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submit your mini-musical

To download the submission packet with complete information, click here.

Bite-Sized Broadway: A Mini-Musical Podcast is opening up submissions for our second season of mini-musicals and is currently seeking submissions from musical theatre writers around the world! We are committed to lifting up and offering 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!

 

Pieces selected for production will be fully produced by IndieWorks Theatre Company as a radio play and will receive:

  • Dramaturgical support to adapt your mini-musical to fit our radio-play format

  • Full radio play production of your mini-musical including casting, rehearsal, direction, music direction, recording engineering, mixing/mastering, publishing, press, advertising, and more!

  • A growing global audience of over ten thousand!

  • A fully-produced radio-play recording of your musical for you to share on your website and with your fans and potential producers

  • An opportunity to be part of a multi-award-winning program!

submission guidelines

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  • SUBMISSIONS OPEN FEBRUARY 6, 2023 AND CLOSE MARCH 5, 2023

  • Mini-musicals must be no less than ten minutes and no more than 25 minutes in length.

  • All mini-musicals must be self-contained stories and have a beginning, middle, and end. No excerpts from pre-existing, full-length musicals will be accepted.

  • Mini-musicals that rely heavily on visuals to tell the story may not be the best fit for our program.

  • Authors may submit adaptations, however, they MUST own the rights or have express written permission to use the underlying source material. We will ask for proof and do our due diligence in verifying this information.

  • Writers may submit any mini-musical(s) they like provided they fit the above requirements.

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tips & best practices for your musical

  • Comedies work well for these short-form programs, however, we like to break things up with a gripping thriller, captivating drama, or heartfelt family show. 

  • Shows with smaller casts or easy doubling tend to work best for our program.

  • Though it is not required, shows that take place in real time and in a single location help our listeners to follow along easily.

  • Characters with big personalities and voices help us establish strong characters right from the start and tend to be most fun to listen to!

  • We encourage winter-holiday themed shows for submission. Most specifically family-friendly material. We get a high listenership around the holidays.

  • Narration can be a useful tool to help ease us into a world for which we might otherwise need visuals (eg. Season one’s productions of Toy Box and Sheila the Tiny Turtle), however, we are not creating audiobooks and look to keep narration to a minimum. 

  • It is best to not rely on visual gags or creative blocking to tell your story.

  • Dialogue should be written in sentence case with lyrics written in ALL CAPS.

  • Please do not include logos, pictures, key art, title-treatments, or branding references. 

the selection process​

Bite-Sized Broadway enlists the help of a group of paid readers (the Mini-Musical Reading Committee or MMRC) to read and evaluate all submissions before passing along their recommendations to producers. The MMRC is a diverse group of trusted readers made up of different ages, ethnicities, gender identities and expressions,, cultural backgrounds, abilities, and other demographics in order to attempt to emulate our writers and our listenership as a whole. Final considerations include (in no particular order):

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  • ARTISTIC CONSIDERATIONS

    • Quality of artistic material

    • Reader opinion

    • Technical Challenges

    • Balance of type/genre

    • Balance of musical style

    • Diversity of writers, stories, characters, and themes

    • Does it fit the Bite-Sized Broadway Mission?

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  • BUSINESS CONSIDERATIONS

    • Cost of production

    • Audience appeal and suitability for different demographics

    • Length of musical

    • The difficulty of the material for artists to learn in a relatively short amount of time

    • Producer/Sponsor Interest

    • Does it uphold our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

For more information on the selection process, click here.

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how to submit​

The application is split into four sections (Contact, Collaborators, Musical Information, Demographics) that should take a total of approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. However, before you begin your submission, please create your submission folder and double check that the materials are formatted to fit the guidelines.

submission folders

IndieWorks Theatre Company and Bite-Sized Broadway run on Google Workspace. Before filling out your application, please ready your materials, following all submission guidelines, and create a Google Drive folder with the header “BSB” and the title of your musical (i.e. “BSB – [Your Musical]”) containing the following items:

  • PDF of your FULL LIBRETTO and label it “[Your Musical] – Libretto”

    • Your libretto should have a title page with the title of your musical and the names of your collaborators prominently displayed.

    • Please remove any contact information (address, phone number, email address, and website) from your submission materials, including on your title page.

    • Your libretto should include a character listing with descriptions including age, gender or non-gender, race/ethnicity, and cultural background if and when those factors affect the story and/or casting of the piece.

    • Your libretto should include information on the time and location of your show on the cast list page.

    • Your libretto should include a list, in order, of all musical numbers (including instrumental numbers and underscores) that appear in your musical.

  • PDF of your FULL PIANO/VOCAL score and label it “[Your Musical] - Score”

    • Your score should have a title page with the title of your musical prominently displayed.

    • Please remove any contact information (address, phone number, email address, and website) from your submission materials, including on your title page.

    • Your score should list, in order, all musical numbers (including instrumental numbers and underscores) and the characters who sing them

  • MP3 Demo Recordings of musical numbers (These can even be composer demos recorded on a phone). All demos should be in a folder labeled ‘[YOUR MUSICAL] – DEMOS”

    • Your demos should correlate as closely as possible to your submitted score.

    • While we welcome you to add demos of the underscore music, it is not required.

    • Each demo file should be labeled with the listed musical number (using a zero before digits 1 through 9), followed by an underscore, and then the name of the musical number (eg. 04_His Holiness Prefers to Work in the Bathtub).

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To see a sample folder, click here.

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PLEASE NOTE: IndieWorks MUST have editing access to your submission folder. It allows us to prep them for our readers and producers. Find the instructions on how to do this at the bottom of the page of our Submission Folder Guidelines.

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frequently asked questions

For a list of frequently asked questions, click here. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list and that it will continue to grow as more questions arise.

Submissions for season two closed on Sunday, March 5th, 2023.

Please join our mailing list for updates on Season Three submissions. 

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