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. "Charell wants us to witness the many different facets from all around the world".

This show was followed by the revues Für Dich (1925) and Von Mund zu Mund (1926), which were arranged by composer Ralph Benatzky and contained music by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and many others.

After the series of revues, Charell began adapting classic operettas such as The Mikado, Wie einst im Mai [de], Madame Pompadour and Die lustige Witwe and turned them into modern jazzy revue operettas, claiming that he needed a plot line for his show, that had been missing in the pure revues before. A few years later, he decided to create his very own operettas with composer Ralph Benatzky. 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). Especially The White Horse Inn was one of the most successful creations of Charell's career. 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. 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". After this string of stage successes, Charell moved on to the new and innovative genre of sound film operetta. In 1931, Universum Film AG (Ufa) producer Erich Pommer invited Charell to direct Der Kongreß tanzt, (sets by Ernst Stern, music by Werner Richard Heymann), one of the most successful films of the early era of sound film, with one review in The New York Times saying that "[it] is a stupendous pictorial film. [...] it is [...] an exceptional film entertainment. The director, Erik Charell, is the Ziegfeld of the German musical comedy stage" and another noting that "It is a charming spectacle of Vienna in 1814, filled with tuneful melodies that one likes to remember and blessed with pleasing light comedy". 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.

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. Three years later a German court even sentenced Charell to return the 26.000 Reichsmark, which had been paid to him as an advance. When Caravan flopped in the US and internationally, his Hollywood career and all other American film projects came to an immediate halt. 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. But the sober fact is that the new film is an exceptionally tedious enterprise". One of the cancelled projects 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.