In Memoriam: Gavin Creel

It ‘only took a moment’ for me to fall in love with American Broadway star Gavin Creel as soon as I heard him sing “What Do I Need With Love” on the Thoroughly Modern Mille cast recording in 2002 when I was seventeen years old. For me, in that moment, he became the voice, the paradigm of the male-identified lover character in musical comedy of his generation. 

Gavin Creel passed away on September 30th, 2024 at his home in Manhattan of metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare type of cancer. He was just 48 years old. 

Gavin Creel was most well-known for performing in eight Broadway shows, and for winning the Tony Award for his portrayal of Cornelius Hackl in the 2017 revival of Jerry Herman’s Hello Dolly!, which starred Bette Midler as Dolly Levi. He was also nominated in 2009 for Hair, and in 2002 for the aforementioned Thoroughly Modern Millie. 

For me, though, I really got to know Gavin Creel as an artist and, I think to a certain extent as a person, in November, 2010 when I had the absolute good fortune to attend two performances of his in Toronto. The first was as part of Ari Weinberg’s Shameless (for a Cause) at Buddies in Bad Times, and the second was Creel’s own show with Robbie Roth at the Factory Theatre a week later. It was there that I was introduced to Creel’s first two solo albums Goodtimenation (2006) and Quiet, an EP, (2010), both of which I bought immediately and listened to a lot during this specific time in my life. He also released Get Out in 2012 and the single “Noise “in 2011. All four are available wherever you listen to music. 

I was struck even just by the fact that Gavin Creel was there at Buddies in 2010. He had this laid back, he might call it a ‘Midwestern’ warmth, and a seamless ease into our musical theatre community with absolutely zero pretence that he was ‘Broadway’ and we were ‘Toronto.’ In a recent interview with entertainment journalist Sheila Watko Creel said, in reference to a story he told about Broadway actors having a musical theatre themed pizza party together, “We’re all the same in that we just love going to the theatre, we love being a part of an audience… we’re all theatre geeks at heart… We are so proud to be the theatre nerd geek weirdos that we are. You’re always welcome in the theatre, everybody’s welcome.” That was exactly the way that I felt with Creel when he was in Toronto, that he saw us as all being part of the same larger community, and that we were all connected by this shared passion, these shared stories we all knew, whether we were from Findlay, Ohio, like him, or Halifax, Nova Scotia, like me: in the theatre our hearts were beating as one.

On Randy Rainbow’s podcast Creel and Rainbow both cite Patti LuPone’s performance of “Being Alive” in Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall, which was broadcast on PBS in 1992, as being a seminal moment in both their lives. “That’s it,” Creel said. “It made me go into musical theatre.” He and his Millie co-star Sutton Foster also first bonded over LuPone’s performance of this song in this concert. The more you listen to the stories that Creel chooses to tell, the more you see how much he talks about community, and connection, and what we have in common. The specificity with which he and Rainbow deconstruct this moment- as Creel says a “two minute and 34 second” moment in LuPone’s illustrious career- is the same specificity that theatre nerds all over the world talk about their own seminal gateway moments.    

Creel first performed in Toronto in 1998 as Nick Piazza in the National Touring Cast of Fame, and he returned there to film Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime (both 2003), in which he played Bill, Eloise’s favourite hotel employee and best friend. These films famously also star Dame Julie Andrews as Eloise’s beloved Nanny. Both Eloise movies were filmed concurrently, while Creel was still playing Jimmy Smith in Mille on Broadway. In Eloise at Christmastime Eloise learns that her beloved Bill has a former sweetheart, Rachel Peabody, who returns to the Plaza to be married to an apparent wealthy Harvard graduate (played by Rick Roberts). Eloise is adamant that she will oversee Bill and Rachel reconnecting and realizing that they are each other’s happily ever after. Rachel was played by Canadian theatre actor Sara Topham, and while Creel was filming during his run of Millie, she was filming between seasons at the Stratford Festival, but also partially during the run of the Ross Petty Panto Robin Hood The Merry Family Musical. “We were both nervous theatre kids who had never really been on screen before,” says Topham of her experience with Creel in Eloise at Christmastime, “let alone in the presence of a childhood idol such as Julie Andrews… and we bonded over our love of the stage and our shared anxiety about this foray into a new medium. Shooting Eloise was a joy from start to finish and for me so much of that was falling in friend-love with Gavin as an actor and as a human. We laughed so much. We loved being together in the work. He was so, so generous.” 

One of the most iconic scenes in Eloise At Christmastime is where Eloise (Sofia Vassilieva) schemes a way to bring Rachel and Bill together “unexpectedly” to sing songs from their shared favourite musical Gypsy. “When we recorded the singing for ‘Together’ I had no idea what to do,” Topham remembers, “I’d never sung in a recording studio before, let alone with a voice like his. He smiled and just encouraged me to forget everything but Rachel and Bill and the fun they were having, singing for no one but each other. By the time it came to filming the dance on the piano we were an absolute team- there are very few days in my career which have been as perfectly joyful as that one.” In the film Rachel and Bill start out singing together with Creel’s Bill playing the piano, but throughout the dance number they end up dancing on top of the piano, only to be interrupted by a very shrill and unhappy Christine Baranski, who plays the event coordinator. “I can still feel his arm around my waist, making sure I was steady coming out of those spins,” says Topham, “The only thing standing between me and a significant tumble to the floor was his care and skill.” 

Of the beloved film Creel recently told Sheila Watko, herself a fan of the movie since childhood, that he was “so moved” whenever he heard people say that they love Bill and watch the film every year and that one of his best memories is of being on set watching Dame Julie Andrews work. 

In his conversation on Randy Rainbow’s podcast Creel cited working with Julie Andrews on the Eloise films as a lesson both in work ethic and also in kindness. He shared two memories of her from that time. The first was watching her standing “in a snowbank outside the studio in a North Face coat and a little stocking cap and winter boots” not just going over her lines, but paying particular attention to the exact placement of Nanny’s Cockney accent. When she noticed that Creel was there she told him, “I have to get the accent right.” He said to Rainbow, “if she can do that work [when she could get away with not putting in the extra effort], there’s no excuse for me not to.” He also told Rainbow about a day on set when Andrews was getting her hair and makeup done, and she was quite far away and facing away from where he was sitting and when he came in he said to her, “‘Julie, I heard you saw Chicago (the 2002 film) last night,’ and she proceeded to arch around, John & John (her makeup team) had to move, she did not lose eye contact with me,” he said, explaining that she told him her opinion of the film, asked him what he thought of it, and was entirely engaged with him throughout the conversation. “She didn’t need to talk to me. She didn’t need to turn… these are the biggest people of our industry, there’s zero excuse for me to act weird to anyone or treat anyone as ‘less than.’ No one wants to hang out with dicks.” 

At the same time, Sara Topham knew that her and Creel would be forever friends. And they were.  

He took what he learned from Andrews to heart, although I suspect it was more just his own nature shining through, but Gavin Creel’s kindness was even more legendary than his voice. Shawn Wright, an actor originally from Saint John, New Brunswick, who is currently working at the Shaw Festival, describes Creel as “an absolute sweetheart.” Wright met Creel when they were both working in Chicago, with Creel performing in what was then called Bounce, the musical by Stephen Sondheim that later became Road Show, at the Goodman Theatre, across the street from Wright’s. The cast of Wright’s show were invited to the Dress Rehearsal for Bounce, in which Creel sang a beautiful song called “Talent.” After that performance Wright talked to Creel who proceeded to introduce him to Stephen Sondheim, who was there giving notes as the creator of this piece. “That was really amazing,” says Wright, “and [Gavin] was so sweet and charming and fun. He suggested that our casts get together and have a games night and we had one on the 4th of July, which, of course, there’s no show on the 4th of July in the states… Gavin was helping people out and giving them the answers [while playing charades].” So through Creel connecting these two casts Wright and his cast members got the chance to spend a bit of time with comedian Richard Kind, who played Addison Mizner in Bounce, and Jane Powell, who had been an MGM musical actor in the late 1940s and 1950s, who played Mama Mizner. “[Gavin] was very physically affectionate to everybody and just a wonderful guy,” says Wright.  

In 2010 Sara Topham made her Broadway debut in Brian Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which originated at the Stratford Festival. “This was a big deal for me,” she said, “The theatre put me in an apartment at 50th and 8th and I walked through Time Square to work every day. No one was more delighted for me than Gavin, and not least because we would finally be in the same city for awhile. One of the first things I did in New York was go to his solo concert at Birdland. He was extraordinary and my heart exploded with pride and love to witness his talent and his growth as an artist. Two weeks before Christmas we met for dinner and he asked me about spending the holidays in New York, and what I was going to be doing with my husband who would be arriving soon. He made wonderful suggestions for holiday adventures in the city, finishing with the statement: ‘And you’re gonna get a tree.’ I said I didn’t think I would because I didn’t have any decorations or anything and he looked at me and said: “Babe. You have to get a tree. It’s your first Christmas in New York.” By the time we finished eating he had decided that since he was going to be with his parents for Christmas I should use his ornaments. The next day I arrived home from rehearsal to discover that he had left a crate of ornaments and tree stand at the front desk with a note that said: ‘Merry Christmas. I love you.’ When my husband arrived we got a tree and spent an evening decorating it with Gavin’s things, ornaments he’d made in elementary school and others celebrating various milestones: family treasures. We sent him a photograph and he was delighted. When we dismantled the tree and packed everything back in the crate, I hid a little box with a new ornament and a card for him to find the next year. When Christmas 2011 rolled around he sent me a delighted email with a photograph of him hanging my gift on his tree. And every year we would send each other a photograph or a note recalling that happy, happy exchange.” 

Between Eloise at Christmastime and when Sara Topham was in The Importance of Being Earnest Creel performed as Jean-Michel in the 2004 revival of La Cage aux Folles, and then made his West End debut in Mary Poppins in 2006 (as Bert). He returned to Broadway in 2009 as Claude Hooper Bukowski in the revival of HAIR, which later transferred to the West End. The Public Theatre, who presented that production before it transferred to Broadway, posted on their Facebook page, “In The Public’s revival of HAIR he was the perfect Claude Hooper Bukowski, the innocent hero who knew the war was wrong, knew the world that had created it was wrong, but couldn’t resist the power of the war machine that killed him. After his death, the cast pleaded to “let the sun shine in,” not as some silly optimistic greeting card, as it is often remembered, but as a desperate plea for hope, a hope that seemed shattered by Claude’s death. As it does by Gavin’s. Tomorrow we will remember more fully the joy he brought into the world, the blessing of being his friend. Today the loss is too sharp and shattering. 

Let the sun shine Let the sun shine Let the sun shine The sun shine in.” – Oskar Eustis” 

Creel told Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien on The Spark File podcast that his first memory of being creative was composing a song at the piano when he was six or seven years old called “The Cat and the Mouse,” where the left hand was the cat chasing the right hand’s mouse, which had two different endings that he played depending on the feeling that he got from the audience. Creel was a gifted songwriter and he must have spent a lot of time before 2006 through to 2012 working on his pop music to have crafted three beautifully vulnerable and meticulously crafted solo albums. GoodTimeNation starts with his luscious voice singing, “Don’t be alarmed, mom/ don’t be ashamed/ I’m still your baby/and I’m still the same:” and immediately we know that we are getting raw truths from this record. And oof. Direct to the heart. The next song, “Rocket Ride,” is the most overtly sexual and joyously queer and feels much more like a song you might hear at the nightclub. I love the absolute specificity of “Going to DC:” a super catchy ditty about literally going to DC on the train to go dancing. In the chorus he sings, “Dave sent me a ticket/I got a ticket/Thanks for the ticket, Dave/Train man gonna click it/Hole in my ticket/Don’t care ’cause I’m on my way,” and trust me: it is a bop. You can really hear the musical theatre influence in the melody of “Behind Me Day,” which is a real little gem of a song. Quiet, Creel’s EP from 2010 is more acoustic, thoughtful and at times sad, and really shows off that buttery voice of his that you just want to burrow into like a woodland creature. It sounds like perhaps he was processing a breakup when he was writing these songs. I listened to this album a lot when it came out and I was in my Eponine Era and I remember connecting with it so ardently. It still reminds me of late night walks through the Toronto streets deep in my own head, Gavin’s voice in my headphones, filling me up with the most absolutely gorgeous voice of all our dreams. “Green to Grey,” “Love Fell Down,” “Small Words,” and “Hot Ohio” are my favourites. In Get Out (2012) Creel has a pop song “Beautiful or Wrong,” which is basically a challenge for folks to be kind and inclusive instead of bitchy and cliquey. “U Can’t Ignore Me” is an anthemic assertion that he is through waiting to be seen, heard, and embraced as a queer person in a country that purports to stand for democratic freedoms for everyone.

In between his Broadway and West End shows Creel was also a teacher. Kate Etienne, who is from Corner Brook and currently performing in the Mirvish production of Come From Away in Toronto recalls when Creel came to Sheridan College at the end of her final year there. “I was chosen as one of the few to sing for Gavin. I sang “Now That I’ve Seen Her” from Miss Saigon. He stopped me and asked if I’d ever loved someone who didn’t love me back but loved someone else in that way?… that wasn’t what I thought the song was about… but I was going through exactly that. He gave me permission to take what 20 year old Kate knew and felt so deeply, and told me that THAT was what made the performance honest and true and so much deeper. ‘Sing it from there.’” 

He didn’t just teach at the college or university level, Jacqui Sirois, a theatre creator based in Toronto, met Creel in Grade 10 when he held a Masterclass at Etobicoke School of the Arts. “I sang “I Know Things Now” from Into the Woods”, she says, “He told me to pretend my trendy-at-the-time scarf was my cape and I was mending a hole in it while telling the police what happened so I had something to do with my hands while I sang. I became aware of my hands when singing. Gavin’s hands while he sang would end up being one of my favourite things about how he performed.” The two stayed in touch over the years that followed, and when she was having a really tough time in her first year of University she reached out to her friend Gavin for guidance, and he delivered in spades. “The amount of times I’ve gone back to [his advice] when I’ve navigated a life change is too many to count,” Sirois says, “‘Keep breathing and being as positive and pure as you can.’ That’s how he navigated the world — positively and purely.” Like Sara Topham Sirois later had a moment of her own with Creel in New York when they bumped into one another at random on the street there, just before he was about to go to the West End to perform in Waitress. “He gave his time and heart so freely. He was a master of being present and living in the moment. Whenever I’d see him, we’d catch up and he’d hold my hand while we talked… I don’t want anyone to know a world without Gavin Creel and it’s up to us to share his legacy and keep being positive and pure with each other.” 

Creel told Randy Rainbow in his podcast episode, “Whenever I teach I say I want you to be honest, authentic, and vulnerable, and you will be believable. If you can access those three things: an honesty of what is going on in the situation, what’s going on with you in that moment, melding the two, finding a way to peel back your chest and expose your heart- the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all, and then just trying to be as authentically you as the character and as yourself as possible.” 

Between 2012 and 2015 Creel performed over 1,300 performances in The Book of Mormon (in the National Touring Cast, in the West End for which he won a 2014 Lawrence Olivier Award), and on Broadway). He went straight into the 2016 revival of She Loves Me where he played Steven Kodaly opposite Jane Krakowski. It was the first Broadway show to be live-streamed. From there he went straight into playing Cornelius Hackl in the 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler. He won the Tony Award for this role (and it was presented to him by his friend Sutton Foster), and he dedicated it to the Musical Theatre Department at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance saying, “My education there as a young person changed my life forever. My professors, my classmates, they instilled in me an appreciation for what it is to be an artist and what it is to be lucky to be a part of this incredible community.” In a conversation with his friend Rory O’Malley from O’Malley’s podcast Geffen Playhouse Unscripted in July, 2019 Creel reminisced about the three different times that he was nominated for a Tony Award. He remembered the first time he was nominated, for Millie, feeling awkward because he didn’t feel like he was part of the community yet. By the time 2017 came around he felt like he knew how to go to the awards ceremony and have fun regardless of the outcome. “The third time was the best,” he said, “not because I had my name called, but because I knew how to do this from start to finish.” He recounts how after their Hello, Dolly! matinee he called a sushi place and had the food delivered and he, Beanie Feldstein, Taylor Trensch, and Kate Baldwin “blasted music, drank champagne, and ate sushi in the hallway… everybody got in the car together, we said hi to everyone we ran into, and it was just magic.” 

In the same conversation Creel mentions how playing Kodaly, the cad, in She Loves Me was a stretch for him, and he mused about whether winning the Tony for Cornelius Hackl had something to do with audiences feeling like they could really see him, Gavin, in the performance. He says, “… part and person maybe lined up in a way that the world was like (he gasps) THERE [GAVIN] is!” For me, Hello, Dolly! was the only musical that I ever got to see Creel perform in, and I do think part of my joy in watching it was feeling like there was no other option, there was nobody else who could play our generation’s Cornelius Hackl. I mentioned at the beginning of this article that the moment I first heard him sing he became the definitive voice of the male lover in musical theatre for me. It is fascinating that he didn’t end up being cast in very many of those roles, but certainly in Hello, Dolly! he had the opportunity to be the iconic wildly idealistic exuberant clerk with a zest for adventure who is adamant that he “won’t come home until [he kisses] a girl.” As soon as he first sang “Out there” I’m sure, somewhere, Jerry Herman was beaming. The role fit him like a glove. His scene before he sings “It Only Takes a Moment,” where he is in court answering for some of his shenanigans, reminds me a bit of Rick Moranis’ Seymour talking about Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. They both play only the heart of these men, but with such truthful openness that it is both sweet and funny, and you forgive the fact that their brains by times seem entirely disengaged. Like Betty White said of Rose Nylund, “She was terminally naive. I like Rose because she thought life was like a musical comedy. It was going to have a happy ending no matter whatever happened.” The same could be said of sweet Cornelius Hackl. 

He had such magnetism on stage, it was hard to draw your attention away from him. He always looked like he was having an absolute blast, even, I’m sure, in productions that he had done for over a thousand performances. He told Rory O’Malley in their conversation that he felt like he had an invisible ‘heart tentacle’ attached between himself and each audience, that they were connected in this experience, and how the audiences’ reactions would literally “feed him.” This connection, I think, was palpable. Nova Scotian actor Julie Martell was in rehearsals for the 2003 Broadway revival of Gypsy when she saw Creel for the first time in Thoroughly Modern Millie. “I sobbed through most of it because I couldn’t believe my life,” she said, “I was so struck by his generous, open hearted stage presence during this performance, his broadway debut! Obviously he sang the shit out of the show, but my big take away was his joy! I had the good fortune of seeing him in a few other shows over the years and that JOY and open heart was always front and centre.” For me, his joy in Hello Dolly! was just as delectable.

Creel was then cast against type again to play the villain and cad in the City Center Encores production of Into the Woods in May of 2022 where he played both the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince. This production led to a subsequent Broadway revival of the show the next month in which Creel reprised his roles. He leaves behind a legacy of kindness, inclusivity, creativity, wisdom, and knowledge (especially through his many students), but his iconic voice is also a vibrant lasting legacy. Many Millennial and Gen Z male-identified musical theatre actors have grown up being inspired by, or in many cases trying overtly to imitate Creel’s voice because it is such (and I use is here because thanks to audio recording, his voice will live on forever) is such a paragon of the musical theatre style.

Yet, as Creel points out in his conversation on Randy Rainbow’s podcast, he grew up doing the same thing with Robert Westenberg when he was listening to the Original Broadway Cast of Into the Woods at the library in Findlay. Coincidentally Westenberg also played The Big Bad Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince. He mentioned in his interview with Sheila Watko that as a teenager “Agony” was always his favourite song in the show. He said that the audience response to the most recent revival was “manic,” which he cites as being how excited audiences were to return to Broadway after Covid, and the fact that this was the first new production of a Stephen Sondheim musical since the composer’s passing. He says, “At its core Into the Woods is the stories we were told as children to become better human beings, to care about one another, to make us not feel alone, to consider one another in the world, to not be greedy, not be vain, to romance a beautiful world that could be… a magic we’re told… it’s a beautiful, open, educating piece. We are more alike than we are different.” 

I would be remiss if I didn’t speak a little bit about Creel’s marriage equality activism. He didn’t refer to himself as an “activist,” but he co-founded Broadway Impact with friends Rory O’Malley and Jenny Kanelos, which was the only grassroots movement to mobilize the theatre community in support of marriage equality. His song “Noise” also helped raise both money and awareness for the cause. In his conversation with Randy Rainbow he notes that his activism has only been focused on one single cause that he cared about very passionately, and that he tried hard to package information about government and legislation into videos that would be educational, but also fun for folks to watch. The movement grew to even include members of the Canadian theatre community like me who added “Equality” as our middle names on Facebook (for years) in solidarity, and tried to amplify the voices of our American friends and colleagues. Finally, on June 26, 2015 same sex marriage was legalized in all fifty states in the United States.

The last project that Creel was working on before his death was the most exciting. He wrote his own “concertical” as he called it, a mixture of his love of pop music and his musical theatre background: Walk On Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and created this quasi-autobiographical piece about Gavin, who has never been to the MET, although he has lived in New York City for decades, and the show takes us through the ways he navigates and connects and experiences these pieces of art that he discovers for the first time at this distinguished museum. The show premiered December 4, 2023 at the MCC Theatre Off-Broadway and ran for a limited engagement there. “I always wanted to make something to leave in the musical theatre canon,” he told Sheila Watko during their interview, “and this is that thing.” In his conversation with Rory O’Malley he says that he was trying to create something new that doesn’t necessarily follow all of musical theatre’s rules and notes that he’s inspired when he sees the younger generations challenging the status quo. He cites the first production of Oklahoma! Saying, “Imagine what Oklahoma! Did in 1943. It was the first one to use dance to forward the plot and it was revolutionary.” His hope for the future of Broadway is that the younger generations would “take the reigns” and that what they would create would be revolutionary too.

“Do the thing that scares you,” he says, “don’t worry whether it’s going to be good or not- just make it.” 

“Christmas will be different for me this year,” says Sara Topham, “if I come across Eloise on television my joyful memories will be quite possibly overwhelmed by my grief (as I know will be true for so many people), and there will be no photograph of [Gavin]’s tree arriving on Christmas Eve. I hope and believe that eventually the joy at having danced with him will be first in my heart, I know that’s what he would want. For me, for everyone who loved him in life or through his beautiful work. And I will always, always carry with me the light in his eyes as we sang: 

‘We may not go far

But sure as a star

Wherever we are 

It’s together.‘”

Rest in peace, Gavin James Creel. You are so loved, and so missed.

I send all my love and light to Gavin’s family and friends at this devastating and difficult time.

The marquee lights at the Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra Theatres were dimmed in Toronto on October 2, 2024 in Creel’s honour. The Society of London Theatre will dim the lights at a selection of West End venues for Creel (the Adelphi, the Prince of Wales, Prince Edward, and Gielgud Theatres, all venues where Creel once performed). Marisha Wallace and the Actor’s Church will host a candlelight vigil on Sunday October 6th at the Actor’s Church (Bedford Street, London) at 6:30pm. The dimming of the lights will coincide with the dimming of the lights on Broadway, for which the date is to be announced in consultation with Creel’s family. There is a petition circulating by members of the American theatre community asking the Broadway theatre owners for all the lights at every Broadway theatre be dimmed to reflect the momentous loss of his immense talents, incredible career, and how much he was beloved by the community.