In February 2020, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, a two-time Tony Award winner, began work on a splashy Broadway revival of The Music Man. Produced by Scott Rudin, then Broadway’s most powerful and prolific impresario, and directed by Jerry Zaks, the production was shaping up to be the event of the fall theater season. When tickets went on sale, the advance soared to $30 million.

Rehearsals that February were intimate: just Jackman, Foster, Warren Carlyle, the show’s choreographer, and a few people from the music department. Rudin popped in from time to time, as did Zaks. Jackman and Foster had never worked together. The goal was to develop the chemistry between Jackman’s “Professor” Harold Hill, the charismatic flimflam salesman of musical instruments, and Foster’s Marian Paroo, the guarded but discerning town librarian—“Marian, the Librarian,” as the show’s creator, Meredith Willson, had called her.

By the end of four weeks, the chemistry was there. Confidence in the room was high. And then, early on the morning of February 28, Jackman woke up and could not breathe. It was, he remembered, the first time in his life that he thought, “If I wake up tomorrow morning and I’m sicker than this, I think I’m going to go to the hospital. I thought, Shit.”

Carlyle arose that day coughing and feverish but was determined, he says, to “drag myself” to rehearsals. Foster had a temperature of 104 degrees, a bad cough, and an inability to taste or smell. She decided to call in sick. But when she checked her phone, Jackman had already done the same. “Hugh canceled,” Carlyle said. “He has never canceled.”

Jackman, Foster, and Carlyle all think they had come down with COVID-19, though tests were scarce back then. Two weeks later, on March 12, New York governor Andrew Cuomo shut down Broadway. A bunch of theater producers gathered at Sardi’s that night to commiserate. One of them had a cough. A few days later, many of them, including Rudin, came down with COVID.

Jackman had flown to Australia that same day to meet up with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness. He got a frantic call from his lawyer telling him to get on the next plane to New York, because there was talk of closing the borders. Rehearsals for The Music Man were to start again in July. If he were stuck abroad, he could be in breach of contract. Jackman and Furness returned to New York on March 19, to “a ghost town,” he said.

Rehearsals did not start in July. Broadway, in fact, shut down for 18 months, destroying the livelihoods of thousands of actors, stagehands, ushers, restaurant staff, parking garage attendants, and others connected to the theatrical trade. The $2 billion that Broadway annually poured into New York City’s coffers evaporated.

But The Music Man, defying the pandemic, has survived. Even after the production was forced to shut down again for a week last month after Foster, Jackman, and other cast members came down with COVID, it’s on track for a February 10 opening at the Winter Garden Theatre (where the marquee has been up for more than a year). Advance ticket sales have hit $50 million.

Broadway’s return last fall was spotty. Disney’s Aladdin opened, then had to shut for two weeks after a COVID outbreak among cast and crew. Ticket sales for all but a few shows were weak, with international tourism, Broadway’s trough for years, having dried up.

There’s a sense on “the Street” that Broadway’s real return won’t come until late winter or early spring, just around the time that Jackman, the biggest box office draw in the business, will be leading a cast of 45 actors, employed for the first time in a long time, in “Seventy-six Trombones.”

Jackman and The Music Man go back a long way. He auditioned for the show in high school. He memorized the opening number—“Rock Island,” better known from its lyrics as “But he doesn’t know the territory!”—and got the part of Salesman #2. Another student, David Anderson, landed the lead. “He was really good,” Jackman said of Anderson. But envy was in Jackman’s eyes. One day, dammit, he thought, that part could be his. (Jackman lost touch with Anderson. But, David, if you’re reading this, Jackman says he’ll leave two tickets under your name at the box office.)

Jackman’s chance to play Harold Hill came in 2018, when Rudin offered him the role. Jackman’s friend Barbara Cook—Marian in the original 1957 production—had long encouraged him to do the show. “To have a successful Music Man, you have to have a Harold Hill all the women in town want to fuck and half the men want to fuck too,” she told him.

But Jackman was “indecisive,” he recalled. He wanted to do an original musical, not a revival. So he passed. A year later, with no original musical in development, he changed his mind. He was 51. He knew he wouldn’t have the stamina to tackle the physically demanding part of Harold Hill much longer. “It’s time,” he told his agent. They rang Rudin. But there was a problem: A British producer now had the rights and was planning a London production. “Let me look into it,” Rudin said. Jackman went to a corner of his apartment, sat down, put his head in his hands, and thought, You’re an idiot. It’s gone. It won’t be done for another 10 years. “I was really down,” he said.

Rudin called back the next day. “It’s done,” he said. “It’s yours.”

That was the Rudin magic. Nothing stood in his way. His taste was impeccable, his ability to land major stars unrivaled. His string of Broadway hits included The Book of Mormon, Hello, Dolly!, and To Kill a Mockingbird adapted for the stage by Aaron Sorkin. Rudin oversaw every aspect of his productions: script development, marketing, advertising, right down to seating arrangements on opening night. He was also as tough as they come and never shrank from a fight. He got into a nasty lawsuit with Stephen Sondheim over the rights to Sondheim’s musical Gold!, in which Rudin had been an early investor. He battled Harper Lee’s estate when it objected to Sorkin’s portrayal of Atticus Finch as a one-time racist. (Both lawsuits were settled out of court.)

Rudin had recently formed a production company with his two friends, Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, and David Geffen, one of the founders of DreamWorks. They would put up the money for The Music Man. Jackman was in good hands.

Jackman never aspired to be a musical theater star. At drama school in Australia, he studied Shakespeare. When he graduated, he landed a part in a TV series. He thought he’d make his living in television and, one day, the movies. But then his agent sent him in for the role of Gaston in the Australian production of Beauty and the Beast. He wasn’t much of a singer but he got the part, though Disney insisted he take singing lessons once a week.

When Beauty and the Beast closed, he auditioned for the role of Joe Gillis, the cynical screenwriter, for the Melbourne production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. He didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a musical theater performer, but he couldn’t resist meeting the show’s director, Trevor Nunn, who led the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s and went on to stage Cats and Les Misérables. At the audition, Nunn told him to pretend he was singing to a young, idealistic Joe Gillis, who detests what he’s become. It was a nifty bit of direction, Jackman thought. After the audition, he called his agent and said, “If this guy offers me the part, I’m in.” Nunn, meanwhile, told his assistants, “I don’t need to see anybody else.”

Jackman’s run in Sunset Boulevard was cut short in 1997 when Lloyd Webber, his company then on shaky financial ground, shut down every production of the show. But Jackman and Nunn kept in touch. A year later, when Jackman was in London, he called Nunn, who was about to take over the Royal National Theatre and was planning his first season, which included a revival of Oklahoma! Nunn told Jackman to come round for an audition. “Just bring a Shakespeare and sing a song from Oklahoma!” Nunn said. Jackman met with Nunn and four associate directors of the theater. He performed a Shakespeare monologue, and the directors immediately started debating what it meant, as if they were in graduate school. When he sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” the directors sang along. Jackman left the meeting puzzled. I definitely got this gig, he thought, or I’ve completely screwed this up and this is the worst audition of my life.

The audition was “phony,” Nunn would later recall with a laugh. “I’d already cast him as Curly.” He just wanted to make sure the other directors were on board.

“A major discovery” is what one London critic, echoing his colleagues, called Jackman. Unfortunately for Nunn, in his view, “about 20 Hollywood film producers thought the same, and all the wonderful things I was hoping to do with [Hugh] were whisked away.”

The next year the elusive movie career Jackman had been trying to pursue kicked in after he landed his breakthrough role, Wolverine in X-Men. The film went on to gross nearly $300 million worldwide.

Before X-Men, Jackman had been offered the part of Peter Allen, the flamboyant, bisexual Australian songwriter and performer, in a musical based on Allen’s life called The Boy From Oz. Jackman knew it was a good role but turned it down, fearing, yet again, he’d be “pigeonholed” in musical theater. But when he saw the show in Sydney, starring a very capable Todd McKenney, his heart sank. He’d made a big mistake. It wasn’t just a good part—it was the perfect part for him.

A few years later, as he was reading the script for the second X-Men movie, he got a call from the producers of The Boy From Oz. They were taking the show to Broadway. They wanted him to play Peter Allen. This time he grabbed it. His agent had doubts. Jackman’s movie career was taking off. Now was the time to cement his relationships with the studios. But Jackman wasn’t about to watch someone else’s name appear on the marquee. “I can’t go through that again,” he told his agent.

The Boy From Oz opened on Broadway on October 16, 2003. The critics adored Jackman, “a rising movie star,” said one, but dismissed the show as a by-the-numbers bio musical that, in the words of The New York Times, “settles for a staleness and hollowness that even Mr. Jackman’s blazing presence can’t disguise.” The producers promised to keep the show running through Christmas. After that, all bets were off. A “rising movie star” did not guarantee strong ticket sales in January and February. Jackman was deflated. Then one night that October he noticed that many of the men in the audience were paying more attention to their Blackberries than the show. It dawned on him that they were checking the score of the Yankees-Marlins World Series.

Jackman had a line: “I know what you’re thinking: Is he or isn’t he? It’s true. I’m Australian.” That night he changed it to: “I know what you’re thinking. What’s the score on the baseball?” People looked up from their handheld devices. Jackman ran offstage to get the score from the TV set in his dressing room. He came back on and announced it to cheers from the audience. For the rest of the night, he provided World Series updates. The audience loved it.

And so did Jackman. Peter Allen had always bantered with his audience, so why shouldn’t he? Jackman started poking fun at latecomers, a bit he stole from fellow Australian Dame Edna. “Take your time, sweetheart,” he’d say, always in character. “Not much has happened, trust me. Do you want me to sing the first song again?” Everybody thought Jackman’s ad libs lifted the show. Well, not everybody. One of the creators wrote Jackman a letter berating him for departing from the text. Jackman ignored it. Pretty soon, he was bringing people onstage to dance with him. On one occasion, he tried to get a reluctant man to stand up and dance. The man wouldn’t budge. “Okay, you sit. Everybody else stand.” They did. Sometimes, he admitted, he got carried away. A woman once yelled, “I want to bite your ass!” “Come on up and do it,” he replied. She did—and left a bruise.

Word got around town. That stale bio musical was a hoot, and all because of Jackman. The box office exploded. Women went wild, mobbing him at the stage door. Celebrities flocked to the show. Barbara Cook saw it 12 times. Jackman gave Barbara Walters a lap dance onstage. Steven Spielberg told him he should host the Tonys. He did—and drove up ratings. The last three months of the run were sold out, with scalpers getting huge markups for what was no longer being called The Boy From Oz. It was now known as The Hugh Jackman Show. Jackman left after a year, no longer just a “rising movie star” but a gold-plated Broadway sensation.

In 2011 Jackman, now a big movie star, had an idea about doing a one-man music and dance show. He and his friend Warren Carlyle, who had been in the chorus of Oklahoma! and was now a choreographer, went to work on the stage of the Curran Theater in San Francisco. It was just the two of them. “We were like, ‘Well, what songs do you like? What do you want to do?’ ” Carlyle recalled. “That’s how we built it.” The show roared into New York on an advance of $10 million. Scalpers were getting $1,500 for orchestra seats. One day Jackman was walking to the theater. A scruffy-looking man came up to him and said, “I’ve got tickets for Hugh Jackman tonight.” Jackman lowered his sunglasses and said, “I am Hugh Jackman, mate.” By the end of its 10-week run, Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway had grossed nearly $15 million.

When COVID shut down New York that bleak March, Jackman, masked and gloved, walked his dog and made runs to the local grocery store. Carlyle holed up in his apartment on the Upper West Side and walked his dog too. “The poor dog is exhausted,” he said. Foster retreated to her weekend house in upstate New York, sat on her couch, drank wine, and watched movies. She was eager to return to Broadway after a six-year absence, during which she’d starred in the TV Land series Younger. She’d burst on the scene in 2002, when she’d taken over the leading role in Thoroughly Modern Millie after the original star left due to creative differences with the director. She won the Tony for best actress in a musical. In 2011, she picked up a second Tony as Reno Sweeney in a revival of Anything Goes. She was a Broadway A-lister. But she still had to audition for Marian the Librarian. She was intimidated—and not just because Jackman was in the room. Marian is typically played by a soprano, and some of the notes are a bit high for her range. The music director arranged the songs “Till There Was You,” “Goodnight My Someone,” and “My White Knight” in her key. After she finished singing, Zaks stood up and said, “Okay, we want you to do it.”

“I was aflutter,” she remembered.

Zaks was putting the finishing touches on the musical adaptation of Mrs. Doubtfire when the producer came to the theater on March 12 and told everyone that Broadway was shutting down. Zaks, “terrified” of COVID, he said, decamped to Bellport, New York, and read But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, Meredith Willson’s charming memoir of the making of The Music Man. Zaks read it five times. “It’s my bible,” he said.

Willson spent six years—1950 to 1956—writing The Music Man. He based it on his memories of his idyllic childhood in Mason City, Iowa. He created Harold Hill, the phony bandleader, because he’d been a musician all his life. He played the piccolo in John Philip Sousa’s band and the flute for the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscanini. Acting out all the parts and accompanying himself on the piano, Willson auditioned The Music Man for dozens of backers and directors. The legendary Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady, hated it. Finally, Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of Death of a Salesman, picked it up. Broadway sophisticates told him it would never work. It was, they said, old-fashioned and corny.

The Music Man, starring Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, opened at the Majestic Theatre in December 1957, won five Tony Awards, including best musical (beating out the groundbreaking West Side Story), and ran for almost three and a half years. It became a staple of high school and amateur theater groups. But it was only revived once on Broadway, in 2000, directed by Susan Stroman, who went on to stage The Producers.

As popular as it is, The Music Man has always been dogged by its reputation for being, as those New York sophisticates once thought, old-fashioned and corny. Sondheim and Hal Prince had transformed musical theater with sophisticated shows such as Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music. A guy in a plumed hat marching around and twirling a baton seemed a little hokey. But as Zaks went through the show—and plunged into Willson’s memoir—he realized something. Willson had “affection” for his hometown, but The Music Man is not sentimental. Harold Hill and Marian Paroo are tough people “who couldn’t be more convinced of the fact that they don’t need to be in love,” Zaks said. “You’ve got these two forces bumping up against each other. It’s the best spectator sport. Watching people try to cope with avoiding connecting. It’s great comedy. It’s fertile air.”

As the COVID lockdown wore on, Foster got off the couch and took dance-cardio classes over Zoom. “I started training five times a week,” she said. Jackman went into gear as well. He got a key to a rehearsal studio where he and Carlyle, wearing masks and keeping 20 feet apart, plunged into choreography for the show. “I’m not a dancer,” Jackman said. “It’s not in my bones. But I can learn it. I can get there. So I thought, having all this time, there’s no way I’m going to waste it.” He also was mindful of the fact that Foster had won two Tonys for dancing up a storm. “She can learn a new dance in three hours, and she’s the best dancer you’ve seen on Broadway.”

Jackman’s assessment of his dancing skills amused Carlyle: “In his defense, he’s extremely dexterous. You give him a cane, and he can flip a cane. You ask him to jump and he can jump really high. I’ve had 24 years of trying every single possible way to embarrass and humiliate him. He’s always managed to overcome and succeed.”

While Jackman and Carlyle were flipping canes, Rudin was on dozens of Zoom calls trying to figure out how to bring Broadway back. Other producers were paralyzed with fear, but Rudin “was working like a dervish,” according to a source who was in on those Zoom calls. “It was the best version of Scott.” Rudin pushed for federal and state grants that, in the end, helped give shows the millions of dollars they needed to reopen.

And then on April 7, The Hollywood Reporter dropped a story titled “Unhinged,” detailing Rudin’s abusive treatment of office assistants. Most of it wasn’t new. In 2005, The Wall Street Journal had run a profile of Rudin called “Boss-Zilla!” He proudly told the Journal that his management style was “a cross between Attila the Hun and Miss Jean Brodie.” The stories of throwing cell phones and teacups at assistants were the stuff of legend, and there was always a sense that if you could survive a year working for Rudin, you could go anywhere in show business—and, in fact, many of his former assistants did. But the THR story landed at a time when work culture had changed. Now there was little tolerance for bullying. The article raised a pointed question: When so many people in the entertainment industry were under intense scrutiny for past behavior, how had Rudin managed to avoid the gaze? And it contained a damning anecdote. Rudin once smashed a computer monitor on an assistant’s hand. The assistant ended up in the hospital. “When I read that, I knew it was over,” said a producer who’s worked with Rudin.

The press piled on, and Rudin, once a master manipulator of reporters, found that they had stitched him up in a bag and tossed him in the river. He announced he would “step back” from all of his projects, including The Music Man. He has not spoken publicly since that announcement.

Jackman said he was “blindsided” by the Rudin controversy. “I hadn’t worked with Scott before, but he’d only been fantastic to me—as a friend, as a collaborator.” But, Jackman added, “There’s no reason”—and no excuse—for Rudin’s treatment of his staff. “I certainly won’t stand for it when I’m in a room.”

Zaks said that he, too, can’t excuse Rudin’s behavior, yet added, “I miss him. I miss his theatrical intelligence and his taste. He makes you do your best work.”

Diller recalled that he “shivered” when Rudin announced he was leaving the show. “It’s Scott’s production,” Diller said. Neither he nor Geffen knew how to take the reins of a Broadway musical. “It’s not what we do. It’s what Scott does.” But Diller moved quickly to calm the waters, hiring Kate Horton, a high-powered British producer who ran the Royal Court Theatre in London, to take over the show. Rudin has a financial interest in The Music Man, but Horton, Diller told me, is now the boss. (She declined to be interviewed.)

As the Rudin scandal unfolded, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted on Broadway, even with theaters dark from COVID-19. In anticipation of productions’ return, activists demanded pledges from Broadway executives for more diversity onstage and off. The Music Man, whose book contains some cringeworthy Native American stereotypes (they’ve been dropped from the revival), became a target. It “sets forth a sanitized, insular and very white America—regularly exploited by a recent president…to stoke racial fears and pit Americans against one another,” a culture critic wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “It asks audiences to cheer for yet another romanticized fraud.”

That’s a bit much to pour on a musical comedy from another era. But people involved in the show feared an onslaught of such attacks. A rumor raced around the theater world that Zaks had cut “My White Knight” from the show because of the word white. The rumor was absurd. “My White Knight” is Marian’s description of her ideal man and has nothing to do with race. But the uproar sprang from the atmosphere swirling around the show.

In point of fact, Zaks’s revival, with some contemporary updates to its book, has a diverse cast, one third of whom are people of color, including Emma Crow, Nicholas Ward, Phillip Boykin, and Rema Webb. As for the charge that the musical romanticizes a con man when much of America is still in the grip of Donald Trump, Stroman laughed and, quoting a line from the show, said: “Well, the con man gets his foot ‘caught in the door.’ If Donald Trump got his foot caught in the door, we’d all be better off. Donald Trump never changed. Harold Hill falls in love.”

Harold Hill does fall in love. But until he does, the audience must believe he’s out to fleece the people of River City. Both Jackman and Zaks want him to have a harder edge than he’s had in previous productions. “If he gets off the train [in the first scene], and he’s happy, I’m not interested in that,” Zaks said. “I want to see Harold Hill get off the train and force me to imagine what he’s thinking.”

“He’s not a nice guy,” said Jackman. “He’s not a terrible guy. He’s making a living, and he’s sort of on the bottom side, probably a little rougher edge to the bottom side of things.”

Jackman, flashing that grin that’s charmed audiences all over the world, added, “He’s got to be a lot less Hugh Jackman.”

JACKMAN PHOTO: GROOMING, MIA SANTIAGO. JACKMAN AND FOSTER PHOTO: HAIR, DJ QUINTERO (FOSTER); MAKEUP, LISA AHARON; GROOMING, JERRY POPOLIS; TAILOR, THAO HUYNH. THROUGHOUT: SET DESIGN, MARY HOWARD. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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