Theater Review: Six

What do you get when you blend infectious pop music, #YasKween empowerment, and the women known to history as the six wives of Henry VIII? You get the wickedly smart, wildly entertaining Six, one of the most joyous musicals to come out of the West End since Mamma Mia!

You read that correctly: Six is about the six wives of Henry VIII, King of England from 1509 until 1547 and all-around terrible spouse. The only characters on stage are the six Tudor queens themselves. Each woman gets the opportunity to tell her story and make the case why she had it worse under Henry’s thumb: Catherine of Aragon, his longest wife whom he divorced so he could impregnate another; Anne Boleyn, who may have helped usher in the English Reformation but ultimately lost her head when she failed to give him a son; Jane Seymour, who died shortly after giving birth to the future King Edward VI; Anne of Cleves, whom he divorced because she wasn’t pretty enough; Katherine Howard, who was beheaded; and finally Catherine Parr, who survived him. Cooked up by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss while they were still students at Cambridge a few years ago, Six has had a long road to the West End. It’s now making its North American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater before moving on to Boston’s American Repertory Theater in August 2019.

If the idea of sitting through a 90-minute musical about the politics of Tudor England triggers panic-flashbacks of high school history class, let me ease your mind: you don’t need to know much about history to follow along. The show does all the heavy-lifting in communicating the important bits and framing each historical figure in contemporary terms. You don’t need to be a history professor to keep up with the show; you just need to be someone who is ready to have a ball. Let me be clear: Six is fun. It’s really, really fun. It’s laugh-out-loud-and-grin-from-ear-to-ear-for-almost-the-whole-show-while-you-rock-out-to-awesome-jams fun.

The one voice that looms over this historical period is Henry VIII’s – and he is brilliantly absent from Six. The musical looks at this dramatic period of history from the female perspective. How we tell historical stories – and who gets to tell them – has long been a tricky issue, since the voice of the narrator shapes what we are told. That has been true of this story, when retellings of it often center on Henry and turn his queens into secondary, marginal, or invisible characters. This tale gets a post-#MeToo makeover by handing the mic over to these Tudor queens and allowing them to tell their own stories. In so doing, Six makes important points about the place of women – even royal ones – in history and how their lives are almost always framed around the men who married them. Six tries to challenge this marginalization and instead reframes the story of Henry VIII as that of a callous, entitled domestic predator.

Though these heavy themes lurk in the corners and center-stage of this production, the show prefers to use the language of empowerment to celebrate these characters as historical heroines. What makes Six so much fun is the fact that it feels like a pop concert. Marlow and Moss use contemporary pop culture to give voice to these Tudor queens. They match each queen with a pop diva, giving every woman her own recognizable musical style, ranging from Adele to Ariana Grande and Beyoncé. The music is ridiculously catchy and the lyrics are sharp and witty, containing plenty of hysterical Easter eggs for history buffs.

The cast flawlessly brings to life women who are uniquely clever, strong, and motivated: Adrianna Hicks is a piously vengeful Catherine of Aragon; Andrea Macasaet is a sweetly underhanded Anne Boleyn; Abby Mueller is a soulful Jane Seymour; Brittney Mack is a brash and confident Anne of Cleves; Samantha Pauly is a devastatingly tragic Katherine Howard; and Anna Uzele is a conflicted and brilliant Catherine Parr. Even better: the entire band – who is on stage the whole time – is comprised of women. This show takes representation on stage seriously.

That’s the secret sauce of Six: it brilliantly relies on first-rate musical storytelling to engage with the past in new, exciting ways, all while embodying its own message by putting women front and center. Its intoxicating blend of the contemporary and the historical makes this a bold telling of a familiar story in the same vein as Hamilton or Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Everything old is refreshingly new again.

Photo Credit: Chicago Shakespeare Theater/Liz Lauren