Annually the Post-Gazette interviews several members of the Pittsburgh CLO ensemble, only to find in a few years that one or another is headlining on Broadway. But we don't do it to spot stars in the making. We feature the ensemble because it's one of the distinctive pleasures of Pittsburgh theater.

These young people -- often working on their first professional contracts -- are the cream of auditions that attract contenders from a half dozen or more states. They're thrown willy-nilly into the CLO whirlwind, which has them performing one show at night, rehearsing the next show during the day and perhaps beginning to learn the next show after that.

It's no country for the faint of heart or limb.

The ensemble used to number about 20 each summer, half dancers, half singers, although all were expected to do it all, and act, too, through the full season of six shows. But seasons vary, and this year's included the tour of "Legally Blonde" and the non-ensemble "Swing," and there's no ensemble, per se, in next week's finale, "Into the Woods," so ensemble members had three or four shows at most.

Not that it wasn't a workout, including the epic "Les Miserables" in between "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Copacabana," with "Into the Woods" for some. They were in rags one moment and towering headdresses and sequined showgirl scanties the next. It has been enough to bond these young performers into an ensemble in spirit as well as name.

Picking three to represent such talent is an annual puzzle. Although we often feature products of Pittsburgh's own Carnegie Mellon and Point Park universities, this year's three hail from Syracuse University, the University of Michigan and Cincinnati College of Music .

Already out of college for more than three years, Carrasco is the most experienced of the three, with a Broadway credit to boot ("White Christmas"). He has learned a lot they didn't teach at Syracuse about how to seize the opportunity that an audition offers. It was sheer initiative that landed him the Broadway role. "There's so much more to it than just being talented," he says.

It was having worked with CLO musical director Tom Helm at New Jersey's Papermill Playhouse that led to his CLO job. Even with his New York experience, he marvels at the CLO's talented leads: "In 'Les Miz,' I felt I was in a Broadway show. I'd hurry to change each night so I could be backstage to hear Jackie Piro sing 'I Dreamed a Dream.' " He also appreciates the chance to work with different directors -- Barry Ivan on "Les Miz," CLO standby Charles Repole on "Copacabana" and James Brennan on "Into the Woods."

Growing up in Okemos, Mich., Carrasco suffered through his parents' bitter divorce before he was 10. Choir, the cello and theater provided alternative homes. After he danced in a musical as a high school freshman, an instructor offered him classes at half-price (shades of "Billy Elliot").

In high school, he spent a summer at CMU in its pre-college program, designed to show what a conservatory program is like. It taught Stephen that he really wanted a "college." "I needed frats and thousands of students and pizza parties at 2 in the morning."

Now, he says he's a born ensemble member, what others proudly call a "gypsy." "I'd be second boy from the back in anything as long as I can," he says. Still, in "Into the Woods" you can see him in a role, as the curt steward who helps his prince find the girl with the glass slipper. Next, he goes into the national tour of "Young Frankenstein." He'll be back in Pittsburgh in May.

Maloney graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 2006. This is her second year in the CLO ensemble and she's just going into her senior year at Michigan.

Her parents are dance teachers who met as dancers at Dance Alloy. "I was so shy in school that they sent me to the CLO Academy," she says. It worked. In 1996, she played her first CLO role, little Molly in "Annie." The next year she started a nine-season string as a CLO Mini-Star, and she logged a half-dozen more CLO shows plus performing at four Richard Rodgers Awards, even before joining the ensemble last year.

Given all this, it's interesting that she never played a lead in an Upper St. Clair musical. She smiles at the oddity of that, noting that she was accepted into several theater programs. Among them, she opted for a big university. Michigan has a conservatory program, but also "big football games" and a lot of non-theater courses she has enjoyed, such as argumentative writing and the Holocaust in literature and film.

A well-stocked mind comes into play when tackling Stephen Sondheim. In "Into the Woods," Maloney will play Lucinda, one of Cinderella's grasping stepsisters. As we talked, they had just opened "Copacabana" and she was already working every backstage minute learning Sondheim's intricate lyrics, many of which she already knew, thanks to what she calls her inner "musical theater nerd."

On the ensemble's one free day in a period of many weeks, she looked forward to offering her Upper St. Clair home as an escape for some of her ensemble friends. "They say they miss their dogs -- I say, 'come out with mine'!"

Growing up in Cincinnati, Sprague fell in love with musicals when she started taking tap dance at 9, watching old Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe movies and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." She went to all the shows at Cincinnati College of Music and dreamed of going there.

She was also a soccer player, so the time came when she had to make a choice. Her parents had no theater background ("Dad has a really good Cowardly Lion impression, but that's about it"), but the whole family has "big personalities." She'll be able to show that in "Into the Woods," where, oddly, this petite actress will play Cinderella's imperious stepmother.

Then, she goes back for her final year at CCM, one of only three girls in her senior class -- one classmate left early to become Miss America, another to appear in "The Little Mermaid" on Broadway. Sprague loves playing real character roles, but she knows the ensemble is also important to "feed the story."

She also enjoys being in an intensive conservatory within a large university, complete with football games, not to mention her twin brother, who majors in accounting.

Last summer, she was in "Beauty and the Beast" for a couple of months, so the CLO schedule with one show after another, lickety-split, is a dream. "It's a crazy schedule, but it's what I love to do -- and I'm paid!"