Joshua Bergasse

Joshua Bergasse is an Emmy-winning choreographer and director who has shaped musical theatre dance across Broadway, Off-Broadway and television. Born March 6, 1973, in Oak Park, Michigan, he grew up inside his mother's dance school, receiving his first tap shoes at age three. Classic Hollywood musicals—the work of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly—became an early language for understanding how movement carries character and story. As a teenager he intensified his training and began testing choreography while teaching at the family school.

Bergasse's first major professional turning point came on the 1995–97 national tour of *West Side Story*, where he played Baby John. Learning Jerome Robbins's choreography gave him a practical model of dance as dramatic action rather than decoration. He subsequently performed on Broadway in *The Life* as a replacement performer and worked as an original swing in *Hairspray*, while a later tour of *Movin' Out* added another long-form dance-theatre credit.

Television brought Bergasse broad recognition. For NBC's *Smash*, he choreographed production numbers that had to function simultaneously as television, rehearsal-room fiction and imagined Broadway spectacle. The Television Academy awarded him the 2012 Emmy for Outstanding Choreography for "National Pastime," "Let's Be Bad" and "Never Met a Wolf."

His Broadway choreography for the 2014 revival of *On the Town* combined period vocabulary, ballet technique and individualized character work. It earned the 2015 Astaire Award and earned him his first Tony nomination for Best Choreography, along with nominations from the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. He followed it with Broadway's *Gigi* in 2015 and *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* in 2017, alongside Off-Broadway work including *Cagney* and *Sweet Charity*.

In 2018 Bergasse made his New York directing-and-choreography debut with the Off-Broadway revival of *Smokey Joe's Cafe*. Rather than freeze the revue in the 1950s and 1960s, he and the performers built relationships across its songs and mixed period references with contemporary movement. That project made explicit the collaborative, actor-centered method already visible in his choreography.

Bergasse returned to the *Smash* material for the Broadway musical that opened in 2025, earning a second Tony nomination for Best Choreography more than a decade after the Emmy. Alongside commercial productions, he teaches as a master instructor at Steps on Broadway and serves as a guest artist at universities and conservatories.