Broadway Shockers 2025: The (Ir)Resistible Return of Scott Rudin

As 2025 draws to a close, TheaterMania looks back on some of the most surprising stories of the year.

In 2021, former (and current, and future) Broadway producer Scott Rudin was put into timeout after his decades of alleged bad behavior were publicly exposed. A figure synonymous with challenging, celebrity-driven prestige productions, impeccable taste, and extravagant spending, Rudin retreated from the spotlight for several years before orchestrating his own grand return in 2025.

Rudin’s modest return featured a pair of his longtime collaborators, Laurie Metcalf and Joe Mantello. Mantello directed Metcalf in Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, a drama about a squabbling aunt and her nephew in Idaho. The production was glowingly received at Steppenwolf, where it premiered last year, and on Broadway, but it never gained enough of a foothold at the Broadway box office. It ended up closing two months early.

Online commentators on X and Broadway Reddit were quick to ascribe a reason: Rudin himself wasn’t welcome back. Broadway, people argued, has no room for abusers. To be clear, we do not condone predatory behavior of any kind, and the industry’s reckoning on that front is both necessary and overdue.

Audience members are free to skip a show for any reason, whether price, politics, or principle. Some speculated that The Queen of Versailles closed in part because of Kristin Chenoweth’s public condolences after Charlie Kirk’s death, but Sunset Boulevard was largely unaffected by Nicole Scherzinger’s red hat comment. To pin a show’s failure on any speculative factor is, at best, myopic.

After all, how many regular ticket buyers—the ones who don’t read the comments—were actually deterred from seeing Little Bear Ridge Road because they knew about Rudin’s alleged past? How many people really take the producers of a show into consideration when they’re buying their tickets? Just because terminally online people like me know these things doesn’t mean that they’re common knowledge. Rudin, for his part, offered the New York Times a more pragmatic take on the show’s premature ending: there just wasn’t enough interest in the product to sustain as long a run as they had hoped.

He’s hoping that his next show will be more attention-grabbing. Metcalf and Mantello will be joined by Nathan Lane for a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. An even dicier proposition, it will play the Winter Garden Theatre this spring, a barn of a venue for even the biggest musicals.

Will attention be paid? Only time will tell, and only then will we see if this is a true repudiation of Rudin or just theater.