The ladies are making it reign. In heels, corsets and rhinestone flash, this Broadway show hijacks a schoolyard rhyme – “Divorced, beheaded, died / Divorced, beheaded, survived” – and remixes it for pop posterity. Written and directed by Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, Six: The Musical (does that colon distinguish it from Six: The Number?) reimagines the unfortunate lives of the wives of Henry VIII as an ecstatic concert with an all-girl band and trefoil lighting effects. Wow, you might think, the Spice Girls really know their history.
Six arrives on Broadway via stints at the Edinburgh Fringe, in the West End and aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line. More than a concert and less than a musical, it has a thin, peppy conceit: these queens have gathered posthumously, with relevant heads intact, to each sing a song detailing her mistreatment at the meaty hands of Henry. As the ladies explain in an opening number, this is a contest. The most miserable woman wins:
The Queen who was dealt the worst hand
The Queen with the most hardships to withstand
The Queen for whom it didn’t really go as planned
Shall be the one to lead the band
Imagine Queen for a Day meets the X Factor meets Antonia Fraser and you’re pretty much there.
Post-opening, the evening progresses in matrimonial order, with one song afforded for each queen. First Catherine of Aragon (Adrianna Hicks) sings, then Anne Boleyn (Andrea Macasaet), and so on, up to the resident survivor, Catherine Parr (Anna Uzele). Each queen adopts a different musical style, which the program helpfully identifies for an unhip audience. Anna of Cleves’ “Queenspiraton”? Nicki Minaj and Rihanna. Catherine Howard (Samantha Pauly) prefers Ariana Grande and Britney Spears. If the pastiche music shows its student show roots, the sugar-spiked performances are entirely professional, often virtuosic.
Some stories are inherently more tragic. “People say Henry was stone-hearted. Uncaring,” Jane Seymour (Abby Mueller) says. “And I’m not sure he was.”
“Yeah actually come to think of it, there was this one really cute time where I had a daughter and he chopped my head off,” Anne Boleyn says sharply.
Some are less so. Anna of Cleves (Brittney Mack), divorced when Henry felt she didn’t live up to her Holbein portrait and exiled to a well-appointed palace, obviously had the best deal. “Guys, I have the plague!’ she says. “LOL. Just kidding, my life’s amazing.”
But who had it worst? And why should that matter? Having the women compete for most miserable reinscribes a Broadway trope in which women’s stories don’t count unless they are stories of suffering. Even as the women serve as each other’s back-up singers, the show’s structure positions them as rivals, rather than nudging them toward solidarity and shared experience. A final gesture situates the competition as fake and nudges the women toward sisterhood (friendship never ends!), but that doesn’t excise the hour of catty infighting that came before.
As a lady who came of age in the 90s, I thought often of the Spice Girls (and Destiny’s Child and the Pussycat Dolls) while watching Six, trying to suss out why a show that checks so many of my personal boxes – Women! Tudor history! Bops! – didn’t send me. Probably because its girls-to the-front ethos feels unexamined and vacant. The animating feminism – Spice-friendly, third-wave – centers the individual ignoring systemic causes. The costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade and enthusiastically informed by the male gaze, say, go ahead, smash the patriarchy. Just make sure you look hot doing it. It is possible – suggested, even – to love the players, each bringing an abundance of personality to musical pastiche (Macasaet and Mack, particularly), while taking a dim view of the game. Long live these queens. Now give them the anthems they deserve.
