Trivia

He was a very successful theatrical director for musical revues and operettas, especially at Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin.

Revolutionized the German musical theatre by developing the idea of 'staged nudity' and by combining European operetta with idioms of the American music theatre, hoping to create a more 'cosmopolitan German'style.

Studied dance and was discovered by the writer Karl Vollmoeller during a 1913 performance of a ballet-pantomime at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

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 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".

His way of using contemporary syncopated music - from the German charts and the USA (the first European performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue took place within Charell's first revue, An Alle) -,the risqué jokes and the inclusion of attractive boy groups (dancing and singing) in addition to the then standard heterosexual display of female nudity were all new to the Berlin theatre scene. He also presented renowned Lesbian stars such as Claire Waldoff to draw in additional crowds.

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.

The international success of Der Kongreß tanzt led to an engagement in Hollywood, where Charell directed the movie Caravan. When Caravan flopped in the US and internationally, his Hollywood career and all other American film projects came to an immediate halt.

When the Nazis took over in January 1933, the Ufa immediately annulled their contract with Charell because of his Jewish descent. They also cancelled all plans for two further contractually agreed upon film projects, one a film operetta based on the Odyssey with Hans Albers in the male lead.

His collection of Lautrec-lithographs was sold by Sotheby's in 1978.

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).

The Schwules Museum Berlin dedicated an exhibition to Charell and his work from 7 July to 27 September 2010. It was curated by Kevin Clarke.

In 1969 he received the German movie prize, the Filmband in Gold, for his "excellent works and outstanding contributions to the history of the German movie".

Erik Charell was a German theatre and film director, dancer and actor.

After the war, Charell returned to Europe. In Munich he had a big success with the musical comedy Feuerwerk (music by Paul Burkhard) at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz. The song O mein Papa became an international hit.

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.).

Spurred by the success of White Horse Inn, Charell adapted Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as a jazz operetta and presented it as Swinging the Dream on Broadway at the Center Theatre in 1939. 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. Furthermore, the stage sets were based on Walt Disney motifs. 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. Benny Goodman conducted his own sextet and the choreography was by Agnes de Mille.

Charell also discovered the boy group Comedian Harmonists and presented them for the first time in Casanova at the Große Schauspielhaus. The reaction of the international press was positive, the New York Times noting that "Erik Charell seems to have done it again. 'Casanova', his latest operetta production at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, is filling this huge circus to its stylized rafters".

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.

One of his cancelled projects in the States during WWII was a film about ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It would have been an interesting project, since Charell in his dancing days was often compared by the German press to Nijinsky.

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.