In ‘Six,’ the ill-fated wives of Henry VIII become pop divas
In the musical “Six,” the wives of King Henry VIII are no prim-and-proper royal bunch. Instead, they’re portrayed as sassy, girl-power pop divas performing an exhilarating live concert. The brainchild of Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who created the show while students at Cambridge University in England, “Six” evinces an acerbic and cheekily anachronistic vibe reminiscent of Hulu’s Catherine the Great TV series “The Great,” the 2018 Oscarwinning black comedy “The Favourite,” and even “Hamilton.”
The sextet of ill-fated and discarded queens in “Six” are decked out in glittering costumes and spout droll putdowns, defiant humble-brags, and cocksure comebacks (“Sorry, not sorry,” coos Anne Boleyn in her standout solo). Meanwhile, the pastiche of musical styles for each of the queens — Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr — are drawn from the sounds of contemporary pop artists like Beyoncé, Adele, Rhianna, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, and Alicia Keys. Presented by Broadway in Boston, the musical arrives at the Emerson Colonial Theatre on Wednesday for a run through Dec. 31.
Storm Lever, who plays Anne Boleyn, says she sometimes spies older patrons, with puzzled expressions on their faces, “fumbling through the Playbill” and searching for a synopsis that explains some of the real history. “You can see them going back like, ‘This isn’t what I remember studying back in the day about these queens. Am I in the right show?’ ” she says with a laugh.
Indeed, the show benches Henry and shifts his six blithely tossed-aside wives into the foreground, reimagining its 16th-century history as a story of female empowerment, solidarity, and resilience.
“The queens get to share their story and history from their perspective,” Lever says. “You recognize that what these women were going through, we’re still dealing with today. We’re still fighting against the patriarchy and fighting for our rights, our bodies, our choices, all these things are still relevant. So it’s a modern spin on this historical story.”
While the fates of these six were notoriously reduced to the refrain, “Divorced, beheaded, died! Divorced, beheaded, survived,” the show wants to dig deeper and give audiences a glimpse into their lives. “Six” unfolds as a concert with the reunited royals and then turns into a competition about who had the most awful experience with Henry (though beheading is hard to beat). Boston-area audiences first got to glimpse “Six” when it played the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 2019 on its way to Broadway.
First wife Catherine of Aragon (Khaila Wilcoxson), who sings “No Way,” was furious about being cast aside by Henry after putting up with his affairs. Still, her marriage was annulled, and in sashays the cameraphone wielding Anne Boleyn (Lever), who was accused of adultery and beheaded after Henry claimed she put a spell on him.
In writing her song “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” with its echoes of Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne, and Taylor Swift, Marlow and Moss sought to play against the perception of Boleyn as devious and manipulative and instead make her a ditzy, self-absorbed sexpot.
“Anne Boleyn is this cheeky little mischief-monster,” Lever says. “She’s unapologetic and bold and fabulous. So she’s making me click into this part of my personality that has a right to be outspoken and brash.”
In the show, the earnest Jane Seymour (Jasmine Forsberg), often thought of as Henry’s favorite, claims she’s “the one he truly loved,” which prompts an irritated “Rude!” from her fellow queens. She sings the aching Adele-style power ballad “Heart of Stone” about her unbreakable love for Henry.
Olivia Donalson’s Anna of Cleves was rejected after only six months when Henry claimed she was not up to his standards. So Marlow and Moss wrote the booty-shaking, house-down anthem “Get Down,” a riff on today’s dating app culture, with Henry objecting that Anna doesn’t “look like [her] profile picture.”
In the swaggering song, Donalson says she channels Lizzo in her ebullient, carefree attitude and embrace of female power and body positivity. “I’m a super bubbly and joyful person, and my song is a celebration of independence,” she says. “So my interpretation is more jolly and buoyant. I’m just having a ball.”
The musical reframes the story of Katherine Howard (Didi Romero), plucked by Henry when she was 16, as that of a fatally naive girl who’s been taken advantage of by older men. Palace gossip about her cheating on Henry eventually leads to her beheading. Her Ariana Grande- and Britney Spears-inspired earworm “All You Wanna Do” shifts from sultry come-hither seduction to an ominous tale of predatory behavior and abuse.
Catherine Parr, played by Berklee College of Music grad Gabriela Carrillo, is considered the “survivor” who saw Henry “till the end of his life.” Her Alicia Keys-Mary J. Blige-style ballad, “I Don’t Need Your Love,” has a dramatic emotional and musical shift, Carrillo says, about giving up her dreams of a relationship with her beloved Thomas Seymour (Jane’s brother) in order to marry Henry and realizing she has no choice. It starts out as a wistful piano ballad and moves into a more upbeat (and defiant) 11 o’clock number.
“It really is an emotional rollercoaster,” Carrillo says. “She chose duty over true love, and I think that says a lot about her. It’s heartbreaking to have someone you’re deeply in love with, but you can’t be with them.”
As Parr watches the catty queens mistreating and disparaging each other, Carrillo says the character realizes “it’s not much better than we’ve been treated by men, which is brutal and without compassion.”
“She encourages the other queens to embrace the full spectrum of who they are aside from just being a wife, and that’s a really powerful message. We should be united instead of divided because we’ve all suffered at the hands of men in this show,” Carrillo says.
Since the show opened in London in 2018 and then moved to Broadway last fall to largely rave reviews, the fan base, dubbed “the Queendom,” has been growing rapidly. Young fans often arrive dressed in colorful costumes. In Miami, Donalson greeted a group of six young girls at the stage door, who wound up singing for her. “It was wild. They knew every single word,” she says.
In “Six,” exchanges with the audience are key to the show’s success, and the actresses say the fans’ energy and enthusiasm fuels them every night.
Donalson relishes when audience members shoot her an ecstatic “who me?” look after she zeroes in on them during her performance. Carrillo says those interactions make their night. “I have a couple of my little best friends in the audience, the people that really lock eyes with me and laugh with me or are cheering extra hard. I’m like, ‘I’m coming back to you.’ It gives me a lot of adrenaline. Some nights I’m even shaking because the audience is so wild.”
In a Washington, D.C. performance, at the moment in “Get Down” when Donalson interacts with an audience member, the fan, who’d been singing along, “jumped up, did a little dance and then buttoned it with a split in the aisle of the theater!” Lever recalls with a laugh. “Olivia was like, ‘Oh! You really got down!’ And I was like, ‘We’ve been dethroned!’ ”