IT was February 2010, and Scott Rudin, the prolific theater and film producer, felt something was wrong with “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical he was developing. A weeks-long workshop had just ended, he recalled, and the show’s main character was an unlikable prig, the tone was muddled, and some of the humor wasn’t worthy of his two star creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of the animated series “South Park.” Mr. Parker, usually the engine of ideas, felt stalled, and the musical just seemed to be drifting toward an Off Broadway run set for that summer, all three men said recently.

Mr. Rudin, a man known for putting excellence before niceties, decided that Off Broadway was a mistake. “Since the guys work best when the stakes are highest,” he said in an interview this month, the musical should go straight to Broadway, a rare instance of a multimillion-dollar show starting there without a tryout.

“In most of the things that I’ve been involved with that have turned out to be good, there is a moment when you have to face your maker,” said Mr. Rudin, who has won seven Tonys for producing plays and musicals. “You either sink or swim. And this was the moment.”

Doubling down, Mr. Rudin and his producing partner, Anne Garefino, also urged Mr. Parker — who usually oversaw his own work — to share duties with the director of “Mormon,” Jason Moore , a Tony Award nominee for “Avenue Q.” Ms. Garefino, who is executive producer of “South Park,” said, “I would be in rehearsal for ‘Mormon,’ I’d know the intention of the scene, and I’d be thinking, ‘No, no, no.’ I knew the subtlety that the guys were going for, and it wasn’t happening.”