INTERVIEW: New musical parodies the Trump family
Photo: Five: The Parody Musical continues at Theater 555 in New York City. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by KSA PR with permission.
In Midtown Manhattan, Six: The Musical continues to pack in audiences on Broadway as it tells a story of female empowerment and rewriting the history of toxic masculinity in the age of Henry VIII. A few blocks away, at Theater 555 on 42nd Street, a different musical is offering a more modern parody on the women in Donald Trump’s life. The cast members — including Anyae Anasia, Gabriella Joy Rodriguez, Jaime Lyn Beatty, Gabi Garcia and Hannah Bonnett — depict characters with well-known first names: Melania, Ivana, Marla, Ivanka and Stormy. Rounding out the cast is Jasmine Rice Labeija as Hillary.
The new musical, which was recently extended to April 21, comes courtesy of Shimmy Braun and Moshiel Newman Daphna, who are both responsible for the book and lyrics for the show. Billy Recce composed the music and additional lyrics, while Jen Wineman serves as director and choreographer.
“Day one was just leading up to COVID when Six: The Musical was in previews in New York,” Braun said in a recent phone interview. “My son, who was 10 at the time, just found it online and was in love with it, and he knows my love of theater. So, he felt the need to show me every video possible of Six: The Musical.“
Braun said he likes Six, especially its concept, and he started thinking of other ideas connected to this plot about women retelling the history of a male-dominated storyline. It didn’t take him long to land on Trump. “The concept almost immediately came to me,” Braun said. “I was sitting there watching these women who were fighting about who had it the worst and how miserable their lives were, and I said to myself, ‘Oh my God. There is a family that replicates this model very easily, and that would be the Trump family.’ So I came up with the idea to think of a parody of Six. I felt like it … lends very well to parody, and so I was excited to do that.”
Braun handed the idea over to Daphna, whose immediate comment was that this couldn’t quite be “Six” because there were only “Three” possible characters: Melania, Ivana and Marla. They needed to get creative in order to expand the show.
Here’s how Daphna remembers the conversation: “I was actually going to see Six, the last preview before it opened, but that was the day Broadway closed before the pandemic. So I actually didn’t get to see it then, but Shimmy came to me with this idea. And I was like, ‘OK, how can we expand this?’ I thought it was funny to do not Six but Five, and I was like, how do we get to five? We have the three wives, and we need like a people’s princess. We need someone that people will root for, that they’ll know is kind of an insider. What about Stormy Daniels? She can bring the sex and the risqué in this really straightforward way that the other women didn’t quite possess. Shimmy was like, ‘Who is #5?’ We sat there thinking. We threw out all these names.”
Eventually they settled on Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and the parody was born. They began to fashion a show that was centered on politics, pop culture and the connections to the former president. But another “p” word got in the way, and that was the pandemic. Both Braun and Daphna put the project on hold in 2020 and revisited the musical a couple of years later.
“In 2022 was when we really hit the street hard,” Braun said. “It has been a two-year process of cutting and writing and rewriting, bringing people on, people leaving, and so on and so forth. So it’s been a journey, but the last couple of weeks, it has been amazing actually having audiences see it for the first time because they are reacting really, really well. It’s sold out pretty much every show thus far, and the audiences are howling and giving standing ovations. It’s like seeing a baby come to life.”
Daphna said Five: The Parody Musical is less about female empowerment, like its Broadway counterpart a few blocks away, and more steeped in fun political commentary. “I think it was very important for us, especially as two and then three cis white guys, to not really give our take on female empowerment,” Daphna said. “There’s nothing that we can really add to that conversation that is important, so for us it was very important to stay in our lane and just make it fun, keep it exciting.”
Braun added: “We did a lot of research, and so we look at them individually as to who they are. Each of them definitely has positive qualities that we point out. … They have negative qualities that we point out, and then we also focus on how did they relate to each other. For example, Ivana refused to mention Marla’s name. She would only call her the Showgirl; that was it, and so that’s the way it runs through the show. … How did they relate to each other, and then how did they relate to each other as it relates to Donald Trump? So you have these three layers, which is what we focused on, and that brings out those different positive and negative traits in each of these women. With themselves, with each other and with how they relate to Donald Trump, they have positives, and they have negatives. We were able to navigate through that, and that’s where we’re really successful in telling it as a narrative, not just this silly parody that just throws out one-liners.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Five: The Parody Musical, featuring book and lyrics by Shimmy Braun and Moshiel Newman Daphna, continues through April 21 at Theater 555 in New York City. Billy Recce wrote the music and additional lyrics. Jen Wineman is director and choreographer. Click here for more information and tickets.
