Gavin Creel's Lucky Life

Remembering the life and career of one of Broadway’s bar-none bests to ever do it.

When a celebrity dies, I often spring into action, mining through their work like an Ellie Sattler-type researcher. The goal is to find a sliver of content that can encompass who they were to the world via their artistic expression or through an interview they gave. When it came to Gavin Creel, the slender-yet-towering Broadway leading man who tragically passed away on Monday at the age of 48, just two months after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma, there was little to mine through. 

And that’s because most of his two-decade spanning career was spent on stage, doing what he loved most, in performances that are sadly mostly relegated in perpetuity to bootlegs. He never did a late night appearance (save for performing amongst the ensemble of Hair on Letterman and Conan in 2009), never appeared in a single movie, only did a handful of television projects (memorably, 2003’s Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime) and rarely signed onto social media. As Jimmy sings in Thoroughly Modern Millie: “Oh, the places I would like to show you/Although I hardly know you.”

In fact, the robust picture of Creel, painted by those who loved, revered and knew him best, conveys a man whose biggest passion wasn’t fame or acclaim, but rather performing, and more specifically, the community that being a performer placed him within. In fact, in one of the few interviews I found online, filmed in May, Creel recounts his sophomore year of high school when he was cast in a production of Camelot.

“I knew I got bit by the bug ‘cause when that show ended, I was depressed. The show was fun, music was great, but it was about the people I was with. We were all in a common, passionate goal to tell a story. I want that for a living. I wanted to be a part of that for my life.”

And he was. So consider the below my attempt to unpack the career of a man I never met, but revered from the first time I saw him on stage in 2002.