After more than eight years in Los Angeles, he’s back in New York, with his wife and two young daughters, to take it in.

If only the arduous world of making a modern Broadway musical were about the melodies, the lyrics, the singers and the orchestra cohering into a beautiful whole, as it is during a celebratory sitzprobe. But Mr. Brown, who walked away from it all about a decade ago, knows better.

Some of his shows have come to be staples in high schools and colleges, where he is a musical theater god, and favorites of small theaters across the country and around the world. But success has eluded him here. The downbeat musical “Parade,” for which he won the Tony, closed after two months. The semiautobiographical “13” lasted not much longer.

The hurt may run deep, but he will be the first to admit it. Self-deprecation comes naturally to Mr. Brown, whose sense of humor runs toward the sarcastic, ironic, sometimes corny and playfully intellectual. (He and his best friend, Joel Fram, text each other photos of grammatically incorrect signs.)

In this and other ways, he can seem like a man out of time. He frets that there isn’t a place for heartfelt and musically and lyrically complex shows on a Broadway dominated by industrial entertainments, for the type of musicals he burns to write. “I feel like some sort of weird haberdasher,” he said, “like I’m doing something so arcane and antique.”