"Six" is Enough

Six, the supercharged, over-the-top celebration of girl power, pop music and sixteenth century royal intrigue came strutting into Overture Center on August 1. The show winds up the venue’s 22/23 Broadway season with high energy performances and lots of bling, onstage in Overture Hall through Sunday.

Looking like a bedazzled Vegas act and sounding like a dozen different divas who’ve dominated the Billboard charts in the last decade – from Beyonce, Britney Spears, Shakira, Adele and Avril Lavigne, to Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Alicia Keys and Ariana Grande – the present incarnation of Henry VIII’s six wives announced to the near capacity crowd opening night that they had a score to settle, first with each other and then with history itself. 

Brought together by their unfortunate marriages to the same monarch, the ladies (who are each showstoppers in their own right) decide that they will regale the audience with their difficult biographies one at a time and the winner will be declared based on who suffered the most, while singing about it with the most style. (The musical is basically an episode of “American Idol” crossed with “The Real Housewives of Tudor London,” and a dash of feminist “her-story.”) 

Filled with vocal pyrotechnics, precise choreography and lighting effects that rival a Superbowl halftime show, Six sizzles with these half-dozen queens dishing out sassy one-liners, flirting with the crowd, executing exquisite hair flips, and gyrating around the stage in fishnet stockings and rhinestone covered ankle boots. It’s an evening of catchy dance music you can feel vibrating through your chest, coupled with clever lyrics, pleasant harmonies, and the onstage (all-female!) band rocking out. 

Songs like “No Way,” “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” and “Heart of Stone” detail the women’s experiences with King Henry’s shortcomings – his fickle taste in wives, his many mistresses, his obsession with having a male heir, his temper and his willingness to rid himself of inconvenient spouses, either by execution or by establishing his own religion. 

The plot of the musical is thin. The history is slight. The structure is straightforward. There are exactly three group numbers and one solo for each ex-wife, but they all sing and dance as back-up performers throughout the show. And each queen sports a dominant character trait so we can tell them apart, similar to the supergroup of my youth, the Spice Girls. (Anne Boleyn is a whiny Baby Spice. The others might be labeled Diva, Madonna, Dowdy, and Victim Spice, followed by Self-Actualized Spice.) 

But overall it’s really fun. And strangely, it’s enough. 

Written by two Cambridge students (Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss) while they studied for exams during their senior year of college, Six first made waves at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017. It then quickly graduated to the big time in London’s West End. Closed down on the day of its Broadway opening due to COVID-19, the Six cast album caught fire while we were all working from home during the pandemic. And now the tour is literally taking over the world as a modern, not terribly serious look at historical women who were previously remembered for their deaths rather than their lives; notable for their husband rather than themselves. 

As the final wife, Catherine Parr urges Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves and Katherine Howard to retroactively declare their independence and stop competing with each other for the title of “most tragic.” Instead, she encourages each woman to speak for herself and expose the patriarchal machinations behind her treatment — as political pawns, pretty toys, breeders, harlots, undesirables and caregivers — and propose a better way forward. 

For 80 minutes, it turns out it’s these girls who run the world.