Albert Marre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert Marre (born September 20, 1925) is a Tony Award-winning American director, choreographer, writer, and producer in the theatre.
Born Albert Moshinski in New York City, Marre made his Broadway debut as an actor in and associate director of a 1950 revival of John Vanbrugh's Restoration comedy The Relapse. Three years later he helmed a production of George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance, followed by Kismet, in which he cast Joan Diener as Lalume, the seductive wife of the Wazir. They were wed in 1956, subsequently had a son Adam and a daughter Jennifer, and remained married until her death in 2006.
In 1956, Marre was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Director for The Chalk Garden. That same year he also staged a disastrous musical adaption of James Hilton's Lost Horizon called Shangri-La and an unsuccessful revival of Shaw's Saint Joan. Two years later, he directed a production of At the Grand, a musical version of Vicki Baum's 1930 novel Grand Hotel, in Los Angeles, with his wife as the opera diva who falls in love with a charming, but larcenous, fake baron. (Although the show never reached Broadway, it was revamped drastically more than thirty years later and, directed by Tommy Tune, became the hit Grand Hotel.)
Marre returned to New York where, after a run of flops, he scored with Jerry Herman's first Broadway musical, Milk and Honey. Another string of misfires was followed by what proved to be his greatest success, Mitch Leigh's Man of La Mancha, co-starring Richard Kiley and his wife. He won the Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical and went on to direct numerous national and international productions of the hit, as well as the Broadway revivals in 1972, 1977, and 1992. He was signed to direct the screen version but was replaced by Arthur Hiller when his work proved to be unsatisfactory for United Artists executives.
Marre's subsequent collaborations with Leigh and his wife, the musicals Cry for Us All (1970) and Home Sweet Homer (1976), were critical and commercial failures. He also has the distinction of directing two flop versions of Leigh's Chu Chem, the 1966 original that closed in Philadelphia and the short-lived 1989 Broadway revision.
