Back in 2001, when he was playing his breakthrough role of Bobby Strong in the musical “Urinetown,” Hunter Foster was asked by one of that show’s producers if he’d do a National Alliance of Musical Theatre presentation of another musical, “The Drowsy Chaperone.”

Foster read the script, and he recalls that his decision was between “Chaperone” and another show. He thought “Chaperone” — in which a man (named only Man in Chair) who’s a bit of a recluse listens rhapsodically to an album of his favorite Jazz Age musical and imagines the characters coming to life — was cute. But Foster wanted to do the other show, which he declines to name and which, he says, “sort of failed miserably.”

“Chaperone,” on the other hand, grew and flourished. A production made it to Broadway in 2006 starring Foster’s sister, Sutton Foster (who currently stars on TV in “Younger”). His friend Casey Nicholaw directed and choreographed that version.

Now, Foster is getting to do “The Drowsy Chaperone” at the Goodspeed Opera House — but he’s directing it. He has almost entirely stopped acting as he has become more in demand as a director.

This is far from Foster's first time working with Goodspeed. He developed two musicals for which he wrote the libretto — “Summer of ’42" (starring Idina Menzel) in 2000 and "The Circus in Winter" in 2014 — at Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.

He directed last season’s “A Connecticut Christmas Carol” and will return to direct this year’s production of the same show at the Terris Theatre.

And Foster was twice selected for The Johnny Mercer Writers Colony at Goodspeed, a residency program devoted to musical theater writing.

When the possibility of directing “Chaperone” at Goodspeed came up, Hunter hadn’t read the show’s script since that long-ago time and hadn’t seen a production since the Broadway opening night.

“It’s been 12 years. It was so funny. Sometimes, you don’t know — you do a show and you get away from it, and you go back to it and it’s not as good as you thought. This was even better than I thought,” he says of the show, which has a book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar and music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison.

“I thought it was just really witty and really smart.”

He sees it as the type of show Goodspeed would have done back in the day. (Goodspeed’s publicity calls it a “hilarious valentine to show tunes and show people.”)

He also believes it is a perfect musical for the current day.

“It just feels like it’s a show that’s filled with joy. Especially with everything going on in the news, we all need something to take us away a bit,” Foster says.

That said, there’s a hint of bittersweet sadness in the character of Man in Chair. He is a lonely soul who is drawn to the joy he hears on the musical comedy’s soundtrack because, Foster says, “he’s dealing with issues — we don’t quite know, but we get glimpses and hints of what his issues are in life. The show is about how the power of art can renew someone’s spirits and keep someone afloat when they’re sort of drowning in whatever life issues that are happening.”

Foster says he thinks that, by the end of “Chaperone,” audience members should have an emotional response because a lot of people will relate to Man in Chair. Man in Chair is, Foster says, “someone who is closing himself off from the world, who is not a part of the world, who probably keeps the shades down and locks the doors and stays inside. I think everyone to a certain extent can relate to that. My own mother was agoraphobic, so that fear — I’ve seen it firsthand. I don’t have it in my life, but I saw it from my mother, of someone who is so fearful of the world, they hole themselves up in their houses or apartments.”

In “Chaperone,” Man in Chair finds solace in the musical he listens to, which depicts a perfect world for him. Even though it’s not reality, Foster says, Man in Chair wants to believe that perfect world exists.

Moving from acting to directing

Broadway devotees know Foster best for his many acting roles on the Great White Way. He was nominated for a Tony for his role in the 2003 revival of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and he played, among other parts on Broadway, Sam Phillips in “Million Dollar Quartet” and Leo Bloom in “The Producers.”

He first directed in 2013, when Lonny Price dropped out of directing “Summer of ’42” at the Bucks County Playhouse in order to focus on the documentary he was making about the musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” The theater’s producing director, Jed Bernstein, suggested Foster take on the directing duties.

“I hadn’t really ever thought about directing at all,” Foster says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ but I thought, it’ll be easy because it’s my show. I know it, and I can do whatever I want because it’s my show. So then I did it and had a really great time.”

Bernstein asked him to direct another show at the playhouse, but Foster took on an acting role instead, originating the role of Bud in the 2014 Broadway musical version of “Bridges of Madison County.” After he left “Bridges,” though, he was asked to direct elsewhere.

“Then it just started taking off. People started asking me to do different things … I think I’ve only acted in the past four years maybe three times. You spend your whole life being a performer, and all of a sudden, you switch gears. I realized I really enjoyed doing this, and I committed to it almost full-time,” he says.

As an actor, Foster always enjoyed the rehearsal process and the creativity that happens there — which is part of the reason that directing appeals.

After his work on “Chaperone” is done, Foster will move on to direct “The Other Josh Cohen” off-Broadway before returning to Goodspeed for “The Connecticut Christmas Carol.”

A question that Foster gets asked a fair amount is whether he thinks about how he would play a certain role in a show that he’s directing. He says he doesn’t.

“Now that I’m directing a lot, I don’t ever do that, I don’t ever sit there and say, ‘Well, as an actor, I would do this.’ I have divided myself from that, which I think is good,” he says.

Growing up creative

Despite the fact the Foster and his sister both ended up as stars on Broadway, their home wasn’t awash in musical theater when they were kids in Michigan. At that point, Hunter Foster was interested in storytelling — but as a writer. He created his own magazine that he handed out when he was very young, and he wrote a play (“four pages long, front and back”) when he was in third grade.

He liked baseball, too, but wasn’t very good, so his mother suggested he take acting classes instead.

“It all started from that,” he says.

Arguably his big break was starring in “Urinetown.” He remembers that his agent was against Foster acting in “Urinetown”; the agent read the script and didn’t think it was going to work. Foster, though, liked the conceit of it.

“At the time, it was one of the first shows to make fun of musical theater … Now it seems like everyone’s doing it, but I said this could be an interesting idea, and I liked the post-apocalyptic future world,” Foster recalls.

It became a huge hit, of course. Foster says they had a wonderful rehearsal process where “we were allowed to create a lot of things,” many of which ended up in the show. "(We had) really great actors in the room and a director that allowed us to explore and figure things out. … It was a great collaborative, creative process,” he says.

He notes that actors talk about how they’ve been burned by material they either thought was good and didn’t work, or thought was bad and turned out to be great. As he had noted earlier, Foster turned down “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and he also turned down “Rock of Ages.”

Comedy is particularly difficult to understand on the page, he notes.

“You never know what’s funny until you put it in front of people. … Comedy is so difficult because it’s math, it’s timing. Sometimes, the actor can make things funny, whereas some actors can’t; actors sometimes have funny instincts you can’t really teach,” he says.

His first ‘Summer’ at Goodspeed

Foster says of developing “Summer of ’42” at Goodspeed, “It was exciting because it was the first show I’d ever written that was being produced, and it was a great experience.”

He appreciated getting the chance to see the piece performed and then getting to rewrite and rework it. With “The Circus in Winter” at Goodspeed, he recalls staying up until 5 a.m. reorganizing and rewriting Act 2. That day, everyone got around a table and read the new Act 2 — and that’s the version they went with.

“You get a lot of support from Goodspeed. I’m a huge fan of the people — Donna Lynn Hilton and Michael Gennaro, who run the place … It just has a family atmosphere to it,” he says. “Also, the location feels secluded but in a good way because you feel very creative here.”

He says, “It’s become one of my favorite places to work.”

“The Drowsy Chaperone,” Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam; opens Friday and runs through Nov. 25; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Wed., 7:30 p.m. Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri., 3 and 8 p.m. Sat., and 2 p.m. Sun.; also 2 p.m. on select Thursdays and 6:30 p.m. select Sundays; tickets start at $29; (860) 873-8668, www.goodspeed.org.