FINDLAY — A day after Whitney Houston’s Feb. 11, 2012, death, Findlay native Gavin Creel released his single of the same name a month early as a tribute to the music legend who inspired him.
A little over 12 years later, fans of the Broadway star were heartbroken when Creel’s partner, Alex Temple Ward, confirmed his death of a rare and aggressive connective tissue cancer.
Creel and Houston, who he credited with helping him navigate difficult middle school years as a young gay teen, were both only 48 when they passed away.
“I was in contact with him all summer after his diagnosis became public. I know it was very difficult for him, but he remained positive,” said Kevin Manley, former director of Findlay City Schools’ award-winning show choir Findlay First Edition.
When Manley opened his own voice studio, Creel, who he’d already met through choir, was his first student. Manley was Creel’s first voice teacher. They remained lifelong friends.
“He told me several times in a text message that this was going to be his finest hour. He was going to beat it. He truly believed he was going to beat it,” Manley said.
After graduating Findlay High School in 1994, Creel received a BFA in musical theatre at the University of Michigan school of music, theatre, & dance in 1998.
Making it big
Creel’s 2002 breakout Broadway role was his Tony-nominated performance as Jimmy in Thoroughly Modern Millie. In 2014, he won the Laurence Olivier Award for best actor in a musical in his London role as Elder Price in The Book of Mormon.
Primarily a stage actor, Creel’s most prominent screen role was in the television movie Eloise at the Plaza , as well as a small role in American Horror Stories. Last year, the Into the Woods cast, including Creel, won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
Creel produced several albums with Robbie Roth, including GOODTIMENATION (2006), Quiet (2010), and Get Out (2012). A fierce advocate for LGBT rights, Creel’s single “Noise” (2011), raised funds for marriage equality, and he co-founded Broadway Impact, which galvanized the theatre community around the same cause.
Creel was nominated for a second Tony after starring as Claude in the 2009 revival of Hair, winning in 2017 for best featured actor in a musical for his role in Hello, Dolly!
“The Tony really felt like a hug from the community I’ve been in for 20 years,” Creel told the San Fransisco Chronicle in 2018. “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. I don’t treat that lightly.”
Creel made headlines for dedicating his award to the University of Michigan, his alma mater.
“My education as a young person there changed my life forever,” he said at the award show. “My professors, my classmates, they instilled in me an appreciation of what it is to be an artist and what it is to be lucky to be a part of this incredible community.”
In a 2017 interview with The Blade, Creel said he wished he’d mentioned the importance of investing in young people in the arts.
“It is an investment in a more beautiful world. I feel that the arts have an impact in a way that just makes the world more beautiful,” he said then.
Hometown hero
Creel lived by those words. While he later spoke about the difficulties of growing up as a young gay man in the early 1990s, he never turned his back on his hometown or those hoping to follow in his footsteps.
Whether it meant coming back to his hometown for charity concerts or connecting with struggling students for inspiration and advice, “he was always so gracious to everyone, and really, really wanted to give back,” Manley said.
“I heard him say time and time again without hesitation, it changed his life, being a part of our program, and I think the feeling was mutual between Gavin and the community,” he said.
David Coolidge, Findlay City Schools’ fine arts specialist and Findlay First Edition’s current director, said that for students, Creel was “just so intertwined in who we are as a community that many of them felt like they had lost a dear friend, even though they had never met him.”
“People talk a lot about how you shouldn’t meet your heroes because they might disappoint you. It’s the exact opposite with Gavin Creel. To meet him is to fall in love with him and to bask in his light and be inspired by him,” said Coolidge, who as an underclassman felt welcomed by Creel when he joined FFE.
Friends and fans have taken to social media to express their grief and admiration for the star, underscoring his kindness and generosity.
Mark Zaborney, longtime on-air radio jazz director for BGSU’s WBGU radio station, strayed from his usual jazz-only selections by including several of Creel’s works on his weekly online playlist for the station.
Highlighting Creel, who was not only local but strongly believed in arts education, was worth the rare departure, Zaborney said. Creel had spoken publicly about how a dream of his was to one day teach at the University of Michigan.
“He really loved teaching,” Manley said, adding that Creel had done so with the University of Michigan when he’d had the chance. “I tell you; he was every bit as good a teacher as he was a performer.”
Another of Creel’s dreams was to originate a role on Broadway, and he had hoped his 2023 show, Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice , commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would bring him that achievement, said Manley.
“The act of interpreting something is an act of creation. And what he’s been doing is interpreting,” Zaborney, also a retired Blade reporter, said. “Now, whether he would have been successful artistically, creating something out of whole cloth for another phase of his career — we’ll never know.”
Creel earned many of his industry’s highest awards, but it’s the depth of mourning for Creel as a “remarkably, genuinely, kind individual,” that serves as a testament to his success, Coolidge said.
“That word, kindness, continues to resurface again and again and again from the great outpouring of grief and celebration of his life,” he said.
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