Henry VIII. What’s the first thing you recall about this colourful historical character when his name is mentioned? Of course, it’s his six wives – “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” as the first lyrics of Six The Musical recount in an evocative opening number reminiscent of Chicago’s ‘Cell Block Tango’. Of course, this is no coincidence. It isn’t the first time that a song in this new pop-rock musical sounds eerily familiar.
Written with the pop charts in mind (rather than a classic musical score), Six is delivered like an energetic, Spice-Girls-esque pop concert, complete with an all-female live band. Instead of a traditional storyline, the six wives of Henry VIII are recast as pop princesses in a questionably formed girl band linked by six tragic storylines and one hell of an ex-husband. They break the fourth wall almost immediately, asking the audience to help them decide who should be the lead singer of their all-girl group.
Linked irrevocably by the patriarchal pages of history, Catherine of Aragon (Phoenix Jackson Mendoza), Anne Boleyn (Kala Gare), Jane Seymour (Loren Hunter), Anna of Cleves (Kiana Daniele), Katherine Howard (Chelsea Dawson) and Catherine Parr (played on opening night by Shannen Alyce Quan in place of Vidya Makan), spend the entire musical competing on the basis of which ex-wife had it the worst.
Of course, it’s a cursed basis upon which to decide; almost all of Henry’s wives were used and abused by the charismatic (and later t