R.I.P. Gavin Creel, Tony Award-winning Broadway star

Gavin Creel—the talented, Tony Award-winning star of musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, Into The Woods, Hair, and more—died on Monday in his home in Manhattan. Per The New York Times, his death was confirmed by his partner, Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, which Creel only learned he had in July. He was 48.

Creel has been a Broadway mainstay ever since he made his debut in 2002 as Jimmy Smith, a charismatic young paperclip salesman, in the original production of Thoroughly Modern Millie. The role, which he played opposite Sutton Foster’s Millie Dillmount, earned him his first Tony nomination. From there, the incredibly watchable tenor went on to star in a number of Broadway and West End productions including the 2004 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, the West End’s Mary Poppins, the 2009 Hair revival on both Broadway and the West End, 2016’s She Loves Me revival, and more.

In 2017, he finally won his Tony for Hello, Dolly!, a win he dedicated to his alma mater, the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. “The Tony really felt like a hug from the community I’ve been in for 20 years,” he later told The San Francisco Chronicle. “That feels good. I can literally do nothing else in my life and I’m still a Tony winner. I will never not have done that.”

He did do a lot of other things, of course. In 2014, he won an Olivier Award for his performance as Elder Price in the West End’s production of Book Of Mormon. (He also played the character in the show’s original US touring cast from 2012-2013.) He went on to star as a replacement in Waitress in both the Broadway and West End productions with his close friend Sara Bareilles, who wrote the songs for the musical. The two shared the stage once again in 2022’s Into The Woods revival on Broadway, in which Creel played Cinderella’s Prince and the suave Big Bad Wolf.

Creel was also a major advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. In 2009, he founded an organization called Broadway Impact that fought for marriage equality before same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015. The same year, he convinced producers to close Hair for one day so the cast could participate in a march for gay rights in Washington, DC. He brought that passion to his last work, Walk On Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice, a musical he was commissioned to write and perform by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. Creel has spoken extensively about the ways working on the project “actually saved my life during the pandemic,” because, as he told The Charlotte Observer last year, “I kinda lost everything, my career, a relationship, my dog. And I got Covid and I was living alone. But I had this one project… that I just kept writing and working on and trying to find its story.”

That story, which premiered off-Broadway in 2023, turned out to be an incredibly “real, authentic, [and] vulnerable” piece for Creel, who told Edge Media Network that “as long as I’m writing stories they’re going to be queer.” He continued: “For some reason, when you’re gay, then it just all becomes about your being gay… There’s an infinite number of stories that can be told about me as a gay man, that have nothing to do with me being gay, or where that’s not the central focus. So, bring it on, let me never have to code-switch or shape-shift to make you believe that I’m straight.”

Creel also had a few television roles, most notably in American Horror Stories, where he played a tenant of the murder house married to a character played by Matt Bomer.  

Creel is survived by his parents, Nancy Clemens Creel and James William Creel, his sisters Heather Elise Creel and Allyson Jo Creel, and his partner, Alex Temple Ward.