HUGH JACKMAN wasn’t feeling the magic.

It was late 2013, and Mr. Jackman was reading yet another rewrite of “Houdini,” the musical he’d been developing for five years. Harry Houdini’s life once seemed so staggering and spectacular for an actor to take on — all those great escapes! But the show had become weighed down by a major plotline about Houdini’s real-life crusade to debunk spiritualists in the 1920s. There were not enough powerful moments like the song “It’ll Be Me,” part of a new score by Stephen Schwartz, his first for Broadway since “Wicked.”

With his film career in high gear, Mr. Jackman called the “Houdini” producers and bowed out — to their dismay, after spending about $500,000 on the show.

Now, instead of breaking out of a straitjacket bound by chains and locks, Mr. Jackman is on Broadway in a low-key new play, “The River.” And “Houdini,” which once aimed to open this winter, remains in limbo. A star vehicle without a star. A book and score languishing on hard drives. A show that bedeviled even A-list artists like the scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin and Mr. Schwartz, who announced in October that he had quit the show, too.

“I wanted to find a great story about Houdini, but the show just never found the right size or shape,” said Mr. Jackman, who has become Broadway’s most reliable draw since his Tony-winning debut in the 2003 musical “The Boy From Oz.” “Creating a new original musical is the Mount Everest of the theatrical art form. That’s why there are very few of them.”