16 years. That’s how long it took me to get my first Broadway show.
I drove from DC to New York in 1993. Dreams of being a rock star. A drum kit and something that wasn’t really a plan.
Seven years later — my first Broadway tour. Eight years in — my first Off-Broadway show. Sixteen years after I crossed that bridge — Memphis: The Musical. My first Broadway chair.
And I wasn’t even actively chasing it. I was just doing the work, staying in the game, and building toward something I couldn’t fully see yet.
I thought I was behind the whole time.
I wasn’t behind. I was measuring myself against the wrong clock.
Here’s the part that humbles me: I know musicians who have been at this for decades and never gotten that call. Not because they weren’t good enough. But because this business doesn’t move on your timeline — and getting one show doesn’t guarantee the next one. After Memphis closed, I had to start over in ways I didn’t expect. The next chair didn’t just appear. It never does.
There’s a sequence to how Broadway careers get built. And it doesn’t start with a Broadway show.
It starts in places nobody is watching.
A regional theater in a city you’ve never heard of. A bus and truck tour where you’re living out of a suitcase and learning how a professional production actually runs. An Off-Broadway show where the budget is tight and everybody has to figure it out together. Sub gigs where you have maybe one rehearsal — sometimes none — and you better play it right.
That’s the training ground. That’s where the reputation gets built before anybody on Broadway knows your name.
But here’s something else nobody talks about: Broadway is not the music you should be focused on in your formative years.
Get out there and play everything. Jazz gigs. Rock bands. Latin music. Funk. Gospel. Wedding bands. Club dates. Churches. Bars. Theaters in other cities. Stages in other countries. Play in situations where nobody is telling you what to do and you have to figure it out on the spot.
Play music that ISN’T Broadway first.
My podcast guest Javier Diaz spoke to this directly.
The musicians who show up to a pit truly prepared are the ones who have played all kinds of music in all kinds of styles in all kinds of venues in all kinds of states and countries. That’s what seasoning actually looks like. You can’t fake it and you can’t rush it.
If you’ve only ever played one kind of music, people can tell. If your entire résumé is theater, contractors notice. If you haven’t done the bad gigs — the ones that paid nothing, that went sideways, that taught you how to hold it together when everything around you is falling apart — you will be exposed the moment the pressure is real.
Those bad gigs aren’t obstacles. They’re the education.
And yet most young musicians skip all of it. They graduate from college, move to New York, and spend the first two years confused about why nothing is happening. They’re talented. They’re serious. But they’re knocking on a door that only opens from the other side — and the only way to get there is to go earn it somewhere else first.
Broadway doesn’t recruit. It selects. And it selects people who have already proven they can handle the pressure somewhere else first.
The calls don’t come because you’re good. They come because the right people have seen you be good — under real conditions, more than once, without anyone holding your hand.
That takes time. More time than you think. And the musicians who make it are almost never the ones who were in the biggest hurry.
My podcast guest Noah Hadland gets this. He called it exactly what it is: the long game. If you haven’t heard his episode yet, it’s worth your time.
Listen here:
Once I understood the sequence, I stopped chasing and started positioning. The calls started coming. 26 years later I’m in the pit at the Broadhurst Theatre eight shows a week.
That sequence is in the book.
Broadway Bound and Beyond → broadwayboundbook.com
—Clayton Craddock
P.S. I’m at the Broadhurst right now for Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Eight shows a week. That didn’t happen by accident.