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.”

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, 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.

A superior singer with a sunny tenor, Mr. Creel made his Broadway debut and received his first Tony nomination in 2002 as the suave salesman Jimmy Smith in the original production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” starring opposite Sutton Foster, who played the title character, a spunky social climber named Millie Dillmount.

He went on to find success in a string of Broadway revivals, playing the straight son of a gay couple in “La Cage aux Folles” (which opened in 2004); the leader of a tribe of hippies in “Hair” (2009); a womanizing clerk in “She Loves Me” (2016); a callow clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” (2017); and both a prince and a wolf in “Into the Woods” (2022).

His characters were often handsome and self-regarding: Alexis Soloski, writing in The New York Times, described Mr. Creel’s wolf rendition as “sleazy and flawless.” After the Broadway run ended, he continued playing that role in a touring production.

He was nominated for a Tony a second time when he played Claude in “Hair” (a role he reprised in London in 2010), and in 2017 he won the Tony for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical by playing Cornelius Hackl in a popular “Hello, Dolly!” revival that starred Bette Midler.

“The Tony really felt like a hug from the community I’ve been in for 20 years,” Mr. Creel 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.”

Gavin James Creel was born on April 18, 1976, in Findlay, Ohio. His grandmother was a music teacher, and from an early age Gavin would perform shows in the family living room with his two older sisters. He was a high school swimmer, but found greater meaning as a performer, singing in show choir and acting in musicals.

“I was able to be with a group of people who were encouraged and celebrated to step into their music and theater nerddom, you know?” he told The Courier, a Findlay newspaper, last year.

Mr. Creel credited the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theater & Dance with helping him find his way; he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater there in 1998. “My education there as a young person changed my life forever,” he said while accepting his Tony Award.

He started working professionally almost immediately after graduating from college, playing an acting student named Nick Piazza in a touring production of “Fame,” a musical based on the film about a group of high school performing arts students.

He spent several years in “The Book of Mormon,” playing Elder Price, the perfectionist missionary, in that show’s first national tour starting in 2012. He then played the role in the West End production, winning the Olivier in 2014, and again as a replacement performer on Broadway, beginning in 2015.

Mr. Creel starred in West End productions of “Mary Poppins” (2006) and “Waitress” (2020) as well. He was close friends with the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who wrote the songs for “Waitress,” and the two briefly performed together in the show on Broadway in 2019 and again in the West End; they also appeared together in “Into the Woods.”

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.’”

In addition to Mr. Ward, his partner, he is survived by his parents, Nancy Clemens Creel and James William Creel; and his sisters, Heather Elise Creel and Allyson Jo Creel.

“Walk on Through,” commissioned by the Met in 2019, turned into a passion project for Mr. Creel, who had never been to the museum before starting work on the show. He used it to explore not only art but also his own life — a journey he had been considering through years of therapy and meditation.

“The project actually saved my life during the pandemic, because I kinda lost everything, my career, a relationship, my dog. And I got Covid and I was living alone,” he told The Charlotte Observer last year. “But I had this one project.”

He had high hopes for the show, saying, “My dream is to transfer it to Broadway next spring then tour it around the world.” While it sold strongly during its run at MCC Theater, reviews were mixed.

Researching the show prompted him to tattoo the word “both” on his left wrist, reminding himself of the contradictions found in life.

In addition to his stage work, Mr. Creel recorded music and performed concerts. The “She Loves Me” production in which he starred was the first Broadway show to be live-streamed and can be seen on BroadwayHD; one of his concert performances is watchable on PBS; and his “Take Me or Leave Me” duet with Aaron Tveit is a highlight in the history of Miscast, which is MCC’s annual fund-raiser at which actors perform songs they would not ordinarily get an opportunity to sing.

Mr. Creel had a few roles on television, including in “Eloise at the Plaza” and “Eloise at Christmastime” in 2003. (“Mr. Creel’s charm glows, particularly in the musical numbers,” Ron Wertheimer wrote in The New York Times.) He also appeared in Ryan Murphy’s streaming series “American Horror Stories.”

Mr. Creel had a house in Carmel, N.Y., where he entertained and swam. He was also a devoted Michigan alum, returning periodically to teach there; remaining close to his voice teacher, Melody Racine, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, a Tony-winning actress who attended Michigan with him. She and Mr. Creel established a scholarship fund to encourage students to engage in social justice causes.

In an email, Ms. Keenan-Bolger recalled how, going through airport security with Mr. Creel last year, he helped a young mother by holding her baby while she removed her shoes.

“His love for the world and the people in it was as profound as it was tender,” she said, “and anyone who came into contact with him felt the magnitude of that light.”