Erich Karl Lowenberg, known as Erik Charell, was a German theatre and film director, dancer and actor.
15 Facts About Erik Charell
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Erik Charell is best known as the creator of musical revues and operettas, such as The White Horse Inn and The Congress Dances.
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Erik Charell was the first child of Jewish parents Markus Lowenberg and Ida Korach.
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Erik Charell had a sister, Betti, who was born in 1886, and a younger brother named Ludwig, who was born in 1889 and later became Charell's manager.
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Erik Charell was discovered, according to his own account, by the press in 1913 during a performance of the ballet-pantomime Venezianische Abenteuer eines jungen Mannes by playwright Karl Vollmoller in a production of director Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
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Erik Charell managed to engage the "Tiller Girls", an internationally famous girl group from London.
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In 1936, Erik Charell staged a successful Broadway production of White Horse Inn.
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Erik Charell died on 15 July 1974 in Munich and was cremated on the Eastern cemetery.
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When Erik Charell visited New York for the first time, working at the Century Theatre for Max Reinhardt, he was impressed and inspired by the American revues, especially the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.
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Erik Charell decided, upon his return to Berlin, to combine European operetta music with the music and ideas of the American music theatre, to create a more 'cosmopolitan German' style.
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Erik Charell established a revue style in which "word, sound, image, costume, colour, the art of illumination [work together] as a single rousing burning mirror".
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Erik Charell presented renowned Lesbian stars such as Claire Waldoff to draw in additional crowds.
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Erik Charell revolutionized the German musical theatre by developing the idea of 'staged nudity' further than had been standard until then.
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Erik Charell discovered modern female chorus lines in New York and was the first to bring them to Berlin, where they fuelled his stunning success.
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Erik Charell wanted "to reawaken aesthetic feelings" in the spectator "by artistic composition".