Farewell Gavin Creel, a Charming, Masterful—and Very Honest—Broadway Star

Mid-conversation with this reporter last year, the Tony Award-winning Broadway star Gavin Creel revealed a tattoo on his left wrist reading “Both.”

This, he said, summed up his attitude to everything in life—things that can be wonderful and terrible, celebratory and melancholy. “I am in a space of all things and everything. At 47 years old, I have realized to love myself is to accept myself, and not judge myself… I am staying open to possibilities—that there is so much more I don’t know and don’t understand.”

Today it was announced that Creel had died at 48, after being diagnosed with cancer—a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma—in July.

A spokesperson said that before transitioning to hospice care at home, Creel was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is survived by his mother Nancy Clemens Creel and father James Wiliiam Creel, his sisters Heather Elise Creel and Allyson Jo Creel and her wife Jen Kolb, his partner Alex Temple Ward, and his dog Nina.

The fulsome and heartfelt tributes being paid to Creel by the likes of Bette Midler, Alex Edelman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bernadette Peters, Casey Likes, Harvey Fierstein, Michael Urie, and so many others within the theater community echo the shock, sorrow, and appreciation of a singular talent being expressed by the actor’s many fans.

Creel was a charming, rare and distinctive performer—he was as honest about himself as he was about show business, speaking in depth to the Daily Beast last year about how fulfilling he found performing, and how ambivalently he felt about fame as he prepared to mount his self-written debut musical, Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice, which premiered off-Broadway at the MCC Theater.

It featured 17 original songs written, played, and performed by Creel. Inspired by visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was a commission from the MetLiveArts Department and focused on the life-giving joy and tantalizing mystery Creel found in visual art.

Creel spoke about how self-doubt, heartbreak, disillusion with Broadway, depression, horniness, sex, his passion and dedication around LGBTQ activism, and the pandemic had changed his life—and inspired this very personal musical.

The other predominant theme of the show was religion, and its influence in Creel’s life, leading up to a final confrontation and agreement or acceptance of God. “I proudly feel God’s blessing,” Creel said. “I don’t believe all this good fortune in my life is no coincidence. I believe I am blessed. I don’t fear God any more. I feel as if I am collaborating with him.”

Walk on Through was the most personal project in a glittering career. Creel won multiple awards for his portrayal of Cornelius Hackl in the smash-hit 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly!, starring Bette Midler and directed by Jerry Zaks. That year, he won the Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Tony Awards for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

He had received his first Tony nomination for playing Jimmy Smith, opposite fellow newcomer Sutton Foster, in the Broadway production of Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002. He played Jean-Michel in the acclaimed Broadway revival of La Cage Aux Folles, and received his second Tony nomination for his portrayal of Claude Hooper Bukowski in the 2009 revival of Hair.

Creel won the 2014 Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for playing Elder Price the The Book of Mormon, a role he had already toured around the United States and would then proceed to play on Broadway.

Joan Marcus

“I have had amazing luck,” Creel told the Daily Beast. After The Book of Mormon came She Loves Me, then the call for Hello, Dolly! “I didn’t understand the show, but I wasn’t going to say no to a job. I eventually found a way into it. (Director) Jerry Zaks guided me. Scott Rudin guided me. Bette Midler guided me. David Hyde Pierce had supreme grace, beauty, and elegance. Everybody was great. I accepted it, but as I accepted it, it felt like I was living someone else’s life. I was thinking, ‘Where do I fit in with all this?’

“Everyone thought my life was so great, but inside I was feeling so crap—even though it looked as if I had everything I wanted. I was really proud of the Tony, but I worked just as hard in Fame: The Musical just after I graduated college. I worked just as hard in She Loves Me the season before Hello, Dolly!, and got zero attention for an almost-identical part. One season I won zero awards, the next I won every award going. I just didn’t get it, but I realized awards aren’t where it’s at. I felt lost and broken by personal stuff happening with my health and relationships.”

In 2022, Creel was cast as Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf in the acclaimed Encores! production of Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, which—rapturously received by critics and audiences alike—transferred to Broadway. In that show he starred opposite his good friend Sara Bareilles, who he had first performed alongside in the role of Dr. Pomatter in Bareilles’ musical, Waitress, on Broadway in 2019 and in London’s West End in 2020.

“I have to believe that this is my story”

In Walk on Through, Creel aimed to assess his own culpability in the breakdown of a long-term relationship that had left him heartbroken—just as happened in real life.

At the same time, his voice was “getting older, and my identity as a singer was tied up with my voice. Forgive me if I sound arrogant. But I had such a good voice in college. I had always feared, ‘If something happens with my voice, who am I without it?’ During the pandemic I lost my voice. I felt such grief. It was as if an invisible hand was gripping my throat. When I sang it wasn’t sounding the same as it used to.”

Creel recognized his body as a whole was changing, which served to remind him that “Getting older as a gay man is a whole other level of invisibility and irrelevance. I had to confront that. I was grabbing at things, trying to find my value and worth in a world I had outsourced all of it to a business where that worth was measured in if I won an award, or if I had a lead part, or to people who if they didn’t say the exact right thing I was decimated and ruined by it.”

Bruce Glikas/Getty Images

Creel said he had struggled with loneliness all his life, but always had his dog Wally, “my salvation”—who then died six weeks after his relationship broke apart. He also contracted COVID at the beginning of the pandemic, and while he never felt he was going to die, it further damaged his voice, and his sense of “losing everything that gives you your identity.”

Creel’s depression was so extreme he didn’t recognize himself, he said. “I was supposed to be a happy person who entertained people, and who made people happy, and who people liked to be around. But at that time I wouldn’t have wanted to be around me for all the money in the world. I didn’t know how to be that happy, outgoing person people expected. I felt that my former partner was the only person who could make me feel better—but we had agreed that relationship wasn’t right.”

Creel said he was never going to harm himself when he was so depressed, and didn’t know if he should define whatever he had as depression. But he had been punishing himself for whatever he was feeling, adding blame and judgment on to the feelings of sadness and loneliness. “It was like, ‘You don’t deserve to feel terrible, because there are other people feeling way worse than you.’”

He said he knew how clichéd it sounded to say he was having a midlife crisis, but “having lived and felt it, and to still be living it now, I found it to be extremely real. You spend the first half of your life heading towards something you hope and dream for—and, if you find it or land in it, you can sometimes think, ‘This isn’t it.’ You supposedly arrive, and yet there’s no arrival. I was looking for things to fill this hole of sadness and loneliness. In relationships, it comes to be an unfair pressure on the other person, who’s like, ‘I don’t know who I am, don’t ask me to complete that blank for you.’”

Julieta Cervantes

Creel said he had felt both “cursed and blessed,” and hoped this tough period had been an “intermission,” marking who he was before it and who he hopes to be after it, and “I hope to be growing him for the rest of this second half of my life.”

Creel found a salve in working on Walk on Through. His director asked him if he was ready to face all his personal demons, and Creel is nervous about how people may respond to the result—whether they will consider it self-indulgent, and the amount of me, me, me-ness in it unmerited, and “that their problems are way worse. But I have to believe that this is my story, and I want to share it, and I have tried to craft it as a piece of theater that is inspiring to people,” he said. “I am going to present this show to heal, and hopefully travel it around the world to help others.”

Asked how he felt at that moment, Creel said that he was OK. “Loneliness and depression don’t disappear. You don’t get to be done with these things.” In the show, he sang of loneliness itself: “Oh, you’re back I see. I guess you never left, ‘cos you’re part of me.”

That same measured acceptance existed in Creel’s day-to-day life. Writing and therapy, he said, had been his biggest “healing and coping mechanisms.” He was scared to present the show, lest people and critics don’t like it. But he knew he could not control others’ responses. He just wanted the opportunity to perform it “again and again.” One of his lead investors had told him, “You’re not creating a musical any more, you’re creating an act of service.”

“I love to make people laugh, cry, and think”

Born in Findlay, Ohio, Creel’s love for the stage had been forged at a young age. His grandmother, a music teacher, delighted in playing the piano while he would sing along, and he would often round up his two older sisters to participate in “Living Room Shows,” casting them as back-up singers and band members. A beloved teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, Nancy Glick, introduced him to Broadway show tunes and classics from the great American songbook.

The first tape he owned was a Debbie Gibson album. He bought all Whitney’s albums, memorized all her songs: “Any soul I have in my voice is me trying to be her,” he told the Daily Beast. A straight friend bought Creel in a Whitney poster when they were in sixth grade, a poster he would go on to take down when other school friends came round lest they thought he was gay. It was the passion and expressiveness and singularity of her voice he relished as a boy. “And her joy. Her videos were so sexy and accessible. She appealed to everybody.”

Creel spoke movingly to the Daily Beast about growing up with religion, its ongoing influence in his life, and coming out to his parents. On his mom’s side, his grandparents were Mennonites, his dad’s were Episcopalians. He was raised Methodist, his parents inspiringly committed to their local church. “It was about community and service. They were quietly and diligently obedient to the teachings of God. We always prayed before we ate.

“I didn’t do bible study, or anything that strict, but we were raised that we were in dialog with God. My parents would dump me at Sunday school, where I would read stories that left me thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m fucked. I can’t be gay, even though I want to look at those boys, and God is a man in a pulpit telling me that homosexuality is a sin and those people go to hell.’ Today that sounds like a cliché, but that was the foundation of my existence. Now, I think the joy and beauty and opportunity I have in my life has come about by being honest and authentic.”

Joan Marcus

Creel and his two sisters were raised “like an all-American white middle American family, expected to get on the honor roll or we couldn’t use the car, and to be good and exemplary citizens. To this day, my parents are two of the most generous and service-oriented people. They are constantly doing things for others. For me, this also meant a lot of pressure when I knew I had this thing inside me that could possibly be embarrassing, shameful and hurtful for them. When I came out to parents I was 25 I was terrified. They were wonderful. My mom cried a little bit. She said, ‘Just don’t go marching in any parades.’ 7 or 8 years later my mom and dad marched on Washington for equality with me.”

His first therapist told Creel that by coming out he was “taking your power back,” and what his parents did with the information was none of his business; that if they ranted and raved and kicked him out of the house he would find his own path. “But they didn’t do that. When I said to my dad I thought it would go worse than it did, he said, ‘I looked around the church and thought how much more dull my life would be if you weren’t in it, and how many people here ask us how you are.’” When the relationship alluded to in the show broke down, and Creel fell apart, his parents came to look after him, cooking, cleaning, and helping him cry it out.

Creel went on to study at the Department of Musical Theater at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance.

A dedicated activist for LGBTQ causes, Creel was a primary voice within the theater industry for passing the federal Marriage Equality Act. Alongside fellow Michigan alumna (and close friend) Celia Keenan-Bolger, Creel founded the Celia Keenan-Bolger and Gavin Creel Activist Artist Endowed Scholarship Fund to encourage students to engage in social justice causes while in school. In Interview magazine earlier this year, the actor Jonathan Groff described how his past romantic relationship with Creel in 2009 had inspired him to come out.

Janette Pellegrini/Getty Images

Handsome, popular, and garlanded with awards, Creel told the Daily Beast the theater business—as liberating and fulfilling it had been—had also been draining.

“I drank the Kool-Aid of Broadway, and loved the community and sexiness of it, going out with friends and getting drunk on margaritas with friends,” Creel said. “I loved meeting some of the idols I looked up to. Then, honestly, the bloom fell off the rose a little bit. New people come in and replace you. The cycle of the business meant I couldn’t love it any more. I knew the industry could not be everything. I couldn’t source my happiness from it because it doesn’t have a heartbeat. It doesn’t ultimately care about me.”

When it came to fame, Creel said he once wanted people to know who he was, “and to have power and influence. Then I realized it was the snake eating its tail. No matter how big you get you want more.” Sure, he enjoyed the followers social media brings, or teaching a classroom of 20 people, “who look at me as if I had sunshine coming out of my butt.”

But, Creel said, he couldn’t teach that class to be famous, but rather how to perform and build a hopefully healthy, long career. “I think I could be way more famous than I am but I don’t want to do that work,” Creel said. “That’s when I knew I didn’t want to be famous for fame’s sake.”

Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions

As a younger performer, Creel said he had experienced sexual harassment and inappropriateness “all the time, to the point where I saw it as how we behaved in theater. There was inappropriate groping, comments, nudity, relationships, and inappropriate physical contact all the time. This is also hard for me, because I worry sometimes that as we correct what was clearly wrong behavior we are also in danger of erasing a culture that allowed a large number of gay men to finally feel they were in a place where they could welcome, accept, and communicate their sexuality.

“I felt both weirdly seen, and also sexualized. It was a complicated feeling. I came of age in this environment, and felt free, and yet was also being harmed and didn’t realize it. I thought that was what the culture was, and I perpetuated a lot of that behavior. Now, the important thing is to communicate about all these things in whatever the appropriate spaces and channels are.”

As he made clear in Walk on Through, Creel believed in speaking about and celebrating sex, and those who condemn queer people for talking about their sexuality are also those, says Creel, who would deny us equality and are presently engaged in a concerted campaign of denigration against trans people.

Then three years away from turning 50, aging was clearly on Creel’s mind. He laughed that he was attracted to younger men, and “has to love whatever is happening” to his body and face (the humility seemed genuine, even if he was, objectively speaking, extremely handsome!).

Walter McBride/WireImage

In the past, Creel said, he had put too much pressure on partners to validate him, “and I have to validate me. I have to look in the mirror and love what I see. Yes, my skin is sagging, and will only not sag if I take a human growth hormone or commit to working out obsessively, which I don’t want to do. I’ve got to trust that someone will want me because they want the body I have because I want the body I have.

“When I turned 45 in the pandemic, I realized nobody gives a shit about a 45-year-old who doesn’t like their face or body. I slapped myself on the wrist. I have to look in the mirror and stop seeing a dumpy 25-year-old, and start seeing a hot 45-year-old. If you can see a hot 45-year-old, then guess who else will see a hot 45-year-old? Those younger guys who want to sleep with a hot 45-year-old! The only voice talking down to myself is my own. People tell me over and over again how handsome I am. When will I believe it? Physical beauty is awesome, but the question is: what else have you got?”

As he prepared to reveal to his show to the world, Creel said, “I don’t need to be on Broadway. I just want to make art. I have more than enough. There’ll be a point where I need to work to pay the bills, and off-Broadway is not a cash cow, but with this show I am doing the most creative thing I have ever been part of in my life—and I hope it leads to more opportunity.

“That’s what I want. I want the show to go to Broadway, for it to have a beautiful run on Broadway where thousands of people see it, then tour it to the West End, then Australia and the world. I want to be able to serve others with it. If I never do film or TV again, I could live with that, but I’m not ready to never be on stage again. I love to be able to tell stories to make people laugh, cry, and think.”

He noted that he needed a minute to himself at the end of each show.

“I look at my teammates, and worry for a minute if I have wasted their time. I ask myself, ‘Was that worth it for them? Are they bored doing it? Are they going to get sick of telling this story?’ That’s where I am at today. I accept that I am going to hear that judge in my head, and so I go, ‘It’s OK,’ and then just get up and do it again.”

At that moment, Creel teared up. “That makes me emotional to think about. It’s like, I’m right here.”