Hair Star Gavin Creel on Having a Jolly Good Time Across the Pond

Those who mourn the absence from Broadway of 2009 Tony nominee Gavin Creel in Hair have a delightful solution available to them: hop a plane to London, where Creel and most of the rest of the Tony winning Broadway revival’s original “tribe” have decamped for six months. (Will Swenson is the exception and will be departing earlier.) It was nearly four years ago that Creel first played the West End, as Gavin Lee’s replacement Bert in Mary Poppins. Now, he’s moved from the well-upholstered England of P. L. Travers to the messy American landscape of bellbottoms, draft cards and clambering across the orchestra of the Gielgud Theatre eight times a week. Broadway.com caught up with Creel two days after his 34th birthday. It was an animated dressing room chat punctuated by drop-ins from Swenson and copious attention paid to Wally, Creel’s dog, a bloodhound mix who will be two in July and who clearly loves London—and meeting people—as much as his ever-affable owner does.

It’s great that you were able to bring Wally with you.
I wouldn’t have come if they’d said he couldn’t come as well, and Cameron’s [Mackintosh, producer] office oversaw the entire process from door to door. I didn’t have to worry about anything. I adopted Wally on Sept 11, 2008 at the North Shore Animal League and got cast in Hair two months later.

You should take him around London’s parks, though be careful of the deer in Richmond Park.
Well, he totally loves Hampstead and Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. I don’t know about Wally and deer. He’d probably get excited and try to attack them and those deer would kick his ass.

Speaking of kicking ass, it’s amazing to have more or less an entire Broadway company on the West End. Do you feel like cultural ambassadors?
The show is finding its own energy here. At first it was a bit of a shock to our system because the audiences are just different. They listen more here; they’re really more engaged. Some days it’s been discouraging for some of the others who think the audiences aren’t enjoying themselves but then when they look at their faces, they’re lit up.

I’ve heard that you were the ringleader in terms of encouraging your Broadway colleagues to cross the pond.
I’m certainly enthusiastic about this city. Who wouldn’t be? So I guess in a sense I was. But I’d also heard murmurings from some of the ensemble members that they were like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go, so let’s go!” So that helped me make my decision. It was a little awkward because of certain people who couldn’t go because of babies or relationships or family matters and things like that, and it was so sad to say goodbye to them. But, you know, Hair’s been going for 43 years or whatever it is and there are a million tribespeople out there—I mean, it’s so neat how they folded me in after the park [Central Park, where this production originated]; they folded me and Sasha [Allen] and Caissie [Levy] in beautifully and we became part of it. So for each new person that comes in, we keep doing that.

How fascinating that in Mary Poppins you were the only new cast member brought into an entirely British show, and here you’re leading an American ensemble [with six U.K.-based swings] in one of the defining American musicals—albeit playing a guy who has a serious thing about Manchester, England!
The British thing is weird, isn’t it? I’m an Anglophile, I guess. My aunt married a Brit and they were over here for 25 years and my cousins are British, so I came here when I was five. And when I was 20, I spent a semester studying here. And then I did a year and a half in Poppins at the Prince Edward. So when Oskar [Eustis, who runs the Public Theater] called me in to meet with him about something entirely different, he was like, “Can I talk to you about something else? There’s the possibility that we might go to London with Hair, would you ever consider it?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’d go back in a second,” and that was last July.

Starring in Mary Poppins must have been scary, being both the only newcomer to the cast and a foreigner at that.
It was, but I promised myself something that I have told this cast: if anyone invites you to go anywhere, say yes—even if you’re tired or don’t want to go. I did that when I came here and I saw people’s houses and neighborhoods and went to Scotland and Norfolk and all over. I experienced British culture by basically saying, “Yes, where are we going? Let’s go!” It’s not about saying, “Let’s do it some time.” The time is now. That’s our mantra for this experience: “Some time is now!”

How fun that here you are playing not only a guy from Queens who wishes he were English but also someone who liberally quotes from Hamlet. Are you ready to give us your Hamlet?
[Laughs.] That’s not even on my radar. That to me would be like singing an opera. I probably could do it, but I’m not going to do it unless I am absolutely incredible at it, and I would take a long time to train. I’d love to do Shakespeare, but that role? I’d need a great director, and I’d need time.