How Gavin Creel Survived Broadway—and Made His Own Musical

When the actor Gavin Creel first visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 he had to “confront the fact that I didn’t feel I belonged there—and that was kind of a parallel to how I felt in my life then.” And so unpeels an intense story of an actor adrift, professionally and personally, trying to forge new ways forward in all areas of his life.

This may surprise those who know Creel as the handsome, Tony Award-winning Broadway star of the 2017 Bette Midler-starring Hello Dolly! revival in which he played Cornelius Hackl. There have been other Tony Award nominations (Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002, his Broadway debut, and Hair in 2009), other awards (for The Book of Mormon in London in 2014, and for his joyously silly turn in Into the Woods, 2023), and many critical plaudits.

But the Creel who emerges in his new autobiographical musical, Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice (MCC Theater, to Jan. 7), is a damaged, questioning, tender, witty, whimsical, horny, sad soul. At least, he said, he knows the depressed and withdrawn person he became during the pandemic was an experience shared with “so many others.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.