BITE-SIZED BROADWAY Announces Open Submissions For New Mini-Musical Works

After a celebrated first season, IndieWorks Theatre Company has announced that 12-time award-winning mini-musical radio play series Bite-Sized Broadway is accepting second season submissions of new mini-musical works for four weeks beginning Monday, February 6 through Sunday, March 5, 2023.

Bite-Sized Broadway presents 10 to 25-minute mini-musicals as fully-produced radio plays complete with lush orchestrations, captivating sound design, and the voices of industry giants from Broadway, The West End, Hollywood and even YouTube. Each mini-musical production is followed by a talkback with its creators, giving them voices beyond the theater walls and giving our global audience a "bite-sized" taste of the future of musical theatre.

Nine new works will be selected and fully produced by IndieWorks Theatre Company as radio plays broadcast worldwide on all major streaming platforms. Selected works will receive dramaturgical support; full radio play production including casting, rehearsal, orchestration, direction, music direction, recording engineering, mixing/mastering, publishing, press, and advertising; a growing global audience of over ten thousand; a high-quality recording to share with fans, potential producers and marketing; an opportunity to be part of a multi-award-winning program; and much more.

Writers selected to be a part of season two will be notified by Monday, April 7, 2023.

For complete submission information, including guidelines, tips and best practices, submission formats, selection process, and the application, please visit www.indieworkstheatre.com/bitesizedbroadway.

"Literature has both novels and short stories. Cuisine has both multi-course meals and snacks. Musical theatre should have both long and short formats that are of equal artistic merit. And expanding the scope of what a musical can be also expands who is creating and enjoying musical theatre," said Jonathon Lynch, creator and host of the series. "In our first season alone, Bite-Sized Broadway won a dozen awards and was in the top 1% of all downloaded audio dramas right out of the gate. But numbers aside, we produced new musical theatre that we could be proud of, showcasing writers from around the world with some of the most talented performers out there, all during the worst of a global pandemic."

Season one featured nine mini-musical episodes by 18 writers from six different countries around the world. Recorded entirely remote by a cast of 40, 13 musicians, a small production team of six, Bite-Sized Broadway won 12 awards including the Davey Award for "Best Use of Music," A Vega Award for "Best Score & Sound Design," A Communicator Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Remote Production," and multiple "Best Entertainment Series," "Best Script Fiction Series," and "Best Arts & Culture Podcast" awards."

Lynch and Michaels, along with season one co-producer Andrew Fox (Starkid Productions), were each part of writing teams featured in the inaugural season, and were joined by writers from around the world including Timothy Huang (American Morning), Ed Levy (Picket Line), Neil Radisch (The Don Juan and the Non Don Juan), Jamil Ellis (Magical Negro Speaks), Eric Grunin (Our Woman, Frank Thompson), Gil Varod (Oedipus for Kids), Teresa Lotz (She Calls Me Firefly), Will Buck (Only Anne), Aaron Jensen (Schitt's Creek), Jared Corak (The Pout-Pout Fish), Joshua Cerdenia (The BMI Musical Theatre Workshop), , Caitlyn Burt (Performing Miracles), Amir Shoenfeld (Winner of the 2020 Stiles & Drewe Best New Song Award), and Peter Saxe (Winner of the 2016 MAC/Burman Award).

Honoring their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Bite-Sized Broadway is seeking to lift up and offer production opportunities to Black, Latine, Indigenous/First Nations, API, SWANA folks, those who identify as transgender, non-binary, gender fluid, and gender nonconforming, people with disabilities, and intersectional musical theatre writers. Writers from these and any other historically marginalized or underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to submit.

To follow through on that commitment, this season, Bite-Sized Broadway is enlisting the help of a group of trusted, paid readers, made up of different ages, ethnicities, gender identities and expressions, cultural backgrounds, and abilities, to read and evaluate all submissions before passing along their recommendations to producers.

"By targeting our outreach to theatre makers from these underrepresented communities, we hope to expand our network, open doors, and spread resources to groups that are rarely served by the usual theatre producing bodies. And it's not just at the writing level. We're looking for producers, directors, orchestrators, and sound designers as well; people who are the most qualified to tell the stories of, what we hope will be, an incredibly diverse season," said executive producer and creative director, Christopher Michaels.

Season one of Bite-Sized Broadway included multiple Broadway performers, including Alan H Green, Ann Harada, Linedy Genao, AJ Holmes, Kennedy Kanagawa, Telly Leung, Constantine Maroulis, Karen Mason, Gabrielle Ruiz, Thom Sesma, and many more. Click here for a complete list of season one participants.

"Our program shines the spotlight on writers and their work giving them an opportunity to speak about their process, careers, and upcoming projects," said Michaels. "And by casting well-known theatre and voiceover artists, we hope to shine that light a little brighter, helping some writers launch, and others maintain, a fruitful career in the theatre."

Season Two of Bite-Sized Broadway will premiere this fall, with new episodes on the first and third Monday of each month released on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and other favorite platforms. The award-winning first season is streaming now. Visit bitesizedbroadway.indieworkstheatre.com or search for Bite-Sized Broadway on your favorite streaming platform.

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