Albert Marre
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Albert Marre (born September 20, 1925) is a American Tony Award-winning director and producer in the theatre.
Born in New York City, Marre made his Broadway debut as an actor and associate director of the 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. Marre and Diener wed in 1956, subsequently had two children, 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 adaptation of James Hilton's Lost Horizon called Shangri-La and a 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, faux 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 he scored with Jerry Herman's first Broadway musical, Milk and Honey. He also directed a revival of Shaw's little-known Too True to Be Good, with an all-star cast. A couple of misfires were followed by what proved to be his greatest success, Mitch Leigh's Man of La Mancha, starring Richard Kiley and Diener. (Kiley had previously appeared in Marre's production of Kismet, as the Caliph.) Marre 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 first by Peter Glenville, and then by Arthur Hiller, after Marre's and Glenville's work respectively 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, both the original in 1966 (which closed out of town in Philadelphia) and the ill-advised short-lived 1989 Broadway version.
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