Marcelo Trepat

Marcelo Trepat (15 March 1964 to 24 October 2026) was an Argentine actor, singer and television co-host whose career ran through some of the best-loved productions of Argentine musical theatre. He was in the original 1991 cast of Drácula, el musical at the Luna Park, played Cliff Bradshaw in the 2007 to 2008 Buenos Aires production of Cabaret, and spent the years 2009 to 2012 as an official stand-in for the comedy-music group Les Luthiers. Television audiences knew him best as the partner of Georgina Barbarossa on Movete con Georgina and her later daytime shows.

Trepat was born in Pergamino, in Buenos Aires Province. He later described himself as "the clown of the family". He attended primary school at the Escuela Normal and secondary school at the Escuela Nacional de Comercio, and he took his first drama classes at Escuela 22 while still in primary school. As a teenager he joined the theatre group led by Jorge Sharry, whom he credited with his "first steps", and he performed with Grupo 84, an offshoot of Juventud de Teatro. He remembered a childhood shaped by school, the nearby stream and his grandfather's market garden, where the family went to pick lettuce and fruit.

His big break came in 1991, when he won a place in the original company of Drácula, el musical by Pepe Cibrián Campoy and Ángel Mahler at the Luna Park stadium, playing Lord Arturo. He recalled thousands of people at the auditions and days of nerves before he was one of the 64 actors chosen. Most of them, he said, left jobs that had nothing to do with acting, and the show toured the country. He went on to musical theatre such as Mi bella dama (My Fair Lady) at the Teatro Nacional, produced by Alejandro Romay with Paola Krum, Víctor Laplace, Pepe Soriano and Aída Luz. He called it his first character in a musical and his chance to sing one of its main songs as a soloist. In 2002 he appeared in El violinista en el tejado (Fiddler on the Roof) with Soriano and Rita Cortese. In 2003 he shared the stage with Raúl Lavié in Zorba.

He also became a familiar name in children's theatre. He appeared in Pulgarcito en busca de Bella Durmiente (1989) and La familia Frankenstein. He played Bambuco opposite Georgina Barbarossa in María Elena Walsh's Doña Disparate y Bambuco, and was in Enrique Pinti's Mi bello dragón at the Teatro Maipo (2002). He sang on the soundtrack albums Amor invisible (2003) and Amor invisible 2 (2005). Other stage work included Te quiero, sos perfecto... cambiá, directed by Ricky Pashkus; Visitando al señor Green with Pepe Soriano, directed by Santiago Doria; and Tres hermanas (2002), directed by Marcelo Moncarz in the Teatrísimo cycle to benefit the Casa del Teatro. In the 2007 and 2008 seasons of Cabaret at the Teatro Astral, directed by Ariel del Mastro, he played the writer Cliff Bradshaw in a company that included Alejandra Radano as Sally Bowles, Karina K and Alejandro Paker as the Emcee.

On television, his long partnership with Georgina Barbarossa took in Movete con Georgina on América TV in the late 1990s and the later shows Venite con Georgina and Las cosas de Georgina, where he worked as a panelist and stand-in host. He said that before this he had never done television, "let alone live and every day". He also had acting roles in the telenovela Montaña rusa, in 22, el loco, in the Argentine version of La niñera and in the cult series Los simuladores (episode "Seguro de desempleo"). He appeared too in the Russian-produced miniseries V ritme tango with Natalia Oreiro. On film he appeared in Patricio Coll's Cicatrices and in Agustín Barroso's short Te querré mientras viva. In 1998 he took part in the group recording Rutas del alma with the Coro Kennedy.

Trepat first visited Villa Giardino, in the Punilla Valley of Córdoba, in the mid-1990s, when the Movete team travelled there for charity events and stayed at the hotel of the Asociación Argentina de Actores. Encouraged by Barbarossa, he bought a plot of land there in 1997. In 2008, when his run in Cabaret ended, he moved there for good. "My work was my work, not my life," he said in a 2019 radio interview, describing a quiet life close to the land. Soon after, Les Luthiers called. He travelled to Buenos Aires for a meeting and, twenty days later, was on tour with them. Between 2009 and 2012, with Tato Turano, he was an official stand-in who could replace any of the five members in the shows Lutherapia and ¡Chist!. He mostly covered for Marcos Mundstock and Daniel Rabinovich, and the tours took him across much of Europe.

Marcelo Trepat died in his sleep at his home in Villa Giardino on 24 October 2026, aged 62. The Asociación Argentina de Actores y Actrices announced his death, and his cause of death has not been made public. Georgina Barbarossa called him her "brother for life", writing that he had gone "the way you wanted, sleeping, at home". Tributes recalled not only his television fame but also the rare honour of standing in for Les Luthiers. In his home town, the newspaper La Opinión and Canal 4 de Pergamino had earlier honoured him at the city's Fiesta de la Cultura.