Submissions Only, the Absurdly Prescient Masterpiece You’ve Never Heard Of

Series Art for Submissions Only, featuring (from left to right) Anne L. Nathan, Colin Hanlon, Kate Wetherhead, Santino Fontana, Stephen Bienske, and Donna Vivino.

I used to act in high school.  Despite the throes of puberty-induced voice cracking (which precluded me from ever being in a musical), there persists a mountain of photographic evidence featuring me performing in every done-to-death high school play you can imagine.  The Crucible, You Can’t Take it With You, Rabbit Hole; the list goes on and on.  

That being said, I hardly ever entertained the idea of acting professionally.  Mostly because people told me I shouldn’t entertain the idea of acting professionally.  When I would tell people I was doing theatre in school, people would launch into platitudes: “It’s too risky,” and “you might not be good enough.”  

I would reply: “Oh, I never said I wanted to act as a career, but okay, thanks for the advice.”  It’s amazing how often people associate acting with the lack of success.

And yet, to this day, I’m endlessly fascinated by the path aspiring actors tread: the highs that come with booking their dream gig, the lows of being cut off halfway through their audition song, the tips and tricks of the trade, and the hope that someday...it’ll all be worth it.  

It’s a tough, yet glamorous world. 

The title card for Season 3 of Submissions Only.

Submissions Only, a web-series that first found an audience on YouTube, offers a brief glimpse into that world, and a realistic, grounded one at that.  It takes a smart, hard look at the highs and lows, those ebbs and flows, that make up the life of a modern actor.  

The show, created by Kate Wetherhead and Andrew Keenan-Bolger, follows Penny Reilly (Wetherhead), a working actress living in New York, and her friend Tim Trull (Colin Hanlon), a mid-level casting director, as they attempt to navigate the brutal world of the modern Broadway audition process.  The show asks the question, “what does it mean to be a successful actor?” and “what does that success look like when held up against the realities of everyday life?”  And it does so all through charming, witty scripts; the reflection of Wetherhead and Keenan-Bolger’s own experiences in the world of theatre.  

And in that world, the dream is dead. What dream am I talking about? I’m talking about that dream of hopping off a Trailways bus, marching into an open call, moving the director to tears with your rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” and instantly ascending the ladder to stardom. It’s long gone. 

But luckily, in the world of Submissions Only, another dream is alive and well amongst the show’s endearing cast of characters, and a more attainable one at that.  It’s the dream of the working actor; the dream of just having a job, and somewhere to go when you wake up in the morning.  This grounded approach towards the life of an aspiring actor not only makes Submissions Only unique, but it also makes it one of my favorite shows of the last decade.  

Wetherhead as “Penny Reilly” in Episode 3x01 “Petite Sweet Ending with an ‘N.’”

But, before getting into the thick of why Submissions Only is so special to me, let’s talk about how it achieved the “cult classic” status it currently enjoys.  The show was originally conceived by Wetherhead and Keenan-Bolger after working together on “It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman,” at the Dallas Theater Center.  Keenan-Bolger was commissioned to create a series of behind the scenes videos, which Wetherhead eventually came to collaborate on.  After seeing how well they worked together, Wetherhead’s husband suggested they create a show together.

Produced on a shoestring budget, the show’s first season gained notoriety despite it’s creaky production value for including a number of impressive cameo appearances from Broadway veterans performing as random auditionees, most notably Kristin Chenoweth in the show’s fourth episode.  The first season also included appearances from Danny Burstein, the late Rebecca Luker, and Rachel Dratch.  

And the list only grows from there.  

By the show’s second and third season, partially produced and financed by Broadway World, Submissions Only eventually featured cameo appearances from Broadway legends like Chita Rivera, Audra McDonald, Brian D’Arcy James, Kelli O’Hara, Lin-Manuel Miranda (pre-Hamilton, more on that later), Harvey Fierstein, Nick Jonas, Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Judith Light.  

I’m obligated to tell you that’s not even a complete list.  Shout out to my personal favorite cameo by Joel Grey, who plays himself auditioning for an up-and-coming casting director.  In the audition, he graciously thanks the casting director for her brutal honesty when she wryly accuses him of relying on his whole Joel Grey “bit.”

These cameos called a lot of attention to Submissions Only in its early days, but it’s just one part of what makes the show so special.  What makes these cameos, and the show as a whole so singular, is Wetherhead and Keenan-Bolger’s unwavering devotion to rejecting mass appeal, and pandering only to the most dedicated of Broadway fans, knowing well that musical theatre nerds would make up the majority of their audience.  

Penny crashes at Tim’s (Colin Hanlon) after being kicked out of her old apartment.

As an example, an early episode references a new play Tim has been hired to cast entitled “Reckless Banter.” When we first see Tim auditioning actors for one of the leads, a pseudo-intellectual auditionee asks Tim if the playwright would prefer a more, “Edward Albee approach to the material, or a Noël Coward, even G.B. Shaw take?” to which Tim gently replies, “Are you asking whether they want a British accent?”  

This is Submissions Only’s best attempt at mainstream comedy, and I love them for it.  If you had to Google any part of that joke, congratulations. You are part of what conservative pundits would call, “The Real America,” and probably were popular in high school and I truly, sincerely envy you!  Unfortunately for me, I first discovered Submissions Only while I was a student at the child-star-turned-celebrity summer camp formerly known as New York University and was therefore reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in lieu of a math class. So, this joke landed with me.    

That’s not to say that Submissions Only delights in its attempts to subvert comedy norms and relish obnoxiously in its own sense of intellectual superiority...that’s me you’re thinking of!  Contrastingly, an early episode involves Tim (along with Penny, his reader) auditioning an endless parade of gay men for the romantic lead of the upcoming “Snuggie Musical.”  

Yes, the blanket with sleeves.  A musical.  About the blanket with sleeves.  

This perfectly mixed cocktail of high brow/low brow humor, when applied to fake Broadway musicals and plays, makes the show endlessly watchable throughout its three season run.

The cast of the show-within-a-show “Jeremy’s Fort,” waits patiently for rehearsals to begin.

And friends, now we get to talk about the fake musicals.  For O The Fake Musicals! Like most show business parodies, Submissions Only is lovingly rife with made-up projects and productions that poke gentle fun at the tropes and traits we’ve grown accustomed to seeing again and again in modern day musical theatre. With lyrics expertly written by Wetherhead and music composed by Adam Gwon, Adam Wachter, Keith Varney, and others, these plays and musicals are specifically crafted for the world of the show, and perfectly satirize the modern lexicon of American musical theatre.  Throughout the series, Penny and Tim continuously audition for and cast these productions, much to their chagrin, and much to our delight as the audience.

It’s these shows-within-the-show that make Submissions Only what it is: a prescient masterpiece, and borderline psychic.  In turn, most of these shows have actually become eerie portents of productions that eventually worked their way to Broadway. 

If you’ll allow me to quickly sidebar, I love referring to Submissions Only as “prescient” mostly because, in a later season, a character struggles to read a casting breakdown for an upcoming “Psychic Cop Procedural” after her agent informs her that the detectives on the show are meant to be more “prescient than psychic.”  This delineation completely baffles the actress, and her preoccupation with the matter prevents her from finishing her pear salad.     

So, is Submissions Only more prescient or more psychic?  Could be either, but in my opinion, Kate Wetherhead and Andrew Keenan-Bogler might as well be psychic.  Throughout the show’s three season run, we’re treated to dozens of these fake shows that would later come to portend future Broadway smashes.  There’s too many to name, but we can start with a sampler tray.   

There’s Mean Girls the Musical (years before the real one came to Broadway in 2018).  

Intersections, a delightful riff on the ill-fated In Transit (a musical by the Frozen lyricist about subways?).   

And most importantly, Light Me Up, a rock musical based on the life of Thomas Edison, anachronistically styled so as to reclaim history through a modern, pop-music take.

Does that last one sound familiar?   

Santino Fontana as “Aaron,” watches a show with Penny at Feinstein’s/54 Below.

Light Me Up first appeared in Season 3, which originally premiered in 2014.  For those of you keeping score at home, this was almost a year before the “Little-Engine-That-Could” musical known as Hamilton appeared at the Public Theatre in 2015. 

I assume nobody needs to do any Googling here, but I’ll leave a quick paragraph break here for those of us who have been living under a rock since 2015, or for any of us who just woke up from a coma.   

Not only is it uncanny how Submissions Only accurately predicted the rise of Hamilton into mainstream culture, but it’s also baffling how effectively it parodies it years before the show grew to the notoriety it currently enjoys.  I can’t even begin to explain how genius Light Me Up is as a tool of parody, but I’ll highlight one small joke that perfectly encapsulates Wetherhead and Keenan-Bolger’s astonishment at the surprising mainstream appeal of the world’s most famous historical pop musical. 

When Tim and Penny attend Light Me Up’s workshop premiere before it transfers to Broadway, the actor playing Thomas Edison appears alone on stage.  He doesn’t sing, and he doesn’t move.  Another actor approaches him, holding up a lightbulb to Edison’s face.  There’s a pause before the actor playing Edison wryly states, “What the fuck is that?”  

The audience watching the show bursts into laughter and applause, as if to say, “I get that!  How droll!”  If you’ve had the chance to see Hamilton (And if not, hurry! It’s gonna close any second!), you’ve probably shared in this type of laughter.  Eliciting that special brand of fourth-wall-breaking laughter is Light Me Up’s intention, and Hamilton’s as well when it makes similar jokes (see the Sally Hemings joke in Act 2), but it’s not Submission Only’s intention.  

Rather, Submissions Only offers up the idea that perhaps what’s truly funny isn’t Hamilton’s incredible reference humor, or its postmodern commentary on historical feminism, or the contradictions wrapped up in the mythology of our founding fathers; but rather, what’s truly funny is the fact that we as audience members find it entertaining at all. It’s a rock musical about Thomas Edison? Who thought that was a good idea? It’s a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton? And yet, here we are.

There’s an entirely different blog post I could dedicate as to why I find this particular parody so genius, but for now, I’ll just hope that Hamilton’s success leads to an actual staging of Light Me Up instead. 

The cast of Submissions Only rehearses music from “Jeremy’s Fort.”

Submissions Only is one of the rare shows I can boldly call a masterpiece, with no reservations or hesitation.  More than just a show, it’s a bible, filled with dozens of meditative life lessons, and answers to questions I’d never even thought to pose, all sprinkled over a delightfully absurdist, yet grounded take on modern theatre.  

How do you pursue a career without letting it consume you?  How do you pursue love without sacrificing something else?  Is life a linear path to success?  Or, is there an ebb and flow we’re all adrift on, with friends and a shared love of something serving as our lifeline?  

Submissions Only comes down firmly in the camp of the latter, and strives to answer all of these questions, offering up a realistic approach to pursuing artistry as a career, maintaining personal identity, and all the while treating us to the absurd and magical world of the audition.  And, I cannot recommend it highly enough, mostly because, if it were still around today, we’d probably get a great glimpse into what the next few years on Broadway will look like. 

Submissions Only is available to watch at Broadway On Demand.