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Concept
Erik Charell
Summary
Erich Karl Löwenberg (8 April 1894 – 15 July 1974), known as Erik Charell, was a German theatre and film director, dancer and actor. He is best known as the creator of musical revues and operettas, such as The White Horse Inn (Im weißen Rössl) and The Congress Dances (Der Kongress tanzt).
Charell was born as Erich Karl Löwenberg in Breslau. He was the first child of Jewish parents Markus Löwenberg and Ida Korach. He also 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.
Charell studied dance in Berlin. He 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 Vollmöller in a production of director Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He founded his own company, the Charell-Ballett, and toured Europe during and after the World War I. The musical director of his company was the young Friedrich Hollaender (later a famous film composer.) In two silent movies, Paul Leni's Prince Cuckoo (1919) and Richard Oswald's Figures of the Night (1920) he demonstrated his brilliance as an actor. Reinhardt appointed Charell as assistant stage manager for the tour production of Vollmöller's The Miracle in New York in 1923. After his return to Germany in 1924, Charell and his brother Ludwig were offered to take over the management of the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, which belonged to Reinhardt's theatre empire, the so called Reinhardt Bühnen.
In 1924 Charell presented his first revue, An Alle. He managed to engage the "Tiller Girls", an internationally famous girl group from London. His aim was to mix German operetta with exotic ingredients such as jazz, "negro music" and "the most enchanting Dancing-Girls with divine legs", in order to show that revue made in Berlin could be "as contemporary as the jazz band, that turns the Siegmund-jodeling and Siegfried-screaching to laughter" and is "as modern as Mozart or the mini-automobile", as Charell's personal friend and PR genius Alfred Flechtheim phrased it in the 1924 article "Vom Ballet zur Revue" in the magazine Der Querschnitt.
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