Revisiting a show is a tricky business. When I first saw David Adjmi’s three-hour drama Stereophonic last fall at Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, I couldn’t get past how much the playwright seemed to be re-creating the notoriously painful birth of the 1977 megahit Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. But my resistance has dissipated with the show’s arrival at Broadway’s Golden Theatre, where a barely fictionalized ’70s quintet has settled in to reveal the messy lives of creative geniuses and the even messier ways that artistic masterpieces get made.

The setting is a wood-paneled studio in Sausalito, California, just like the one where Rumours was recorded in 1976 (meticulously designed by David Zinn and lit by Jiyoun Chang). The band members’ bios, and many of the anecdotes and story beats, mimic Fleetwood Mac’s note for note: There’s the taciturn, heavy-drinking British bassist (Will Brill) and his long-suffering British singer-keyboardist wife (Juliana Canfield), whose marriage has hit the skids much like John and Christine McVie’s did; there’s the band founder and drummer (Chris Stack), whose own domestic life is a mess since his wife and family are back in the U.K. just as Mick Fleetwood’s were; and there are the newcomer Americans, the insecure but enormously gifted singer-songwriter (Sarah Pidgeon), and her on-again-off-again boyfriend (Tom Pecinka, wonderfully intense), a guitarist who commandeers the entire album’s production with his exacting vision for achieving greatness. Even the two sound engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler), including a lead who may have inflated his résumé to land the gig, are clearly drawn from the real-life counterparts.

Only the names have been changed: Lindsey Buckingham is now Peter (Pecinka), but still has an older brother who became an Olympic medal-winning swimmer (like Buckingham’s); while Steve Nicks is now Diana (Pidgeon), who sips Courvoisier with lemon and honey to sooth her throat, just as Nicks famously did. As you might expect, the production didn’t secure the rights to Fleetwood Mac’s music catalog — so the tunes that the onstage band labors to produce are facsimiles, ’70s rock pastiches by Arcade Fire frontman Will Butler that have a rootsy period feel and a timeless, poetic lilt.

There is a kind of train wreck fascination to watching this faux Fleetwood Mac creating a masterpiece in the midst of personal chaos. And Pecinka captures the contradictions of Buckingham as a super-talented, micromanaging monster, with a hair-trigger temper and a verbally abusive tongue that he uses to belittle his bandmates, the Stevie Nicks-like Diana in particular. And yet, we also do see (and hear) how his interventions — staged in real time as the cast moves from the upstage recording studio to the downstage booth — make the recordings recognizably better. (Hat tip to Ryan Rumery’s sound design.)

There’s also real humor here, and the laughter comes more frequently than it did Off Broadway, particularly in the interactions between the heavily sideburned Gelb and balding Butler as the lowly engineers who are trying to manage the group’s egos, which are both outsize and fragile. I also had a newfound admiration for the musicianship on display — particularly the challenge for the remarkable Pidgeon to produce a voice crack on a high note on cue, and then turn around and hit the note perfectly on the next “take.” A later scene, where Pidgeon joins Canfield and Pecinka on pickup harmonies while each privately seethes at being stuck so close to each other, achieves an electrifying energy drawn from the tension bween the beauty of their vocal blending with their barely contained animosity. These are pros checking their personal baggage just long enough to produce something pretty.

I still do have reservations about whether the unnamed band in Stereophonic has been fictionalized enough from Fleetwood Mac to really stand on its own. Why hook so much on the Rumours story if you can’t deliver what made that band great — the music? Why watch an asshole at work on a fictional, putative masterpiece? But while I wish Adjmi had gone further to make his band more unique, with fainter echoes of the actual Rumours saga, it’s hard to fault the seamless way that his carefully constructed script explores how an artistic triumph can emerge from a toxic mix of talent, interpersonal drama, easy access to drugs and alcohol, and the quest for fame. His primary achievement is to plop us into the studio for the entirety of the show, where director Daniel Aukin paces the scenes in a heightened version of real time that unfolds like a stage version of a Robert Altman film or a Behind the Music documentary.

Some of the final scenes, set when the band puts the final touches on the album just as their relationships have almost completely frayed, remain too perfunctory. Adjmi is unable to resist having these wounded artists justify themselves in ways that don’t feel authentic. Faux Lindsey even tries to reconcile with faux Stevie with a bit of confessional psychobabble (“I am controlling because I am fearful of losing everything”) that he seems unlikely to have admitted to himself, much less aloud to his wounded ex. Perhaps because he gets rebuffed, he soon returns to asshole mode and lobbies to cut another song from the album. As Fleetwood Mac fans know, the final song cut was another Stevie Nicks ballad, “Silver Springs” (which subsequently became a hit single off the group’s 1977 live reunion album, The Dance).

STEREOPHONIC
Golden Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Jan. 12