THE last few days of March were the most nerve-racking of Sherie Rene Scott’s acting career. After trying unsuccessfully through the fall and winter to move her critically acclaimed Off Broadway musical, “Everyday Rapture,” to Broadway, she was emotionally raw and awash in self-doubt when, out of the blue, she learned thatRoundabout Theater Company was considering her show as a last-minute replacement for its scuttled Broadway production of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.”

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

After months of uncertainty, Sherie Rene Scott's critically acclaimed Off Broadway musical, “Everyday Rapture,” has moved to Broadway, where it opens on Thursday

 

 

James Estrin/The New York Times

Sherie Rene Scott in “Everyday Rapture,” which ran last spring at Second Stage Theater.

As not only the musical’s star and co-creator, but also the basis of the central character who shares her name, Ms. Scott has had an unusually deep investment in “Everyday Rapture,” which ran last spring at Second Stage Theater. After Roundabout reached out, Ms. Scott recalled in a recent interview, she quickly began trying to reassemble members of the show’s creative team, many of whom were busy working on the new Broadway musical “American Idiot.”

She soon grew anxious that Broadway might again escape her grasp, and decided to get away to Miami with her husband, the record producer Kurt Deutsch, while her team negotiated with Roundabout on a production budget. During their four days away Mr. Deutsch would step into another room to take calls about the show because Ms. Scott wanted to avoid incremental updates. But he sometimes spoke so loudly that she had to yell, “I can hear you, Kurt.”

Ms. Scott, 43, who was nominated for a Tony Award for best actress in a musical in 2005 for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” said: “The truth is that I had put so much energy and hope into moving ‘Everyday Rapture’ to Broadway before this, and failing had hit me hard, so I didn’t want to invest too much emotionally when the Roundabout deal was only a possibility. What was perhaps hardest was that Broadway theaters made it loud and clear that they wouldn’t take a chance on the show because I was not a star, I was not a name. I was worse than not a name. I was three names, Sherie Rene Scott, but still not a name.”

This time around necessity (and Ms. Scott’s widely praised talent) triumphed over celebrity. Roundabout announced on April 1 that “Everyday Rapture” was a go; even then, Ms. Scott said, she worried it was an April Fool’s Day joke.

She then shifted gears for what has been one of the most hectic schedules on Broadway in recent memory. Rehearsals of “Everyday Rapture” began on April 5, with short lunch breaks and after-hours sessions of script revisions by Ms. Scott and Dick Scanlan, the co-author of the show. Its director, Michael Mayer, could not devote himself chiefly to the production until April 12, when “American Idiot,” which he also directed, no longer required his full-time care. The first preview performance of “Everyday Rapture” at American Airlines Theater was on April 19, with an opening night set for this Thursday.

“It’s been like having sex on Sunday, a sonogram on Monday, and the baby on Tuesday,” said Mr. Scanlan, who shared Tony nominations in 2002 for best book and best score for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

“Everyday Rapture” is loosely based on Ms. Scott’s memories, journals and letters from her youth in Kansas, growing up in the Mennonite religion, and her pursuit of an acting career as an adult. While she plays a character named after herself, she said most of the musical’s anecdotes came from “a combination of truth and fiction, though some of them reflect my own dreams or aspirations.” The show is partly a meditation on worship in a religious context, but also in the world of show business, as Ms. Scott seeks fame and has to deal with the rabid attention of one teenage musical-theater fan. (One young actor and two actresses play supporting roles; Ms. Scott’s is by far the largest.)

Relaxing before rehearsal in her dressing room, with her yoga and Pilates DVDs wedged next to an entertainment system, Ms. Scott said she was recently struck by how the musical’s examination of fame intersected with her experience trying to land a Broadway theater. The character Sherie Rene Scott grapples with her own celebrity status, while the real Ms. Scott became frustrated with celebrity status in the theater.

“The show is partly about a woman being completely free to express herself creatively, and choosing her own path without worrying about people and fans paying attention to her,” Ms. Scott said. “And here I was last winter, wondering if I should have done” a television show, “because it would have perhaps helped me become famous enough to get people to pay attention to me and give me a theater.”

Mr. Mayer, the director, said in an interview that the transfer of “Everyday Rapture” to Broadway represented a coup for theater veterans.

“The Hollywood star machine on Broadway has become so intense that we all knew it would take a stroke of good fortune for this show to make it, because, despite its quality, ‘Everyday Rapture’ is a hard show to describe and sell commercially,” Mr. Mayer said, given that it is more than a one-woman show but far from a traditionally structured musical. “But the opening at Roundabout was the special moment we needed.”

Mr. Haimes said “Everyday Rapture” was his only choice for the 740-seat American Airlines Theater once “Lips Together” fell apart; according to Ms. Scott and her colleagues Roundabout began sending feelers to them on the same day that theater blogs began reporting that Ms. Mullally was planning to leave “Lips Together.”Todd Haimes, artistic director of Roundabout, said in an interview that the recent turn of events involving “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” and “Everyday Rapture” had no precedent in his theater’s 45-year history. He postponed “Lips Together” on March 25 after its star, the Emmy Award-winning actress Megan Mullally (“Will & Grace”), quit because of problems she had with one of her co-stars,Patton Oswalt, and the director, Joe Mantello. That left Roundabout with an empty Broadway theater and a hole in its subscription season. (Roundabout is a nonprofit theater with about 43,000 subscribers.)

“It was a very strange circumstance that brought this production to us,” Mr. Haimes said. “But I have to trust my own instincts and those of the great team we have here at Roundabout.” He said that he saw “Everyday Rapture” during its Off Broadway run at Second Stage, which holds 296 seats, and came away “staggered by Sherie’s incredible talent.”

As it happens, Roundabout was one of the theaters that had said no last winter to Ms. Scott, who, with the original commercial producers of “Everyday Rapture,” had hoped to transfer the show to the Henry Miller’s Theater, another Broadway house that Roundabout operates. Mr. Haimes ended up giving the theater to the new musical “All About Me,” starring Dame Edna Everage and Michael Feinstein, in hopes that the duo’s fan bases would yield a money-making tenant. But after mixed to negative reviews from critics, the show closed on April 4 after only 27 previews and 20 regular performances.

“I had told Todd last winter that his subscribers would flip for ‘Everyday Rapture’ at Henry Miller’s Theater, that they would love it, and to just trust me that we would be great for Roundabout,” Ms. Scott said. “But he had to do what was right at the time, and Dame Edna is a bigger name and star than I am. I’m just happy that I now have that chance to make audiences flip for our show.”