SIX: THE MUSICAL
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay
Tue 21 Jan
*****
“Remember us from your GCSEs?” asks one of the queens from Six. Everyone who went to school in the UK knows the rhyme, but this time it goes “divorced, beheaded, LIVE!” The Tudors are forever in the British consciousness – whether it’s in drama series, BBC4 documentaries or the novels of Hilary Mantel. It’s a wonder why there hasn’t been other musicals about them, but nobody could’ve imagined it would be done like this! “Welcome to the show, to the histor-remix,” sing the queens in their opening song Ex-Wives – this is not your David Starkey version of the Tudors!
Six is an ultra-modern musical, one that casts the six wives of Henry VIII in the mould of pop divas such as Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa and classic Britney. There’s no plot exactly: the musical is presented as a pop concert. Breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience, the six historical divas compete to see who had it worst from their shared husband, each presenting their reasons why they should ‘win’ this completion via a pop solo in differing styles.
Conceived and written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss while at university, this is an obviously youthful show – that said, the audience was pleasingly made up of all ages. The fact that Moss and Marlow were at Cambridge might explain why Six is clever and current as it is – satirising online dating apps and calling out sexism.
“The only reason men employ women is to get them in their parlour / Tudor life, it was a different time,” Katherine Howard says during her song All You Wanna Do. Meanwhile Anne of Cleves’s Get Down contains the genius lines “No criticism / I look more rad than Lutheranism” and “Dance so hard that I’m causin’ a sensation / Okay ladies, let’s get in reformation”. It’s similar to the cleverness of TV’s Horrible Histories – only these aren’t parody. The real brilliance to these songs is how they could stand alone as pop songs, like Jane Seymour’s Heart of Stone, for instance – a beautiful and heartbreaking ballad.
As for the queens themselves, it’s a good thing that the competition part of the show isn’t really important, because it would be hard to choose a winner. All six leading women – Lauren Drew, Maddison Bulleyment, Lauren Byrne, Shekinah McFarlane, Jodie Steele and Athena Collins – are, in their own individual ways, sexy, sassy, funny and a little bit shady (in character).
This is not history as we used to know it. A musical for the #MeToo era, this is ‘herstory’ at its best, and Mary Beard would be proud. Feminism, education and history have never been this fun. Six gets a six out of six!*
*Although Buzz’s ratings are out of five so technically *****.
words CHRIS WILLIAMS photos JOHAN PERSSON
Six: The Musical is at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay until Sat 25 Jan. Tickets and info here.
