Fourteen years before Broadway banished Laura Osnes because she didn’t get the Covid-19 vaccine, a lot of people in the theater world resented her for the way she’d arrived there. She had dropped out of college and was performing at a dinner theater in Chanhassen, Minnesota, when her aunt told her about a television audition in Los Angeles. It was called Grease: You’re The One That I Want!, a reality show to cast a Broadway revival.

In March of 2007, Osnes won the lead role. She was 21 years old when she and her husband of three weeks, Nathan Johnson, arrived in New York City with a U-Haul.

Even before the show opened, it was an object of derision among the Broadway elite. “It seemed tacky and down-market,” remembered Adam Feldman, the longtime theater critic for Time Out New York and the president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. New York magazine referred to Osnes and her co-star as “test-tube babies,” adding that “not everyone on the Great White Way would be devastated if they fell on their bright young faces.”

When the show opened in August, Ben Brantley, the New York Times theater critic, wrote: “The message of this latest Grease is that anyone, famous or not, can star in a Broadway musical.”

Much of the criticism of the show had a subtext: The theater world is a guild. You need to put in your time going to auditions and waiting tables. You don’t show up with a moving van and a reality show trophy, and slide into a starring role.

Grease ran for 554 performances. Osnes never missed a show. After it closed, she landed the lead in South Pacific in 2009. “That was the thing that legitimized me in the Broadway community,” Osnes told me. “From there, I felt like I was one of them.”

By the time the pandemic arrived, she was a star. The once-skeptical critics loved her. “Laura Osnes brings a crystalline grace to the role of debutante Hope Harcourt,” wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly of Osnes’s performance in the revival of Anything Goes.

“Laura Osnes as a performer has more spine than you expect,” Feldman told me. “Although she looks and sounds the part of a perfect Disney princess ingénue, there’s a spark in her. There’s this inner core of strength and inventiveness that she finds.”

It was an inner core she’d need later...