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The deputies: assistant choreographers learn while doing.

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For all the high-tech stage tricks and corporate trappings that have infiltrated the Broadway theater in recent years, a musical is still essentially a handcrafted product, created by a highly trained labor force of artists and artisans. Their skills, from music arranging to costume building to choreographing, are, as with all handiwork, best learned through apprenticeship.

Yes, you can win a Tony without ever having worked on a musical before--ask Bill T. Jones (who has, of course, exercised his theatrical skills on other kinds of material). But most of the choreographers who make it to Broadway get there by learning from the ones who got there first, typically moving from the ensemble to dance captain, from dance captain to assistant, from assistant choreographer to associate. Investigate a Broadway choreographer's career and you're likely to find it's part of a long chain: links to the past through gigs assisting older...

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