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The new musical tells a complex tale that is both timely for the current dialogues around gender identity and based on the life of a real person whose major career achievements happened 60 or 70 years ago.

“A Complicated Woman” is having its first full staging, a developmental production that is still undergoing rewrites and reworkings, from May 10 through June 2 at ’ in Chester.

It’s a modern musical with modern themes shaped in a way that’s accessible to Broadway-loving audiences.

“I’m interested in commercial theater,” said the show’s director, Jeff Calhoun, who is also a fount of knowledge about the musical’s real-life main character. “I’m not interested in preaching to the choir.”

At the same time, he calls the show “my passion project. It’s intimidating and frightening.”

The musical is based on the life of , a famous producer in the Midwest at the height of the summer stock theater movement in the mid-20th century.

Besides ruling the midwestern theater world in the era before regional theaters took root, Kenley spent over a decade in New York City as an assistant to Lee Shubert, one of the biggest Broadway producers ever.

If that life sounds like good material for a musical, that’s just the half of it. The summer stock and Broadway selves of Kenley are shown in “A Complicated Woman,” but the show also explores two other sides of the producer. Born intersex, Kenley presented as male in his professional career, but when the summer theater season was over and he was in Florida, he lived as a woman named Jean.

Kenley was the subject of rumors in the theater community for decades. “At his 90th birthday I asked him if the rumors were true,” Calhoun said. “He asked me to tell his story.”

They had known each other since the 1970s. Kenley perfected the practice of casting TV and movie stars in lead roles at large summer theaters. He created a circuit of stock theaters which influenced how Broadway musicals manage national tours today. He not only dealt with big stars but started the careers of many young actors by giving them their first acting jobs. One of those young actors was Calhoun, who not only performed in Kenley’s shows but through him met Tommy Tune, with whom he would work on the Broadway hits “My One and Only” and “The Will Rogers Follies. Calhoun’s biggest hits as a director include the Broadway revision of “Grease” in the 1990s and the triumphant rags-to-riches stage version of the flop Disney movie “Newsies.”

“He was very supportive,” Calhoun said of his and Kenley’s decades-long friendship. “He was very proud that he’d put Tommy and I together.”

Calhoun believes that only two people in Kenley’s life knew both John and Jean. “One was his agent and the other was Edie Adams.” The director said the musical is “based on what I heard, so there are holes in the story. We had to take some license.”

Calhoun’s original plan was to turn the story into a documentary while Kenley was still alive — he died in 2009 at the age of 103. A great deal of footage was shot, but “his family put the kibosh on it,” the director said.

Calhoun is the director and producer but he enlisted Ianne Fields Stewart to write the book for “A Complicated Woman” book and Jonathan Brielle to do the music and lyrics. Stewart is a performer, writer and queer activist whose plays include “A Dying Breed.” Brielle’s musical theater credits include “Foxfire” and “Nightmare Alley.” Brielle is also the executive vice president of the Johnny Mercer Foundation and is the writer/producer in residence at Goodspeed Musicals’ wintertime Johnny Mercer Writers Grove at Goodspeed Musicals. The grove is a retreat for musical theater creators and a lot of work on “A Complicated Woman” was done at the Goodspeed’s main campus in East Haddam.

In the musical, the John/Jean role is shorthanded as just “J” and is played by , the writer/star of the one-person comedy “Diva” and its later musical version “Diva: Live from Hell.”

Goodspeed Musicals offered a sneak peek of “A Complicated Woman” at its Festival of New Musicals in January. Monahan performed a song that simultaneously sings Lee Shubert’s praises and announces J’s own theatrical ambitions called “The Man Who Runs the Show.” The other song previewed involved J’s Florida relationship with a woman named Nina Mae.

Though Calhoun began his career as a dancer and choreographer, he said “A Complicated Woman” is “not a heavy dance show. We’re focusing on text, dancing and music. It’s a developmental production. We’re rewriting every day.

One of the play’s supporting cast members, Klea Blackhurst, exemplifies what Calhoun is after in his staging of “A Complicated Woman.” She is an old-school Broadway type. Goodspeed audiences will remember Blackhurst as Dolly in “Hello, Dolly!” in 2013. She is known for her one-woman tribute to Ethel Merman “Everything the Traffic Will Allow.” She brings a Broadway ebullience to the potentially dark and complex world of “A Complicated Woman.”

When told that her presence in the cast seemed to guarantee that “A Complicated Woman” would be entertaining as well as dramatically engrossing, Blackhurst defers the compliment.

“Your mind can be put at ease because you have Calhoun at the helm. John Kenley wanted his story told, and he went to a song and dance man who’d grown into a Broadway director,” she said.

“This is written like a golden age musical. It’s also an interesting character, and it’s real.”

Blackhurst called “A Complicated Woman” a true collaboration. “I just joined it, but it’s been in the works for quite some time and there were two workshops recently,” she said. “I just met Jeff Calhoun in the last couple of years. He’s a Broadway guy, and I’m in love with Broadway.”

But Blackhurst also confided that “working on new material is my secret favorite thing,” making her a natural for “A Complicated Woman.”

Blackhurst didn’t know Kenley personally but certainly heard of him. “I’ve been in New York 40 years. There had always been the rumors,” she said. “They were ever present in my generation. Luci Arnaz, who directed me in the workshops of ‘Hazel,’ was a dear friend of his. But it was not my era. I wasn’t in Ohio at the time.”

In “A Complicated Woman,” Blackhurst plays John’s sister, who’s very uncomfortable with the Florida side. “I’m representing the family, like ‘What would the neighbors think?’ There are friends in Florida that only knew Jean. My character is representing a side of society that says you can’t be both.”

She noted that “It’s not fully a trans story. He was intersex. His parents decided to raise him as a boy. It was not a situation where the goal was to become one or the other. John Kenley wanted to live and identify as both male and female. There’s a point of view that he couldn’t live fully as himself, but he did.”

Calhoun only knew Kenley in his male-presenting theater self, so uses he/him pronouns when referring to him. “I only knew him as Mr. Kenley. To this day it’s Mr. Kenley to me.” Likewise, Blackhurst said that in her role as his sister “I deal with that character as male.” Monahan, who plays J, uses they/them pronouns.

In some ways, the Goodspeed production is the culmination of a longtime dream to share Kenley’s story. In others, it’s just the beginning. Calhoun hopes the show will have a life beyond the Goodspeed. He calls the project “a dream of 20 years. It’s taken me this long to get here. John Kenley was a hero for me. He changed my life. It’s not hyperbole to say that he was responsible for my career.”

“A Complicated Woman,” with the book by Ianne Fields Stewart and music and lyrics by Jonathan Brielle, directed by Jeff Calhoun, runs May 10 through June 2 at The Terris Theatre, 33 North Main St., Cheshire.$20-$54. .