[MUSIC]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. In a few minutes, we'll talk about the history of music in Greenwich Village. But before that, we want to hold some space for the passing of a beloved musical theater performer who made his mark farther uptown on Broadway, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel. He died at his home in Manhattan Monday from a rare form of cancer. He was 48 years old.

Over the span of his two decades long career, Gavin was nominated for Tony Awards for his 2002 performance in Thoroughly Modern Millie and his 2009 performance in Hair. He won the Tony for best performance by an actor in a featured role in 2017 when he starred opposite Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! But Gavin Creel's final role was one of his own making. He wrote and starred in a one man Off-Broadway musical called Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice. It was a commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was an interesting arrangement considering that until this project, he'd never even set foot inside the building.

The show follows him discovering the art in the museum, which he later came to think about as old friends who taught him to understand and appreciate painting and sculpture in ways he never had before. When Walk on Through first started showing last December, Gavin Creel joined us on the show to talk about it, and we're going to share an excerpt of that conversation here. I asked Gavin where the seed of the idea for the show came from.

Gavin Creel: I was originally, I've always wanted to write a musical or a musical piece of some kind ever since I went to University of Michigan School of Music Theater and Dance and studied musical theater. I always knew I wanted to do it. I didn't think I could. I didn't know what I was doing, but my friend Matt Quam who works in the development department at the Met and he said, "Hey, there's this department, this curatorial department in the MetLiveArts series."

He said, "You should meet Limor Tomer, who runs the department with Erin Flannery, who's one of our associate producers on the show now. These women are doing really amazing stuff at a major museum in the world. It's a performance based curatorial department, and if they like you, they'll give you a membership card and then they just set you free, and they say, go." And then I just explored. They liked me, thank God, and they said, "Do you want this "job"?" I spent about a year and a half before I really knew what I wanted to do. They called me and said, "What's the goal?" I said, "I can only tell the truth, and the truth is I've never been in this building before." It's embarrassing to admit. People are like, "What is wrong with you?" I'm hoping the show explains why.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting. Did you find yourself-- Did you just take it for granted that it was there or did you not have a sense that it was a place for you?

Gavin Creel: Both. I think, living in New York, I moved here in 1998, and there's so many places. I've never been to Ellis Island. I've never seen the Statue of Liberty up close. We floated by it on a ferry once or twice, but there're so many iconic places. Not until a few years ago did I go to the top of the Empire State Building. I think I take for granted the unbelievable resources this city has. My life in the theater is very scheduled, and I have remained pretty quiet, but knowing it was over there, and if I'm honest, I say this in the show, I thought it was just kind of an old, dusty place that had a bunch of old art, that it is pulsing with reinvention and curiosity and creativity.

Everything from the new Afrofuturistic room that blows my mind every time I go into the Egyptian section. You cross, like I said, 5,000, 6,000 years of art and artifacts. And I know everyone's like, "Yes, Gavin, we know, we know, we've been going for years." But I just, I try to stand on stage in the show and out myself as the "museum novice" and just go, "It's okay if you have ever felt this way too about a million things, but especially that."

Living in New York, I moved here in 1998 and there's so many places. I've never been to Ellis Island. I've never seen the Statue of Liberty up close. We floated by it on a ferry once or twice, but there's so many iconic places. Not until a few years ago did I go to the top of the Empire State Building. I think I take for granted the unbelievable resources this city has. My life in the theater is very scheduled, and I have remained pretty quiet. But knowing it was over there-- and if I'm honest, I say this in the show. I thought it was just kind of an old, dusty place that had a bunch of old art, that it is pulsing with reinvention and curiosity and creativity.

Everything from the new afrofuturistic room that blows my mind every time I go into the Egyptian section. Like you cross, like I said, 5,000 6,000 years of art and artifacts. I know everyone's like, "Yes, Gavin, we know, we know, we've been going for years." But I just, I try to stand on stage in the show and out myself as the "museum novice" and just go, "It's okay if you have ever felt this way too about a million things, but especially that."

Alison Stewart: There's a song called The Journey, which is got to be A, you have to have a great lung capacity.

Gavin Creel: Yeah, I'm still learning how to breathe through that one.

Alison Stewart: It's a bit of a tongue twister. It did remind me of, "I am the very model of a modern Major-General." I was like, "Oh," do you know? It's just like that. Would you share-

Gavin Creel: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -with our audience? Would you mind going through that?

Gavin Creel: The chorus?

Alison Stewart: Yeah, I would love to hear it.

Gavin Creel: Okay, and the chorus--

Alison Stewart: I got the words. I'm going to follow.

Gavin Creel: Okay. The chorus, if it goes, it's like,

[MUSIC - Gavin Creel: The Journey]

Mm, mm,

I gotta run to the Joshua tree

I gotta slip on a mountain

Drink the fountain of youth

Gotta swim to New Delhi

To Bali to rub the Buddha belly

To find eternal truth

I gotta make a Manhattan in Queens

I gotta tan in Havana or the Isles of Greece

Gotta rock Costa Rica,

To [unintelligible 00:06:11] to sunny Mozambica

To find eternal peace.

And it's just basically that. It was so much--

Alison Stewart: You're getting an applause from the control room.

Gavin Creel: I love it. Thank you so much. It was so much fun to write because--

Alison Stewart: I gotta make a Manhattan in Queens. It's the best in Queens.

Gavin Creel: O, thank you. I know. I love a Manhattan. I honestly, I had a lot of friends who lived when we first moved to the city, you couldn't afford-- I mean, you know, I was like a Pollock. Thankfully, I'm still living and I'm able to continue my art, but, I mean, I was broke when I came to this city. I did two Broadway shows and I had, like, $81 to my name at one point in my savings account. My agent was like, "I hate to say this, but you need to take this job," and I said, "Okay, I'm taking this job."

The art for that is Thomas Hart Benton's America Today and it's this incredible room. Actually, you know what, it's 360-degree red gloss ceiling. It's life. It's color, light, sex story. I walked in and that was one pre-existing song that I was like, "This is the journey." The journey was about my first three years in New York City. I rewrote a bunch of lyrics to fit for the piece now, but the idea that you come here-- everybody comes to New York to win. You don't come to settle and relax. It's like we all come here with a dream and I wanted to represent that, the naivete of youth of like, "I gotta get this, and then I gotta get this, and I gotta get that, and I gotta get that."

The rapid fire was deliberate in that I was 25 when I wrote the beginnings of that song and it was like almost 20 years later, over 20 years later, it's now in a show. But I thought, "Put it near the beginning because you're going to sound so idealistic."

Alison Stewart: There's a moment that's incredibly dramatic in the show. I think if you were in New York City during COVID, you feel this moment when it just goes black. A black curtain comes down. We hear chatter from a news station about everything closing and The Met closing, and all the art disappears, and your ability to do your art disappears. How did COVID affect this project? And then how did not being able to go to The Met once you started becoming a Metaholic-

Gavin Creel: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: -how did it affect you being able to go?

Gavin Creel: I have to tell you, Alison, that, like, this-- I'm just going to tell you my truth of the pandemic. Hopefully, people out there won't think I'm saying that I had it the worst, but for me, everything I hung all my identity and worth on disappeared, relationship, my profession, which we did not know if people would ever want to sit in a theater again.

Alison Stewart: It was terrifying.

Gavin Creel: It was terrifying. I lost my voice for a year and a half. I couldn't phonate. I was trying to write, and I couldn't, and I think it was grief. My dog, my longest relationship of my life died at the very beginning. I looked at him and I was like, "Thank God for you. You're my salvation in the center of this," and like six weeks later, he was dead. It was just like a lot of stuff happened and I got COVID in the first week and-

Alison Stewart: Oh, gosh.

Gavin Creel: -it was rough. The project was supposed to be in June of 2020 and obviously, it was canceled. I was terrified that that would go too and it didn't. They said, "Just stay with us. Keep writing." It was my salvation, truly salvation. I just kept thinking about it, and working on it, and dreaming of it. I'm so grateful to Limor and Erin for keeping the project alive. They took a lot of things from the MetLiveArts department online, and they said, "Do you want to do your thing online?" and I said, "No. I'm a theater artist. I do this live. I'm in a room. I want to be with human beings." And they were like, "Okay. Then we have to wait and have faith that it will come back."

Thank God, October 25th of 2021, fully masked, tested, we sat in that. And when it reopened to 25% capacity, I was literally one of the first people back, and it was healing. It was like coming back to old friends. There's a song in the show called I Know You that I wrote. Anne Tenenbaum and Tom Lee did this incredible Photography's Last Century exhibit that opened, and a week later, The Met closed, and it was just sitting there alone in that building. I saw Cindy Sherman's photograph on the side of the building, and I was like, "I'm going to write a song about that." Gregory Crewdson's untitled Woman with Roses in the Bed. I saw that online and I was like, "I have to go see that." Then the third one is a Robert Heinecken photograph that I wrote later.

I wrote-- each three verses is about these three women who are suffering from deep loneliness, which it sort of plagued me my whole life and it was terrible during the pandemic. I wanted to witness it in a way. And thank you for saying about the pandemic, because I worry that we should take it out. People don't want to go back there or whatever. Everyone-- we try not to hit anybody on the head with it, but I was like, "This is the truth and it's this a 100-year thing. I'm going to be dealing with this for the rest of my existence."

Every talkback we've had since, the first thing all of them say is, "Thank you. Thank you for holding space for this, because I still have not recovered from the pain of what this was." I was like, "I'm here with you. I don't know that I ever will, but we just got to literally walk on through and keep going."

Alison Stewart: A listener of the show wrote to us, "I am particularly thankful for the interview you did with Gavin Creel. It was so sweet. Now Gavin is in the great beyond. I am so grateful to have seen him perform and for this wonderful conversation to remember him by." Gavin Creel died in his Manhattan home on Monday.

We also want to acknowledge the loss of some other greats. Kris Kristofferson died this past Saturday at the age of 88 after five decades of work in music and film. He pioneered outlaw country and starred in movies like in 1976, A Star Is Born. Pete Rose, the legendary baseball star, played for the Cincinnati Reds and the Phillies. He was known for giving it his all and for his lifetime ban from baseball for gambling. He died on Monday at the age of 83. Another loss from the world of sports, Dikembe Mutombo, the Congolese-American NBA star who was recognized for his efforts to fight polio and his championing of the Special Olympics. He died on Monday in Atlanta at the age of 58.

We will also remember the legendary actor John Amos, whose death was back in August but was confirmed this week by his family. Amos was born and bred in New Jersey. After a brief football career, he went on to act on Good Times before butting heads with producers about the one-dimensional way his character depicted African-American men. He'd go on to star as the adult Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots and played Admiral Percy Fitzwallace across the first five seasons of The West Wing. John Amos was 84.

We wanted to celebrate the lives of these accomplished and inspiring men. Let's go out on some music from the late Gavin Creel. Here is Gavin from the Broadway cast recording of Hair. This is I Got Life.

[MUSIC - Gavin Creel: I Got Life]

I got life, mother

I got laughs, sister

I got freedom, brother

I got good times, man

I got crazy ways, daughter

I got million-dollar charm, cousin

I got headaches and toothaches

And bad times too, like you

I got my hair

I got my head

I got my brains

I got my ears

I got my eyes

I got my nose

I got my mouth

I got my teeth

I got my tongue

I got my chin

I got my neck

I got my--