On Broadway: words can't say it all in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

One of the big differences between dance in the musical theater and dance on the concert stage is that in a musical, movement can sneak up behind you and lift you out of your seat. At American Ballet Theatre or Paul Taylor Dance Company, audiences know they're in metaphor-land and dance will be the chief means of expression. Musicals happen in a different place--a place where everyday speech is the standard of communication. When it proves inadequate, music takes over. And when there's even more to say, well, it's time to dance.

That's precisely how it works in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the surprise hit of the season. With music and lyrics by William Finn, a book by Rachel Sheinkin, no stars, no ensemble, and no hype, it opened in February at the off-Broadway Second Stage Theater. The rave reviews sent it quickly into the Circle in the Square, a Broadway house that makes it eligible for the Tony Awards.

Anyone who was won over by Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that brilliantly captured the agony and the ecstasy of six contestants at the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., will understand where this show is coming from. With adult actors playing the middle school students, and volunteers from the audience filling out the ranks of the spellers, Bee manages to be both funny and compassionate about these freaky kids who know how to spell words like "syzygy."

So where's the dancing? Though the bee takes place in a gym, the participants are there to spell, not dance. Yet the musical, which grew out of a straight play called C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, becomes a kind of object lesson in how dance should work in the theater. As new spelling words propel the plot forward, the show stops periodically for a song that gets us inside a speller's head. They're a pretty, weird bunch: a home-schooled idiot-savant, a little-Miss-Perfect, a walking anthology of lefty dogma. And the first sign that there may be a real dance component in the show erupts in "Pandemonium," a wild ride illustrating the fundamental principle of both spelling bees and life: They ain't fair. In the number, students and scenery both spin out of control, and Jose Liana, as a frustrated speller who's just been eliminated on a technicality, flies across the stage on a gym rope.

And then there's Dan Fogler, as William Barfee. His name, repeatedly pronounced BARFY (even as he insists it's BARFAY), is only the least of his social liabilities. He's a slobby, pampered, overfed prep school geek with a swelled head that isn't entirely the result of his permanently congested sinuses. He spells by writing out words with his foot, shuffling across the stage as his extended right leg traces curlicues into the floor.

"Dan is a big guy, but he is so graceful and in such control of his body," says the show's choreographer, Dan Knechtges (which is pronounced like "connect-us"). "And he brought such a rich character to the table! I would pull up Charlie Chaplin moves or Buster Keaton moves, and he could turn around and make them Barfee moves."

It's no accident that Fogler really does have a "magic foot." "I've never been a technically wonderful dancer," the Brooklyn native says. "But when I was at my fighting weight, I did tap and ballet. I went to Boston University for straight theater, but we did a lot of movement. I could always shake it if I had to."

He has to in Spelling Bee. In addition to his choreographic spelling sequences, he's one half of the show's most inspired dance episode, an ecstatic waltz that lifts the show into the blissful zone usually inhabited by Fred and Ginger--even though the dancers are Barfee, in his rumpled, ill-fitting Bermudas, and Olive Ostrovsky, a lonely speller in overalls, played by Celia Keenan-Bolger. Folger recalls that when Knechtges first showed him how to lift Keenan-Bolger, he thought, "There's no way I'm gonna be able to do this!" But, he says, "He taught me how to do it, first lifting her onto the arm, and then onto the shoulder. I was amazed at how simple it was. And I think that moment is so beautiful."

At first, Knechtges says, the dance wasn't working. "In the original plot of the dream ballet, they got married and had young Barfees. We tried to make that work, but we couldn't, and we were close to cutting it." Once he figured out that the dream kiddies were killing the dream romance, he put the number together in 15 minutes. "Set-up," he says, "is everything."

The secret to working with non-dancers, says Knechtges, is adaptability. "As a choreographer, you're a part of a puzzle," he says. "You're collaborating with all of these actors. You can come in with your ideas, but you can't come in with steps, with every measure choreographed."

For all his willingness to stay loose, says James Lapine, who directed Putnam County Spelling Bee, "Dan was very exacting; he knew what he wanted to do, and he didn't come in expecting to do it all on his feet." His greatest accomplishment, Lapine says, is that "he captured those kids' energy. It would be weird if they were doing anything too elaborate up there."

Knechtges, who turns 33 this month, got hooked on dance in classic "I Can Do That" fashion, when his mother took him and his brother along to his sister's classes in suburban Cleveland. He's been living in New York for more than 10 years, working mostly in regional theater. That, he says, was good training for a show like Bee.

"In the regionals, you have less chorus. It means that they really have to be able to sing. So you're working with people who don't necessarily have the dance skills. For yourself and your artistic satisfaction, you still want to see a dream ballet in Oklahoma! But you have to be very creative to make that happen."

The other thing he brought to the task of choreographing Bee was his understanding of how a dance sequence can help a musical tell its tale. "I think dance for dance's sake just doesn't cut it in the theater," he says. "I don't think I could choreograph without character and story."

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.