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THE CREEL DEAL
I have a memory of walking on 45th Street one evening a few years back and seeing Gavin Creel in full sprint toward the Marquis Theatre, the pony tail he was sporting while playing the uptight Jean-Michel in La Cage aux Folles trailing close behind. Turns out this might have been a common sight for anyone walking on 45th Street close to call time during the run of that show. "I was never late to a show more often than La Cage," Creel says. "Because I lived close, and I didn't really do anything in that show."

The same cannot be said of his current role of Claude in Broadway's vibrant new production of Hair. As far from Jean-Michel as one can get, Creel's Claude has to be the emotional center of the hippie party, balancing out the carefree rest of his tribe with his introspection. The role has inspired no shortage of introspection from Creel himself who has taken the show's messages to heart. He says, without a trace of salesmanship, "It's more than a musical to me, it's an experience," and it is clear the show has impacted his worldview.

Question: How has doing Hair changed you?
Gavin Creel: It's been a joyful, expressive, freeing creative process. Working with this tribe, it's really freeing. There's not as many boxes put around you physically and vocally. I've really enjoyed the place it has delivered me as an actor. I hope it runs a nice long time and I get to keep exploring through the run.

Q: What have your studies shown you so far?
Creel: Not only is the score incredible, but the story is topical, even now. It's about a country that's falling apart and is trying to find its identity, and a generation is trying to find its identity, and there is chaos. It's kind of like now. A generation is trying to figure out, "Where do we fit in this world, with these wars?"

Q: Hair has always been an evolving piece...
Creel: The cool thing about it changing is we've got two of the three creators alive and willing to let us reinterpret things or cut lines or change lines or re-examine scenes. Gerome Ragni [co-author] and Galt MacDermot [music] are so willing, and that's what makes this experience so unique and makes Hair so unique. While we still honor the original source material, we're given a chance to take a new look at it.

	Gavin Creel with Will Swenson in Hair
	photo by Joan Marcus

Q: What makes Claude so affecting?
Creel: He finds an identity in this tribe that's so unique and expressive and free. Of course the undercurrent of the whole thing is this draft, this looming death sentence. If he's able to escape the draft, he's free. That's what I love about the character, he's willing to try anything to live and be free, as long as he doesn't get that letter in the mail.

Q: That's a whole different set of worries we don't have today. Did you talk to anyone to get a sense of what living with that fear was like?
Creel: My dad was drafted. It's amazing, I talked to him about it because of this play. We just had a conversation one night when I came from rehearsal. I said, "You never really talked about your draft experience." He opened up about how he and my mom were out to lunch, and he came back and there was the letter in the mail, and he was almost 26, almost out of draft age. He got drafted and actually served in Thailand in the finance department for the Vietnam war. So luckily, he didn't have to go fight, but he said, "If I got called, I was going, and I was going wherever they told me to go." His assignment was in Aberdeen, MD, for a year, and then Thailand. The amazing thing was after basic training in Aberdeen, my mom came and said she was pregnant with her first kid, my oldest sister. And she moved to Maryland, then he got assigned to go to Corpus Christi to train and then to go fight. His commanding officer said, "No. I'm sending you to Thailand because you have a baby and a young wife." I don't even know what the officer's name was, but he was like an angel. What's weird is that, when my dad finished serving, six or seven years later I was born. All of that happened before I was even here, but not too long before. Just to think that he was just a kid, starting a family. It's incredible. My parents are coming opening night, and I can't wait for them to see the show and see his reaction.

Q: Some of the show's reputation is built on the audience interaction. Do you think the show can still connect directly in the way the original did?
Creel: Yeah. I definitely do. I think people are more cynical now, so we can't worry about getting every single person. New York is, by nature, a more cynical place. What I've seen happen in the theatre in previews is pretty magical. People losing their minds, and they're not afraid to. It's almost more celebratory to me because they're like, "Screw these people around here with their stuffy attitudes and thumbs up their noses. I'm gonna stand up, I'm gonna grab that flower, I'm gonna go to the Be-In, and I'm gonna go onstage at the end and dance!" It's beautiful, people are having a wake-up at our show.

Q: I imagine it is harder to get people to let go nowadays, they have to be "cool."
Creel: I'm so tired of "cool." Screw "cool." It's so boring. I want to be a poster-boy for the uncool.

Q: This show is really the last Broadway show to have massive hit songs on national radio…
Creel: Even something like Rent wasn't playing on the radio. The pop-music culture of then was about expressing yourself and about being heard and about breaking outside the lines, and what nauseates me is the pop culture of now is all about being famous, about being on reality TV, and about celebrity and materialistic goods. It's like we're about to explode and I hope we explode with a big hippie revolution. I hope people see this show and realize, "What are we doing? What am I contributing?" I'm thinking about it myself, being in this play, I'm like, what do I really want? What noise am I willing to make? Why do I want people to pay attention to me? Is it so that I can be on TV? Be on the next "Survivor", win a million dollars? Ugh. Screw that! It's tired.

[Hair music] was on the radio because that was what people were making music about. The artists were there to make great music and to be expressive and talk about what was happening then. Then it ballooned into, "Ooh, look what I can do on synthesizers, and now I've got bling." Hopefully we'll get back to what music is really about.

[Hair is now playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th Street. For more information, go to www.hairbroadway.com]  Continued...