The North American touring company of Six, now playing at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Joan Marcus.
Six wives? Holy history, that’s three more than my total.
I didn’t behead any, of course.
Six the Musical tackles that number (of Henry VIII wives) and turns the 500-year-old sorry saga into extraordinary entertainment — replete with fantastic vocal cords and rock chords, fantastic layered metallic costumes, and a fantastic light show.
Henry, we’re told, cut off two of his Tudor queens’ heads and divorced two others. One died of natural causes. One survived.
Despite that bleak-scape, Six the Musical is pure escapism, feminist-style (since its point of view flips from the king to the women). And it gives attendees at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco a chance to steer clear of the reality of their own lives while it distorts the reality of what the show labels “her-tory.”
Like Hamilton, this is revisionist stuff. Big Time.
Yesterday’s opening night audience couldn’t care less, however, about evaluations, academic references, or the possibility that the presentation is in a sense a #metoo-ish reaction to Henry’s abuses. The crowd was too busy screaming with glee and clapping wildly after each of the nine tunes — leaping, in fact, to a standing “o” for the finale and the “encore” that followed it with scads of glitter falling from the rafters.
Didi Romero (center) plays Katherine Howard in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.
It’s clear that the glitzy sextet morphs from being villainous or invisible — and supporting players in royal history — to being 21st Century females who can attain distaff empowerment. Accompanied by lots of clever sexual innuendos and mentions of being “un-friended” and TikTok and other digital entities.
Featured characters are Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. Each gets to hog the spotlight for a soliloquy in song. Each is modeled on modern pop artists that in a sense reflect her personal story (Rihanna, Beyonce, and Alicia Keys, for example).
The gimmick is that they’re competing — even to the point of nasty cat-fighting — to be lead singer of their girl band, ultimately a sisterhood of sassy, joking divas. The supposed test? Who had the worst time being Henry’s wife?
The theme of the plotless, intermission-less, concert-style, 80-minute, touring BroadwaySF presentation is “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived,” a couplet based on a sing-song melody long favored by British kids.
Lyrics more than once lean on forced rhymes, as when Anna of Cleves contends, “You said that I tricked ya/’Cause I, I didn’t look like my profile pictcha.”
And laugh-lines in Six the Musical aren’t subtle. Consider this interchange: Jane Seymour asks what hurts more than a broken heart? Anne Boleyn responds, “A severed head.” Still, the show shows that beheadings can be funny or entertaining — especially when they’re merely conversational and not as lurid and in-your-face as scenes in Sweeney Todd or Little Shop of Horrors.
On occasion, the subject matter here is cringeworthy. Such as Katherine Howard explaining her molestation at age 13 and desire to be loved — including her attraction to Henry when she was 16 and he was 49, a geezer in those days.
Olivia Donalson (center) portrays Anna of Cleves in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.
All that considered, the musical is much better than one might expect since it evolved from a concept-album concocted by two Cambridge University seniors, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, both triple-threats as playwrights, composers, and lyricists.
Feminists should love that the four musicians on stage behind the six — the “ladies in waiting” — are all women. They’ll probably love as well that Catherine Parr details in “I Don’t Need Your Love” that she managed to fight for female education and wrote books without the king.
The musical, which won 23 awards during the 2021-22 Broadway season, including a Tony Award for best original score (music and lyrics), can’t be taken too seriously. But seriously, you should head down to the theatre — although I strongly urge you check out the lyrics online before going so that they won’t miss a lot of the wordplay that zips by.
Six the Musical will play at the Orpheum Theatre, 1182 Market St., San Francisco, through March 19. Tickets start at $56. Info: 888-746-1799 or tickets@broadwaysf.com.
Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.
