Erik Charell
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).
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.
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.
Together they wrote the trilogy of historical revue-operettas, which made Charell famous to this day: Casanova (1928), Die drei Musketiere [de] (1929) and The White Horse Inn (Im weißen Rößl, 1930).
In the following years he himself staged the show in London (1931), Paris (1932) and New York (1936), where each production was newly conceived, the script translated differently, and new music and instrumentation were added in some parts.
Many actors and singers, such as Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Schmidt, Max Hansen and Camilla Spira, who all became famous later, first appeared in major roles in Charell productions.
[6] The international success of Der Kongreß tanzt led to an engagement in Hollywood, where Charell directed the movie Caravan, again with sets by Ernst Stern and music by Werner Richard Heymann.
The New York Times noted "If lyric loveliness and photographic charm were all a picture needed to keep an audience enthralled, Mr. Charell could be toasted in good tokay this morning, and 'Caravan' could be applauded until the bottle is dry.
The New York Times noted that it "involves mountain scenery and hotel architecture, costumes beautiful and varied enough to bankrupt a designer's imagination, choruses that can do anything from the hornpipe to a resounding slap-dance, grand processionals with royalty loitering before the commoners, a steamboat, a yacht, a char-à-banc, four real cows and a great deal more of the same.
[11][12] It was a daring and innovative production, because Charell used only black actors and singers, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Maxine Sullivan, Moms Mabley, Dorothy Dandridge and Butterfly McQueen.
Music was written for the production by Jimmy van Heusen but songs included in the show came from the greatest African-American composers and songwriters in jazz: W. C. Handy, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Count Basie and many others.
His two big film productions were The White Horse Inn with Nazi operetta star Johannes Heesters in 1952, and Fireworks with Lilli Palmer and the young Romy Schneider in 1954.
After failing to write a sequel to The White Horse Inn with his original librettist Robert Gilbert, Charell spend most of his time of the 1960s buying and selling art.
A movie producer spoke to his memories, and to honour this charmer, who consciously and prudently managed his graceful talents, the triumph march of Verdi's opera 'Aida' sounded across the cemetery".
On 18 November 2015, Friedrichstadt-Palast Berlin inaugurated a memorial at Friedrichstraße 107 dedicated to the theatre's founders, Max Reinhardt, Hans Poelzig and Erik Charell.
When 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.
He established a revue style in which "word, sound, image, costume, colour, the art of illumination [work together] as a single rousing burning mirror".
The comedians Claire Waldoff and Wilhelm Bendow were hired to perform slapstick and dialectic humour similar of the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Karl Valentin.
In the first case homoeroticism is quite obvious, the tabloid newspaper BZ am Mittag noting "juicy guys in leather trousers, who slap each other in time.
Charell also used famous male sex symbols in his operettas, like Alfred Jerger, Max Hansen and Siegfried Arno, the latter doing a famous striptease in The Three Musketeers [de] when comparing his battle wounds with the others, critic Erich Urban noted that "when [Arno] unveils his perforated body to Hansen [...] the whole theatre screams and gasp, not just the upper balconies".
[24] Im weißen Rössl contains a similar scene, in which Arno presents himself as a "gorgeous bathing beauty" and undresses, before plunging into the Wolfgangsee.
