In print in the NYT today, a story (by Michael Paulson) I’ll talk about here in its 9/30 on-line version, headed “Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48: He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair” and beginning:
Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.
His death was confirmed by his partner [AZ: his male domestic partner], Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.
Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The obit continues with a detailed account of his career, which springboarded from his amazing singing voice and his projection of energy and enthusiasm, wrapped up in a big smile. He was noted for working well with others, and as being supportive of other actors’ careers. In short, an immensely talented really nice guy. All of this is wonderful, and I’m sorry I never got a chance to see him perform live, but I’m here because he also talked publicly about his life as a gay man, and how gay men compose and manage their lives is one of my areas of academic (as well as personal) interest.
From Paulson’s obit:
Mr. Creel was a champion of gay rights, helping to found an organization called Broadway Impact, which supported same-sex marriage when it was still prohibited in much of the United States. In 2009, he persuaded the producers of “Hair” to cancel a performance so that the show’s cast and crew could participate in a gay rights march in Washington.
“I am constantly trying to soothe that little wounded dude inside me to say, ‘You’re OK, even if somebody has made you feel shame,’” he said this year in an interview on Bobby Steggert’s podcast, “The Quiet Part Out Loud.”
Mr. Creel said on the podcast that “growing up super-Christian and being in the Methodist Church my entire life” had left him with scars, including “still to this day trying to deprogram the pain that the church caused me, and having such an aversion to organized religion and the ways that it creeps into laws and schools.”
Theater offered Mr. Creel a place of belonging.
“If you didn’t know how to throw a football — which I never really could — there was somewhere for me,” he said. “Thank God. Otherwise, I’m isolated and lost and alone, and who are my people?”
He also had fond memories of childhood, and said growing up in the Midwest shaped him in positive ways. “I think that the main reason I’m successful is because I’m kind, I’m easy to work with and I’m a team player,” he told The Blade of Toledo, Ohio. “And that’s not ’cause I’m a great person, it’s because of the values I learned being from Ohio and having good parents who instilled in me that ‘you’re a part of something, you’re not the something.’”
Flags:
— “that little wounded dude inside me”, a wonderful image for the internalized shame inflicted on many gay people by their experiences; most of us found ways to surmount these experiences, but still carry around painful memories (while some of us were crippled by these experiences)
— the wounding, scarring, and sometimes crippling effects of various forms of homohatred — the malicious othering of gay people — manifested in social norms but also in institutional practices
— the role of some churches in this process; in Creel’s case it was the UMC (which has split over the issue of homosexuality, with the fundamentalists who so bedeviled Creel now having left the denomination), but the Roman Catholic Church, the LDS Church, and many fundamentalist evangelical churches have all played roles in saddling gay people with burdens of guilt, shame, and self-hatred
— the importance of welcoming and accepting places where gay people can belong; for Creel it was the theater
— the significance of grounding (from family and community) in being able to fashion a life; here, Creel was fortunate, and that grounding no doubt contributed to his wonderfully sunny disposition
October 3, 2024 at 2:38 pm |
We saw him twice, in Hello, Dolly! and in She Loves Me. He’ll be missed.