Story of the Week: Self-Uncanceled Power Producer Scott Rudin Plots His Broadway Return

He’s baaaa-aaaack.

Putting an end to longstanding rumors around Shubert Alley, former Broadway producer Scott Rudin—who was effectively canceled by the industry in 2021 after his decades of alleged bad behavior were publicly exposed—has announced to the New York Times that he’s planning his grand comeback.

Story of the Week will give you a brief reminder of who Rudin is, what happened four years ago, and what this deus ex machina of the post-Covid age has in store.

But first…

Who is Scott Rudin?

With 130 movies and at least 100 theater productions to his name, Scott Rudin is the very definition of a “power producer,” known for his willingness to present challenging fare on Broadway, his ability to lure powerful stars to the stage, and, allegedly, his aim with a baked potato.

For two decades, Rudin was one of Broadway’s most reliable artistes, with his golden age occurring around the time he opened The Book of Mormon in 2011.

Among his productions: Fences, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Iceman Cometh, all with Denzel Washington; Larry David’s Fish in the Dark; Blackbird with Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams; and Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

He made stars out of writers like Lucas Hnath, Annie Baker, and Stephen Karam. He shepherded Bette Midler, Glenda Jackson, and Elaine May to the stage of the Tony Awards.

The shows weren’t all hits (double-truck ads cost a lot of money), but they brought a level of prestige to Broadway that many considered unimpeachable.

What happened to him?

Rudin’s ouster occurred in 2021, after a Hollywood Reporter article described the warzone that was his office, and featured accounts of bullying and violence against his assistants and former staffers.

While the story put faces to the allegations, none of it was new. Everyone knew Rudin had a mercurial temper—those rumors had circulated for decades and were even reported in print way back in 1998. He was known to yell and, allegedly, throw phones and staplers at people’s heads, remove publicists from accounts for misplaced punctuation in emails, and famously tried to strong-arm low-level community theaters into canceling their productions of a version of To Kill a Mockingbird that wasn’t his.

Rudin summarily withdrew from all his Broadway productions, current and future, and resigned from the Broadway League, the trade organization for producers.

Who has filled the void?

One of the arguments against fully canceling Rudin was that his taste in theater was just too superior to lose.

And yet, several other producers and organizations have stepped up in his wake to present the same kind of high-quality, star-driven theater that he championed.

Rudin’s absence has allowed companies like Seaview, run by Greg Nobile, and Wagner Johnson Productions, started in 2019 by Sue Wagner and John Johnson, to rise to the top. The latter two are notable as they’re former Rudin associates, who served as executive producers on nearly all of Rudin’s productions. Last June, they all won a Tony for Stereophonic, the exact kind of new play that Rudin would have championed.

Perhaps in response to their rise, Rudin pointedly said to the New York Times, “I think the economics of Broadway have gotten tougher and tougher, and that some producers are throwing movie stars at that model as a way of cauterizing the bleeding. But I don’t believe it’s a sustainable model because overall, what has historically worked has been really good shows with really great people in them, whether they were movie stars or not. And I think using stars as a replacement for quality has a sell-by date printed all over it.”

Meanwhile, in the Hamptons…

Scott Rudin has spent a lot of time reflecting on his therapist’s couch. In the Times, alongside the kind of photos that only make him look a little bit like Mr. Burns, Rudin has become contrite, admitting to throwing things (“very, very rarely”), yelling at his assistants (“of course”), and other “bone-headed” behavior. He realizes that his disappearance was “in some basic way inevitable,” once the culture had begun to change, but now he owns the years of “bad behavior” that stemmed from “a level of narcissism.”

More importantly, he just seems very bored with civilian life. Reporter Michael Paulson painted a portrait of a man who couldn’t find a home. Rudin literally sold a variety of houses in Manhattan and the Hamptons, canceled a new build in Connecticut, and dispensed his million-dollar art collection. He also worked with cohort Barry Diller to program the offerings on Little Island, Diller’s floating public park on the West Side Highway.

So, Rudin is plotting his comeback.

Who’s going to work with him now?

The same people who worked with him before, namely, Laurie Metcalf and Joe Mantello.

Metcalf won consecutive Tonys for the Rudin-shepherded productions of A Doll’s House, Part 2, and Three Tall Women. She was nominated for Hillary and Clinton, which Rudin also backed, and was starring in the Rudin-produced revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when it got shut down by Covid. Mantello directed all four of those shows (plus The Humans, Blackbird, and The Glass Menagerie), making them two of Rudin’s closest artistic collaborators.

And they remain as such. According to the Times, Rudin has several projects in the works for Metcalf and Mantello: a Broadway transfer of Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road this fall after an acclaimed Chicago run at Steppenwolf in 2024; a new play by David Hare called Montauk next spring (Rudin produced Hare’s Skylight, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Vertical Hour, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, and The Judas Kiss); and an eventual revival of Death of a Salesman, in which they’ll be joined by Nathan Lane (who has an extensive history with Rudin, Metcalf, and Mantello).

Other shows reportedly in Rudin’s pipeline: a Bruce Norris play titled Cottonfield and a Wallace Shawn drama, What We Did Before Our Moth Days.

Have Things Really Changed?

Rudin’s public admittance of his transgressions is more honest and level-headed than many others, and he doesn’t go out of his way to deny anything like people caught red-handed often do.

The Paulson interview makes him seem reflective: “I have a lot more self-control than I had four years ago,” he said. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy. I don’t want to let anybody down. Not just myself. My husband, my family, and collaborators.”

Thus comes the moral quandary: Should he be given the benefit of the doubt?

One day quite soon, the ticket buyers will let us know.