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Movers & shapers: the new generation of Broadway director/choreographers is reshaping musicals--and the dancing in them.

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In a Susan Stroman show, everything dances. Happiness, her latest, features a pirouetting subway car, a levitating ladder, and beds, kitchen counters, and baseball bleachers that glide on and off the small thrust stage of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. People dance, too--in idioms ranging from '40s jitterbug to '60s rock. And Stroman, the show's co-creator, director, and choreographer, orchestrated it all. She collaborated with John Weidman on the script (about "people with alpha personalities all trapped on a subway car") and enlisted Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, of Grey Gardens, to do the score.

Stroman belongs to one of musical theater's most exclusive clubs: director/ choreographers who can generate their own projects. Groundbreaking directors like George Abbott and Harold Prince and pioneering choreographers like Agnes de Mille and Michael Kidd made critical contributions to the history of the musical. But it was the hyphenates--conceive-director-choreographers like Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett--who revealed the heights to which musical theater could aspire.

A generation ago, it seemed that the future of musical theater would belong to such director/choreographers. And then AIDS,...