“And tonight, Boston, we are … live!”
The six cast members flooded the stage and got the audience members to jam along with the opening beats of the pop powerhouse number “Ex-Wives,” the shifting purple light reflecting off the bedazzled and multi-colored costumes of the all-female cast. The packed and amped-up theatre was more than ready to “listen up” to the story, with all of its tales of glories and disgraces.
Broadway in Boston will host “SIX: The Musical” at the Emerson Colonial Theatre from Dec. 3 to 29. This “histo-remix” places the six wives of Henry VIII into a pop battle extravaganza, where each wife shares their story through high-energy musical numbers.
The musical, created by two former Cambridge University students Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, first premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017. It drew attention from West End producers soon after and premiered at the Arts Theatre in 2019, before moving to a sold-out Broadway run in 2021. The show has gone on to national tours and continues to be one of the highlights of Broadway and the West End theatre scenes.
Each queen, Catherine of Aragon (Chani Maisonet), Anne Boleyn (Gaby Albo), Jane Seymour (Kelly Denice Taylor), Anna of Cleves (Danielle Mendoza), Katherine Howard (Alize Cruz), and Catherine Parr (Tasia Jungbauer), take turns in the spotlight, each song full of pretty naughty jokes and witty historical references.
With memorable pieces like the tongue-in-cheek “Don’t Lose Your Head” sung by Albo as Anne Boleyn, and the black-lit, riotously funny “Haus of Holbein” sung by all six Queens sporting glow-in-the-dark sunglasses, attending “SIX” is a time spent in pure euphoric fun.
The musical’s accompaniment, Lizzie Webb (Keyboard), Emily Davies (Bass), Rose Laguana (Guitars), and Camila Mennitte Pereyra (Drums), play on stage alongside the cast, who interact with them as a pop star would at their own performance.
The musical, a nonlinear history at 80 minutes long, blurs the line between concert and musical, breaking boundaries through its audience engagement and eye-catching costumes and set design, such as the innovative backdrop. It was made up of a set of arches created through LED lights, which turn on and off and cycle through different colors to correspond with the music and the lyrics that the Queens sing.
In the midst of all the fun, “SIX” crafts an important narrative about our historical perceptions, and why we as a society are so fixated on Henry VIII and the fate of his queens. The closing piece, “SIX,” allows the Queens to reimagine their endings and forge their own paths independent of Henry’s legacy and shadow.
They acknowledge in that final song that they’re “one of a kind” and that they have spent “too many years lost in his story” which ends the show with an optimistic look and joyful celebration of reclaiming a narrative too often told from one point of view.
In the same way that classic skits such as “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” used slapstick comedy to play on historically accurate elements of the Medieval period, “SIX” reframes the narrative of the wives of Henry VIII in a pop bash that ends up uniting the Queens against the common comparative patriarchal lens they are viewed through.
