‘Six’ queens take turn at spotlight, look to today’s pop stars
In creating the Tony Award-winning musical “Six,” Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have turned a sextet of 16th-century English queens into pop princesses, complaining in rock, rhyme and meter of their mistreatment by their husband, Tudor monarch Henry VIII.
Zan Berube, who plays Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, says she won’t be checking Arkansas off the list of states she’s visiting on the musical’s national tour just because the show already played Sept. 12-17 at Fayetteville’s Walton Arts Center.
“I had a blast,” she says of the weeklong sit-down in her Northwest Arkansas visit. She expects to hit 31 states by the time her touring contract closes out.
The Boleyn Tour takes the stage this week at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall. (The show’s Aragon Tour, named for Henry’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon, has already closed. Berube doesn’t know, although she admits the possibility, that subsequent tours would be named for subsequent queens.)
Gerianne Pérez plays Catherine of Aragon, with Amina Faye as third queen Jane Seymour, Terica Marie as fourth queen Anne of Cleves, Aline Mayagoitia as fifth queen Katherine Howard and Sydney Parra as sixth and final queen, Catherine Parr.
“Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” according to a long-standing catalog.
Berube explains that the show is a retelling of the sextet’s regal lives, presenting “their points of view and perspectives, instead of the way history depicts them.” The result is as much a concert as a musical, with a live four-person rock band, dubbed “the Ladies in Waiting,” on stage.
Each queen gets a solo number; Berube’s, reflecting her character’s ultimate, unfortunate fate, is titled “Don’t Lose Your Head” (“I wanna dance and sing; politics are not my thing … we might elope, but the Pope said nope.”) She has revealed in other interviews that her “queens-pirations” include Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.
Berube’s background is purely musical theater, however, not rock ’n’ roll: “I’m a music theater geek, through and through.” She cites the help of the music director and supervisor Joe Beighton with “helping mold these pop songs to our own voices.” She has added growls and affectations to provide that “good rock ’n’ roll feel.”
Every production is unique and different, Berube explains, depending who plays the queens.
It’s the second professional gig and first tour for Berube, a Boston native who graduated in 2020 with a degree in musical theater from the University of Michigan.
“You can’t learn what a tour is like until you do it physically,” she explains. “It’s full of curve balls and challenges.”
She had a long audition process landing the role, a process in which the covid-19 pandemic was a limiting factor. It started with a video that she recorded in her university dorm room while she was under quarantine. After the theater industry emerged from a yearlong total lockdown, she attended a 2021 open audition with the creative team in which the only time she was able to remove her mask was when she sang.
She subsequently went through seven rounds of nerve-wracking callbacks, with and against other auditioners. She says she was under consideration not only for Anne Boleyn but Jane Seymour and Katherine Howard.
BOOKEND CATHERINES
According to the women playing his first and final wives, you don’t have to know who Henry VIII was to enjoy the show.
“I think some people hesitate to go see a historical revision show because they’re afraid that they don’t have the foundational knowledge to keep up with the story,” says Parra, who plays Catherine Parr.
“We give you everything you need. Surprisingly, we’re able to pack a lot of information into a very short amount of time, and it’s quite historically accurate.” For example, she explains, Parr was the only queen to outlive the king.
Meanwhile, “I’m Catherine of Aragon. I’m the bookend to Sydney,” Peréz says. “I was the first queen. I was known for being the one that was married to him for the longest. I was with him for 24 years.”
Parra explains that the production is formatted like a stadium pop show.
“The show imagines a world in which these six women get together and write an album where they each get a song explaining why their experience with Henry was the worst,” she says.
“It does follow regular musical-theater tropes, but the show is 80 minutes of lights and choreography and costumes in a way that is not being done in any other Broadway show right now.”
Each queen, in researching her respective role, took inspiration from modern-day pop stars. Peréz says that even though the writers had particular influences, the actresses were encouraged to borrow from their favorites as well. Her research, she adds, involved watching performances by current pop queens Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez.
“They put on these beautifully nuanced performances that are not usually performances we have to replicate in the world of musical theater,” she says. “A lot of times [when] we’re doing a ‘book musical,’ we’re really focusing on the acting, the scene work, the characters themselves. In this musical, we’re trying to replicate a pop star, which is a completely different kind of stage persona.”
Adds Parra: “When we started the rehearsal process, I was told a lot that Alicia Keys was the inspiration for Catherine Parr — her groundedness and her soulful R&B ballad with a lot of heart vibe.” She also mixed in her love of Jojo and “Queen of Tejano Music,” Selena.
A BEAUTIFUL BLENDING
“I think she did a beautiful job of blending the Spanish and non-Spanish-speaking communities and uniting them through her music, and that sort of inspired me and felt very much in alignment with my version of Catherine Parr,” she says. “We got to play around a lot with those inspirations.
“I think it appeals to most people, and I think people who aren’t theater dorks end up being obsessed with this show because it’s so different. It’s so accessible. And it pulls on so much contemporary music that it’s really easy to love. It’s going great for us out here on the road. We’re so grateful that the audiences have been so receptive.”