“Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived.” With these six words six wives sum up their lives in the opening number of the appropriately named Six, Toby Marlow and Emma Moss’s musical phenomenon, which pays tribute to the parade of queens that Henry VIII disposed with during his reign as king of England.
In Six, these female footnotes from the Tudor past take centre stage to flesh out their stories. But it’s less the staging of a traditional historical musical than an indoctrination into the cult of the superfan. To encounter it for the first time is to be bowled over by the word-perfect patrons surrounding you, dressed in tribute as their favourite queen, singing along to anthem after anthem with complete unselfconsciousness.
For the uninitiated, it feels like being beamed on to a different planet. Who would have known that these sidelined sovereigns would become role models for young women all over the world?
Marlow and Moss can barely believe the phenomenon that Six has become in the eight years since it premiered, in a hotel conference room, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017. Back then the pair were final-year students at Cambridge University, finishing their dissertations and studying for their exams while also working with the university’s Musical Theatre Society on a production to bring to Scotland once they’d discharged all their formal obligations.
RM Block
Performing at the fringe is a rite of passage for college students looking to break into professional theatre, but “honestly”, Moss says, “our original ambition was just to write something that wouldn’t embarrass us and our friends. Just writing an original musical felt ambitious enough.”
Marlow had suggested that taking a famous subject matter as a starting point might be a commercially savvy idea: Henry’s wives – infamous in their number, yet not well known – would provide a familiar selling point for potential audiences. They came up with the concept of introducing Henry’s wives as a group of pop stars competing, X Factor-style, through a repertoire of biographical ballads. Their motivation would be to convince the audience that they were the most stoic of the king’s spouses.
Each of the wives, they thought as they worked on the score, could be inspired by a pop star. Catherine of Aragon would have the soulful style of Beyoncé or Jennifer Hudson, Anne Boleyn the grungy swagger of Lily Allen or Avril Lavigne. Jane Seymour might be a belter, like Adele or Céline Dion; Anne of Cleves a rhythmic R&B star, a la Rihanna. Catherine Howard they could infuse with the bubblegum flavour of Britney Spears, while Catherine Parr could bring the jazzy joy of Alicia Keys or Emeli Sandé to the songbook.
Musically, Marlow and Moss realised, the wide range of styles would offer something for every kind of pop fan, but it made dramaturgical sense to the duo too. All six of the wives, Moss says, “couldn’t just be singing sad ballads about suffering. That wouldn’t work as a journey for the show”. By giving them their individual voices, they would give the wives “an opportunity to reclaim their story, have their say – but it would also let us have the classic ‘sit down, shut up’ song or an upbeat ‘here I am in my power’ song”, to balance things out.
The musical’s premiere was a scrappy affair. “We had no real budget,” Moss says. The queens “wore high-street dresses, and tiaras from Claire’s accessories”. The venue was conference room 2 at the Grassmarket Hotel. “It didn’t have the level of gloss” it has today, she continues. “It didn’t actually look like a pop concert. There was more of a comedy musical aspect to it.”
We sort of piggybacked on the idea of pop-star fandom – the idea of feeling that this particular song or experience is being tailored for you ... When you think of how fandom works today – that blurred line between the performer and their fans – in the story of Six we set out to replicate that fandom
— Emma Moss
But it was clear from the get-go that the material was resonating strongly with the audience. “I remember during the third performance,” Marlow says. “It was a full house, and I was looking around, expecting to see family and friends, and I thought, I actually don’t know anyone here.”
Despite the lo-fi aesthetic, however, reviews were really good. The run sold out, and when the team returned to Cambridge for a series of homecoming performances the West End producer Kenny Wax, one of the forces behind The Play That Goes Wrong, among other commercial hits, travelled down to see the show and meet the team.
In the summer of 2018, with professional investment, Six returned to Edinburgh at the beginning of a pre-West End tour. In January 2019 it moved to the Arts Theatre in central London, and it has since toured Britain and Ireland twice, returning to the Bórd Gais Energy Theatre this June for a third Dublin run, with simultaneous productions in Australia, Canada, South Korea and on Broadway. Another production has just opened in Shanghai.
Marlow and Moss say they understood from the start that an audience might know absolutely nothing about Henry VIII’s wives. “I mean, Toby and I weren’t exactly history buffs, so we worked hard to make sure that we would tell you everything you need to know in the first few minutes.” And that’s exactly what the opening number, Ex-Wives, does when it uses the divorced, beheaded, died rhyme.
But it’s the format of the show that lends a sort of inevitability to its success. As Moss explains, “just the idea that these famous women are these mega pop stars sets up a sort of contract with the audience: ‘You are going to be obsessed with me.’
“We sort of piggybacked on the idea of pop-star fandom – the idea of feeling that this particular song or experience is being tailored for you. That fed into how we wrote the songs, the different types of music that influenced it, even the costumes. When you think of how fandom works today – that blurred line between the performer and their fans – in the story of Six we set out to replicate that fandom. The queens are like the Taylor Swifts of their day.”
Marlow has just returned from New York, where he was checking in on the US production, which has been playing on Broadway since 2022. “I met a fan outside the theatre who said she had seen it more than 80 times.” Fans want to see every version of Six, he says. “They want to see the understudies and the alternates, [as they know] that the performances and performers are a big deal in the show’s life. It’s not just the queens they are watching, but which version of which queen.
“Each performer, whether they are the lead performer or one of the alternates, has a very specific interpretation of that role, which has been specifically built into the direction of the show. They bring their own set of musical inspirations, pop stars that they [model] their characters on. They have their own costumes. Fans that really love the show want to see all those different versions.”
In the past few years those fans have been spoiled with opportunities to prove their devotion. A studio cast album was recorded in 2019, with an instrumental singalong version released soon after. A recording of the Broadway cast on the musical’s opening night captures the fans singing and screaming along. In April a live filmed version, Six: The Musical Live!, which brought together the original cast for a final performance, was released in cinemas in Ireland and Britain; it broke the record for the highest opening-day box-office take for a musical, opening in more cinemas even than Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.
Even though the production’s historical aspect is specifically English, the pop-concert form is international; Marlow says this means the reaction across the world, across the “Sixverse”, is the same: ecstatic cosplaying mobs gather in the venues to pay their respects to the unlikeliest of tribute bands – the “Tudor von Trapps, the Royalling Stones”, as they call themselves.
Even the wives find this difficult to conceive of, as they make clear in the final ensemble number: “We’re one of a kind/ No category/ Too many years/ Lost in history/ We’re free to take/ Our crowning glory/ For five more minutes/ We’re Six!”
Six is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, June 17th, to Saturday, June 28th
