An old favorite Broadway play has gotten a facelift. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean: A New Musical is being produced by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, with its world premiere on June 18. This is a reimagined, pump-up-the-volume version that is spearheaded by the original creators—and Shakina.
Not everyone will recognize the name yet, but Shakina has been wowing audiences with her acting on Hulu’s Difficult People, and NBC’s Connecting, her work behind the camera on Quantum Leap, and her one-person show, Manifest Pussy.
Before all that, Shakina was a student at UCSC, an undergraduate in community studies, soon to minor in theater arts and eventually earn a graduate certificate in theater as well.
But academia was never her sole/soul focus. “Even while working on my degrees, I was directing at the Actors’ Theatre, in Santa Cruz,” Shakina says, speaking from rehearsals for 5 & Dime. “Basically, I always believed that you don’t need permission to make theater, so I just found ways to make it.”
With a passion for the avant-garde, like ritual movement theater, Shakina was able to manifest her obsessions. But she secretly longed for her roots in musical theater. And now, with the world premiere of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean: A New Musical, everything is coming together for this powerhouse performer and artist.
“I wrote the lyrics with my mentor and lyricist, the incomparable William Finn, who just passed in April. He would always say, ‘A song isn’t a song until someone else is singing it.’ I saw him work with so many songwriting students, but it wasn’t until the words got into the mouth of an actor, who could interpret them, that the song really came to its own life. And getting to be not only a singer of some of those songs but to also work on both sides of the creative team has been incredible,” Shakina says.
Ed Graczyk’s play has already had numerous renditions across the country since its launch in 1976—even resulting in a Robert Altman film with Karen Black, Cher and Kathy Bates. The story follows a group of James Dean fans who gather inside a piece of history, the local 5 & Dime store, in a small Texas town. They are an all-female fan club for actor James Dean, whose reunions are hectic and funny.
“The community of creation is so massive in TV and film. Having worked on camera, and in producing and writing on TV, I’ve seen the teamwork that really goes into making anything happen—it’s just so brilliant and mind-blowing. On Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean: A New Musical, we have between 100 and 250 people on our contact sheet. There are creative production crews in our marketing office, a team who focuses on catering, and it just takes such a human effort of passion to put on a show.”
Shakina has been a director, an actor, a book writer and lyricist, and in this new project, all of her hard-earned skills come into focus. Finding new back stories, subtext and nuance, she was able to give voice to the poetic subconscious of the characters that were already so artfully drawn in the original play.
“We moved around gender in the piece with me playing the trans woman [Joanne, played by Karen Black in the Altman film],” says Shakina, who herself is trans. “And we have the young version of the trans woman, played by a trans masculine actor. So no matter when you meet the character of Joanne, whether you’re meeting Joanne or Joe, it’s being played by an actor of trans experience—which I think is pretty radical.”
While the setting of the play is in Texas, no previous productions leaned into the Latina experience. Shakina had no such restrictions. “The show takes place in South Texas, along the borderlands. When they filmed the movie Giant there in the 1950s, so many people from across the border were instrumental in its success. And that narrative was left out of the original play. We found room to bring it in, which only adds to the complexity of the story, in a really beautiful, harmonic way. I’m super excited for people to see it, and feel it, and receive it.”
For Shakina, moving between television and the stage is an organic experience that is about the product, but also about the beauty of working together with a large group of people. “There’s so many things I love about both ways of working and I feel really blessed that I get to continue to work in both arenas. This is so essential to my identity as an artist,” she says.
Runs June 18–July 13 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are available at theatreworks.org.
