and a practitioner’s understanding of what it takes to put on a play. His approach was humane, and his writing was clear, graceful, and filled with insights about the works and the productions he covered. It was a privilege to be the first one to hear his reviews during studio shoots. Knowing that my work shared a platform with his was a constant inspiration to do better.

Before coming to St. Louis, Bob taught at Sewanee: The University of the South. While on the faculty, he recommended to his dean that the university award an honorary doctorate to Tennessee Williams, whose grandfather had studied at Sewanee’s divinity school. Williams received his Doctor of Letters degree from Sewanee in 1978. After Williams’ death in 1983, his will made Sewanee the beneficiary of his literary estate.

Much of the light went out of Bob’s life when his beloved Agnes, the founder of Prison Performing Arts, drowned in Lake Erie during their annual trip to the Shakespeare and Shaw festivals in Canada. Bob and Agnes were married for 47 years. Though hampered by physical infirmities in recent years, Bob still tried to cover as much as possible until his retirement earlier this year.

The rich legacy of his recent reviews can still be found on https://hecmedia.org/category/theater_reviews and https://www.youtube.com/@the_arts_experience.

—Gerry Kowarsky