A moment with Gavin Creel
Remembering the Broadway icon
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There are some celebrity deaths that expand beyond mere sadness and feel like a seismic cultural shift. River Phoenix. Heath Ledger. Chadwick Boseman. The musical theater community experienced that shift last week with the loss of Gavin Creel—a beloved Broadway icon who passed away at 48, just three months after being diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer.
Like most musical theater fans, I first discovered Gavin through his turn as Jimmy in the original 2002 Broadway production of Thoroughly Modern Millie. While Broadway has no shortage of cute tenors who can belt, there’s a floating, timeless quality to Gavin’s voice that makes it uniquely intoxicating. His earnest, playful ease as a performer comes through even just on cast recordings of his work. One of my favorite musical theater videos is music director Seth Rudetsky’s analysis of the Millie song “I Turned the Corner,” which highlights all the nuances that make Gavin’s voice so special.
He went on to scene-stealing turns in productions of Hair, Into The Woods, Mary Poppins, La Cage Aux Folles, Waitress, The Book of Mormon, the absolutely delightful 2016 revival of She Loves Me, and the 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly!, for which he finally won a Tony Award. Along the way, he gave us iconic flirty performances with Aaron Tveit at MCC Theater’s annual MISCAST gala and gorgeous backstage mash-ups with Joshua Henry. He was also a major advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout his entire career—from his fight for marriage equality in the late 2000s to the trans pride flag in his final Instagram profile picture.
To be honest, his death has affected me maybe more than any celebrity death ever has. I think it’s partially because his voice has been in my life since high school and partially because there’s something about theater that feels so vital and alive that it seems impossible Gavin won’t be there to give more performances for decades to come. My irrational first thought when I heard the news was that they should just shut down Broadway forever. But I’ve taken great comfort in the incredibly moving tributes from his friends and colleagues (I’ll link those at the end) and wanted to share a teeny tiny story of my own.
I was lucky enough to see Gavin onstage in the 2009 Hair revival—a production I was absolutely obsessed with at the time. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years as a college theater major and a family friend had pulled some strings to get us house seats in the orchestra. The show ends with a massive curtain call dance party where the cast invites the audience onstage to dance along to a final reprise of “Let the Sun Shine In.” But the choreography had Gavin stand above the chaos on a balcony-height platform on the left side of the stage. And because I was such a fan, I decided to stay at my seat and just watch whatever he did instead.
Funnily enough, what he did was look out into the audience, notice me starring at him, and proceed to have a maybe 10-second silent conversation with me from halfway across the orchestra. He encouragingly gestured that I should go up onstage and join the dance party. I smiled and sheepishly indicated that was not my thing. He laughed and flashed me a peace sign and went on dancing. It was the tiniest of interactions, the sort of spontaneous exchange that happened at Hair all the time. But it really made an impact on me because, well, when you’re watching a random background performance in a movie, the actor doesn’t usually wave back at you.
It was a reminder that for as big and splashy as Broadway is, it’s ultimately just people in a room putting on a show for another group of people. Part of what makes theater so magical is that each performance is unique, even if it’s just in some small, almost imperceptible way. Gavin performed Hair hundreds of times for thousands of people, but we were the only two who ever got to share that one charmingly random little moment together.
While Gavin may have made his mark in an artform that’s incredibly ephemeral and relatively niche in its audience, that doesn’t mean his mark wasn’t still huge. I was a 19-year-old who got to feel (quite literally) seen by someone whose work I tremendously admired. And to this day it remains one of my most vivid, cherished Broadway memories. All because he took a moment to fully engage with one lone audience member at the end of a long performance. As he’d go on to sing years later in Hello, Dolly: “It only takes a moment / For your eyes to meet and then / Your heart knows in a moment / You will never be alone again.”
If you don’t know Gavin’s work, I highly recommend seeking it out now. He’s got a charming supporting role in the 2003 Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime TV movies, which are currently streaming on Prime. His scene-stealing turn as a dapper cad in She Loves Me is streaming on BroadwayHD. And his final full project was an autobiographical Off-Broadway show called Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice, which he wrote and performed late last year. (You can see snippets of that production here.) BroadwayWorld also put together a Spotify playlist of his cast recordings and albums.
But a lot of his best work simply exists on YouTube: his take on the Waitress ballad “She Used To Be Mine”; his two duets with Tveit; his appearance in a 2008 Pasek & Paul concert; his Kiss of the Spider Woman performance with Andrew Rannells; this 2019 jazz cabaret set; his duet on “As Long As Your Mine” with Ali Stroker; his pop cover of “Something Wonderful” from The King and I; his jazzy take on “Don’t Tell Mama” from Cabaret; this lovely mash-up of “It Only Takes A Moment” and “Till There Was You”; highlights from the Thoroughly Modern Millie reunion in 2018 and bootlegs of the original; his charismatic performance of George Michael’s “Faith”; his gorgeous take on the musical theater classics “Something's Coming” and “Corner of the Sky”; his stellar version of “Going Down” for the Actors' Fund of America Benefit Recording of Hair (which also has a Rudetsky breakdown video); his gorgeous, hilarious rendition of “As If We Never Said Goodbye”; and this incredible Mamma Mia medley, which he performed just this April:
Rewatching all these clips really drove home for me how effortless Gavin was as a performer. There was nothing try-hard or egotistical about him. He wasn’t aiming for vocal perfection (though he frequently achieved it), he was focused on giving performances that felt spontaneous and honest; that invited both his fellow performers and the audience to feel like they were part of the moment too. As he wrote to his friend Benj Pasek in their final text exchange, “if you are alive LIVE.”
Indeed, by all accounts Gavin seems to have been an absolutely wonderful person in addition to a wonderful talent. I’ve rounded up as many personal tributes from his friends and colleagues as I could find in the hopes that people who don’t know Gavin can get a sense of just how big his impact truly was:
Cheyenne Jackson, Sutton Foster, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Patti Murin, Caissie Levy, Zachary Quinto, Joshua Henry, Aaron Tveit, Matt Bomer, Sara Bareilles, Kelli O’Hara, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Donna Murphy, Grey Henson, Andrew Rannells, Telly Leung, Phillipa Soo, Denée Benton, Hannah Waddingham, Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Jinkx Monsoon, Marc Shaiman, Harvey Fierstein, Josh Gad, Rory O'Malley, Anthony Rapp, Laura Bell Bundy, Celisse, Laura Benanti, Bernadette Peters, Audra McDonald, Jenn Colella, Kerry Butler, Shoshana Bean, Heather Headley, Asmeret Ghebremichael, Ashley Park, Tituss Burgess, and so many more. Plus this interview with Jonathan Groff from earlier this year and this American Theatre remembrance from Will Swenson.
You can also sign a Change.org petition to encourage Broadway to do a full dimming of the lights to honor Gavin’s legacy. His family has requested that any gifts in Gavin’s memory be made to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids.
Shocking and heartbreaking to have heard this sad news when it broke. I just saw Gavin last year in the Chicago road company show of Into the Woods as the Wolf/Prince. Cannot even believe he’s gone. I will be mining all these links in the days to come. Thank you.