Rob McClure met his future wife, Maggie Lakis, 15 years ago, when the two appeared in a regional theater production of “Grease” in Marlton, N.J.

But Mr. McClure — who will be playing the title role in the musical adaptation of “Mrs. Doubtfire” on Broadway, when Broadway is back in business — wasn’t just sweet on Ms. Lakis. He also became a fool for Philadelphia, her hometown, just across the Delaware River from Marlton.

“I learned there were close to 25 equity theater companies within 20 blocks of where Maggie was living at the time,” said Mr. McClure, 38, who grew up in New Milford, N.J., and remained close to home during the early years of his career. “I thought, ‘Let’s give this Philly thing a try.’”

In the spring of 2006, he relocated to the City of Brotherly Love, where he and Ms. Lakis rented an apartment together.

Wouldn’t you know it — barely six months later, Mr. McClure was cast in the Broadway production of the “Sesame Street” lampoon “Avenue Q.” (Subsequently, he and Ms. Lakis, a skilled puppeteer, got roles in the show’s first national tour.) He was excited about the opportunity, of course, but as he said, “I had fallen for Maggie and Philadelphia.”

Rob McClure, 38

Occupation: Actor

Making tracks: “I love Amtrak. It gave me designated me-time where I could read or write or sleep or watch Netflix. But it’s gotten less and less dependable. My appeal to Joe Biden: Handle coronavirus. Handle systemic racism. And then if you have time in your busy schedule, Mr. Amtrak, for the love of God, make the Northeast Corridor as reliable as we all need it to be.”

The solution was Amtrak. Starting with “Avenue Q” and continuing through Broadway shows including “Chaplin,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Noises Off,” “Something Rotten!” and “Beetlejuice,” he has, as much as possible, been a commuter on the Northeast corridor.

A decade or so ago, thanks to their earnings from “Avenue Q,” the couple bought a 1904 three-story rowhouse in the East Passyunk neighborhood of South Philly, and promptly dubbed it the House the Puppets Built.

The property was a wreck, Mr. McClure said, with unlovely features like a vinyl backsplash in the kitchen and dropped ceilings piled on dropped ceilings. Pigeons and bees had taken up residence under one of those ceilings.

On the plus side: the layout and the dimensions. At 16 feet across, the house was two feet wider than most in the neighborhood. The dining room archway and the beveled-glass foyer door, both original to the house, hinted at what had been and what could be again. Perhaps best of all, the third floor was an open space with a half bathroom.

Most couples would look at that space and think bedroom suite. Mr. McClure and Ms. Lakis were thinking more on the order of game room, a place where they could play Ping-Pong, store their collection of puppets and action figures, and hang or display 20 years’ worth of theater memorabilia, including show posters, the light-up Deco bar set from a play Mr. McClure appeared in at the Cleveland Play House, and a hat and cane from his starring role in “Chaplin,” in 2012

“One of the things we wanted in the house was a secluded spot where we could be shameless,” Mr. McClure said. “We wanted a room that we jokingly call Theater Applebee’s. You have to go through two floors of a proper adulting house to get to the fun.”

One would be remiss not to mention the game room’s pièce de résistance: the coffee table. Mr. McClure made it from a submarine door that figured prominently in the plot of “Lost,” a favorite series in the Lakis-McClure household.

The couple was fortunate enough to be in California when “Lost” wrapped, and there was an auction of items from the show. “So for our one-year wedding anniversary we bought the door, and I drove it across the country,” Mr. McClure said.

He and Ms. Lakis did the rehab work on the house themselves, one room at a time, with help and tutorials from Mr. McClure’s father, Bob, a contractor, and his high school industrial-arts teacher, Jim Africano, who was best man at his wedding, in 2009.

The renovation, which wrapped in the fall of 2019, took nine years. But don’t blame Mr. McClure and Ms. Lakis for the dilatory pace. They’re very handy and very task oriented. It’s just that in between swapping out lath and plaster for Sheetrock, installing a pressed-tin ceiling surrounded by light in the dining room and getting rid of the aforementioned birds and bees, they were on tour, sometimes for as long as two years at a stretch. Or Mr. McClure had a job on Broadway. Or they were having a baby, Sadie, who just turned 2.

Everything in its own time. Not long after buying the house, the couple came upon four century-old windows in a Lancaster, Pa., architectural salvage shop. Wouldn’t it be cute, they thought, to make a wall cupboard and front it with those windows? They brought their find home, where it sat for six years.

Somewhere between the end of his Broadway run in “Beetlejuice” (late September of 2019) and the start of the world-premiere run of “Mrs. Doubtfire” in Seattle (two months later), Mr. McClure finally built the cupboard. It now holds, among other treasures, an “Avenue Q”- themed tea set that the he and Ms. Lakis made at a crafts shop while on tour with the show.

There was a similar gap between when Mr. McClure yanked out the original red-pine floor in the third-floor half bathroom and when he gathered up the planks and turned them into a dining table. “We were on nobody’s schedule but our own,” he said.

Nearly everything has now been completed, including the long-aborning roof deck with its great view of Philadelphia’s Center City — although “completed” is not a term Mr. McClure is fully comfortable using in this context. Never mind. It’s all so nice to come home to.

“When I’m returning to Philly from New York on the train, and I see the Schuylkill River, the stress goes and my shoulders drop, they really do,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful thing to have a comforting home life that doesn’t feel tied to what I do every night at 7:30,” he added. “Or what I used to do every night at 7:30 and hope to do again soon.”

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