Interview: Shakina of COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN: A NEW MUSICAL at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

When it comes to the performing arts, there’s nothing more exciting than the birthing of a new musical. It requires so many resources, so much creativity and such intensive collaboration - and still you never know what you’re going to get. Will it be a new classic, the kind of show that is produced all over the world and leaves behind an original cast album that has successive generations memorizing every song? Will it be a well-intentioned misfire that fails to engage audiences and is quickly forgotten? Or will it land somewhere in between? Despite the best of intentions, it’s always a total crap shoot, even for the most celebrated of creators (see Elton John’s The Lion King vs. his Lestat, just for starters). Thus, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley deserves major props for presenting the world premiere of the musical Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean: A New Musical, especially in this current environment of scarcity when so many regional theaters have been forced to drastically cut corners just to put anything on their stages.

“Come Back to the 5 & Dime” would seem to be a perfect candidate for musicalization, given the big emotions and clear-eyed nostalgia that are baked into the source material. Based on the play and cult classic film Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean written by Ed Graczyk, it is a rockin’ country musical centered on the 20th anniversary reunion of a smalltown James Dean fan club. As the women reminisce about the glory days when the iconic actor filmed the movie Giant nearby, a stranger named Joanne arrives to settle old scores.

Developmental readings of the show excited audiences at TheatreWorks’ 2024 New Works Festival. TheatreWorks Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli directed those readings and is helming this fully staged production. “Come Back to the 5 & Dime” features music by Dan Gillespie Sells (the Olivier Award-nominated musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie), book by Ashley Robinson (West End stage adaptation of Brokeback Mountain featuring music by Sells), and lyrics by Shakina (TV’s Quantum Leap, Difficult People and the Transparent musical finale) who also stars as Joanne.

Shakina is one of those multi-hyphenate, force-to-be-reckoned-with types. Known for her outsized comedic performances and lusty alto, she’s also an ardent developer of new musicals, has a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies (really), and made history as the first trans actor ever to work as a series regular on a network sitcom (NBC’s Connecting). Even with all of those credentials, she originally did not think she was right for the role of Joanne and is quite surprised to find herself now starring in the show.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Shakina by phone a few weeks ago and she was largely the funny, earthy, shoot-from-the-hip gal I’d expected from her resume. But what I hadn’t expected is that she’s also a total musical theater nerd who can casually throw out terms like “dramaturgical tracking” in a way that indicates she knows exactly what she’s talking about. This makes perfect sense when you learn that she was the founding artistic director of Musical Theater Factory where she helped incubate countless musicals, including the Tony and Pulitzer-winning A Strange Loop.

We took a deep dive into how the creative team of “Come Back to the 5 & Dime” came together, why she was happy to write the lyrics but had no intention of playing the role of Joanne, and how even though she is a trans actor playing a trans character she is quite different from the character she plays. We also delved into a couple of her higher-profile TV projects and talked about how she copes with a world where trans people are being increasingly demonized. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m old enough to remember what a sensation the play and movie of Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean were when they came out in the early 1980s, even if neither was a big commercial success. What was your own first exposure to the play or the movie?

I would have to say high school theater class. I grew up in the 90s and it seemed like every girl in the world was doing monologs from “5 and Dime” in my adolescence.

Where was your high school?

In Orange County, California.

Omigod, I can’t imagine that in conservative Orange County!

Yeah, at this Catholic high school I found a, like, six-inch shelf of gay plays in the library and it was a lifesaver. It was like Harvey Fierstein and Larry Kramer, [etc.]. Someone had left a little token for the young queers coming up through this Catholic school, hidden in the gay play section of the Catholic school library. Not labelled as such, but to be discovered by us.

How did this musical adaptation of “Come Back to the 5 and Dime” come about?

Ashley Robinson, the book writer and the original conceiver of the adaptation, was a big fan of the original play. He was just entranced by it, especially these incredible monologs that Ed [Graczyk] wrote, and had the idea that it would make an incredible musical. He was working on the musical adaptation of Brokeback Mountain at the time with Dan Sells, who’s our composer. So they set up a collaboration and started working on the beginning outline, like how do we adapt this, where would songs be, what do we want to do with it? And they realized pretty quickly that they should have a trans person on the team and went looking for someone. It was actually my former agents at A3 that put us together, so it was like a creative blind date.

Once you came on board as lyricist, what was the process for collaborating with Dan and Ashley?

Well, because I was coming in after they had already started, I wanted to know how they understood the play. So the first thing I did was with Ashley I went through his first draft of the book line by line and talked with him about every beat and made a spreadsheet that was like what is the action, what is the intention, what is happening here, what is the character doing?

And then the same thing with the song moments. They had been identified, and I had some of my own ideas as well, like “Okay, if we put a song here, what is the song doing and how should it sound?” We did all that dramaturgical tracking first and then when we had been through that process, I was like “Okay, now it’s time for me to sit down and see if I can step inside the world of the musical.” At the top of the play, there is this gorgeous monolog where Mona comes back from visiting the set of Riata in Marfa where they had filmed Giant when she was a teenager. She has this wistful, dreamy monolog about what a shame it is that this movie set had fallen into disrepair.

I thought this is the song that first gets inside Mona’s psychology, her nostalgia, her heartache, and so I wrote the lyric for “Riata,” That was sort of my first way in, and that’s I guess what you could consider the opening number, though we don’t really have a traditional opening number in our show. Anyway, that was my first attempt to see, like, “Can I even do this? Can I write for these women? Can I find their voice?” So that’s where it started.

Was the part of Joanne written with you in mind from the get-go?

No, actually. At first, I didn’t see myself as Joanne at all and I made that clear to the team. I was like “I love who she is and I’m happy to write it, but I don’t see myself as her.” Which kind of made it easier to conceive of the character because I truly had no intention of playing the role. I did record a couple demos with the guys over the pandemic.

Which is common practice for lyricists just to get their stuff out there, right?

Exactly. And I was also recording demos for the other characters, too. But then we did the Joe’s Pub concert and we were like “Well, who can we get to do this and help us elevate the profile of the show, and be a part of what it is?” I said to the team, and this has truly been my statement on the matter the entire time, “If everyone in the room thinks it’s the best idea for me to play the role, I will play the role, and happily.” And it’s been really thrilling and exciting. I’m forced to challenge a lot of my own internalized transphobia and, you know, putting myself up to a really big challenge as an actor as well as a writer. It’s awesome. 

Even though you’re a trans actor playing a trans character, is there an aspect of Joanne that you especially enjoy playing because it’s so different from who you are?

I think it’s her craft. This is partly in the writing from the original play and partly from Karen Black’s iconic performance [on Broadway and in the film], but I think that we experience Joanne as such well-crafted woman. I’m a little shoot-from-the-hip, off-the-cuff, messy-in-an-adorable-way kind of person [laughs], and so to come in coiffed and prepped and really like living in the experience of being completely fortified by my persona is thrilling. And then that breaks down, of course, as the play goes on.

You are also the founding artistic director of New York’s Musical Theater Factory -

I am, indeed!

- which has helped develop literally hundreds of musicals. Did they have any role in bringing this show to life?

Brisa Arel Muñoz, who is the current artistic director of Musical Theater Factory, directed and assisted us with developmental dramaturgy for that Joe’s Pub concert, which was really the first public presentation of the piece. It wasn’t an official MTF-produced concert, but I think anything musical that I make has MTF in its blood. And the fact that I got to collaborate with Brisa at such an early stage in the piece’s life was really significant.

The show had very well-received readings at TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival last year. Has the show changed substantially since those readings?

I think we learned a lot last summer about how to focus the story on the emotional arc that the audience cares about the most. And we really wanted to find the trio in the ensemble, because there is a very intimate story taking place amongst this exuberant group of women. So I think audiences [who saw those readings] will find, like, the distilled hearts of the piece that maybe they couldn’t always keep track of in the festival last year.

I have to ask you about the Transparent TV series musical finale. What was that experience like, coming into such a tightknit cast after Jeffrey Tambor had been let go for obvious reasons and then taking on the mantle of this iconic character of Maura?

You know, it’s funny that you ask, cause I actually created a TED Talk about the experience called “On Radical Forgiveness” for TEDx Broadway. There was such a huge spiritual task to helping this cast and crew move through the trauma of that rupture. I felt as an artist a kind of like doula-level responsibility to assist Joey Soloway and the rest of the team with laying Maura to rest since that whole experience had ended in such an unfortunate, premature way. So it was a very tall order.

Also, the fact that I got to develop that at Musical Theater Factory was so wonderful. It was incredible to be in one rehearsal room working on the Transparent musical finale and in the other room working on A Strange Loop, doing those two shows side by side, popping back and forth, checking in on A Strange Loop and then coming back in to sing a Maura song and have a note with the writers. It was just really, really epic.

And then of course you were in seasons 2 and 3 of Difficult People, which was such a delight for us theater geeks because it probably featured more stage actors per episode than any TV show ever.

Absolutely.

And it was such a wild show. What was the vibe like on that set?

It was so much fun. I literally got a talking to one day from our director, Jeffrey [Walker], who said, “You get to break one more time!” Because I kept losing it, especially in my scenes with Cole Escola. It was just outrageous. But it was my first professional acting job so I was terrified, up there with you know Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner and Gabourey Sidibe, Cole Escola, Andrea Martin – I mean, the list goes on and on and on. It was just legends and big shots. It was very cool.

Since you’re also a trans activist, I have to ask how the hell you’re dealing with what’s going on in the world these days with the demonizing of trans people, and not losing all hope?

Well, I try to stay engaged with my art and my created community, and I refuse to let anybody steal my joy. And you know I recognize that historically whenever folks have tried to silence me or any one of the communities I’m a part of, we just get louder. I find a lot of courage in that.