SIX Outside of Marriage
The catchy appeal of a girl power musical retelling the story of Henry VIII
I should start by showing my cards, which are a royal flush of biases. I am the target audience for SIX. The venn diagram of interests you have to have to enjoy this musical: Medieval and Renaissance history, empowering female vocalists, catchy pop songs, and witty wordplay used to communicate progressive values is one Reilly-shaped circle. The only time I felt more in the target audience of a performance was when I saw a Lorde concert where Run the Jewels was inexplicably but delightfully the opener.
I bring this up because I suspect the very qualities that made SIX land for me will make it an immediate “nope” for others. Art is often defined by the stylistic and tonal choices of the creator, therefore genres like musicals can be particularly polarizing because of how inherently stylized they are. I discovered this firsthand when I realized that Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and Bo Burnham’s Inside, both sacred musical texts for me, held zero appeal for my brother. For him, I later learned, the very medium of rhyming pop song as vessel for social commentary is simply too on-the-nose and too saccharine to drink from. So when the opening song of SIX had an EDM-style synth breakdown of “Greensleeves” I could almost feel my brother groan and change the channel in Bed Stuy from all the way across the country.
I’ll also be really direct about two things. The first is that SIX is not perfect and it’s certainly not a history dissertation. The second is that if you’re into this sorta thing you’ll have a really good time. Leaving SF’s Orpheum theater after viewing it, I felt positively buzzing with joy, energy, and inspiration. Emerging into a magical mist of March rain, the Beaux-Arts dome of city hall glowing green like Minis Morgul in honor of St Patricks Day, the only thing I wanted to do more than find a Tiki Bar was shout out “I just saw SIX” like I was Akon guest starring on a Lonely Island song. Judging by the chatty buzz up and down Market Street, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
SIX is a musical about the six wives of England’s most famous neckbeard, Henry VIII. What most of us remember about Henry VIII is not his atrocious facial hair, however, but how he changed the course of England and Christianity forever when he decided to create his own branch of the church just so he could legally get divorced. This ultimate flex of patriarchal power let him move from wife 1, Catherine of Aragon, to wife 2, Anne Boleyn, who he grew tired of and had beheaded on suspicion of adultery, which conveniently let him marry her lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour suspiciously soon after. After she kicked the bucket, he went back to the drawing board and three more wives followed. These marriages included running back the newly-minted tactic of divorce and another beheading for good measure, before Henrys poor health and a jousting injury finally took him down while married to Catherine Parr, wife six. I never learned most of this in school, so the fact that I can recite it here is a testament to the educational power of SIX.
The main point of this musical, however, is not just to educate you on the well-trodden path of Henry’s marriages. It’s to re-center the women in the story in a bit of pop-feminist jiu-jitsu. This reframing is abundantly clear from the opening song “Ex-Wives,” when the queens march onstage in glittery outfits that would be at home in a Super Bowl halftime show and self-referentially frame the story with this couplet:
”Welcome to the show, to the histo-remix
Switching up the flow, as we add the prefix”
They know their audience and know the vernacular to use, ending the song with:
“Get your hands up, get this party buzzing You want a queen bee, well there's half a dozen”
The queen bee reference is apt because the experience of watching SIX feels like a buzzy cocktail of the intellectual triumph of Hamilton and the turbocharged girl power of a Beyoncé concert. Yet none of this would work if the songs weren’t good and I found the raw musicality of the live performance to be simply incredible. All six of the actors playing the queens could belt their parts in jaw-dropping multi-part harmonies while nailing the music-video-caliber dance choreography. While Hamilton hit slightly harder emotionally for me, from a musical standpoint, SIX nailed the “musical” half of “musical theater” much better than Hamilton. I suspect this is because it’s easier to sing live than it is to rap live. Miranda’s commitment to fast paced multisyllabic rhymes creates lyrical spires that only the musical Alex Honnolds of the world can summit, favoring certain performers and privileging the broadway cast recording over the live show or the Disney+ film. Yet while SIX’s songs aren’t a cake walk to get right, the performance I saw showed that they were clearly possible to nail live. The melodic power, harmonizing, and breath control of the six titular queens was just breathtaking to see in person. Overall, the sheer spectacle of the triad of singing, dancing, and glittery costumes was second-to-none.
The arrangements are also catchy as hell. This is a musical that will have you re-listening to the soundtrack afterwards in a way you haven’t since the Hamilton soundtrack burrowed into our ears during Obama’s second term. “No Way,” sung by Catherine of Aragon has the commanding power of a Beyonce ballad with the danceable bouncy instrumentation of a made-for-radio Shakira hit. Like Hamilton, the lyrics are exceedingly clever and wittily condense entire paragraphs and pages of history books into pithy little couplets. This musical alchemy turns chunks of history that are saltine cracker dry and transforms them into sweet and tangy morsels of pop starbursts. This is thanks in large part to the use of witty millennial vernacular that make the dense and depressing history much more palatable for a modern audience. For example, in cheekily named “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” a punk pop banger with Avril Lavigne vibes, Anne Boleyn explains the formation the Church of England by singing:
“Tried to elope, but the pope said nope” before elaborating that “The rules were so outdated. Us two wanted to get x-rated. Soon, ex-communicated. Everybody chill, its totes God's will.”
In German dance pop parody “Haus of Holbein” we get this darkly funny slant rhyme about Tudor beauty standards:
“So what? The makeup contains lead poison. At least your complexion will bring all the boys in.”
“Get Down,” one of my personal favorite songs about Anne of Cleves, has the syncopated pre-chorus build of Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It” and the female empowerment vibes of Little Mix. It’s also got this sassy lyric about Anne’s post-divorce Renaissance:
“All eyes on me, no criticism. I look more rad than Lutheranism. Dance so hard that I’m causin’ a sensation. Okay ladies, let’s get in reformation.”
“All You Wanna Do” by Katherine Howard sounds like vintage Britney Spears. It even has the same major to minor chord progression of “Toxic.” Indeed, it’s so catchy you almost forget it’s about sexual exploitation of young women, Howard having been taken advantage of since the age of 13 by everyone from her music teacher to her employer long before she met Henry, who proceeded to do the same. This makes the Britney pastiche hit extra hard. We’re left to wonder how our own society’s lust for sexualizing young women before chewing them up and spitting them out is any different from Henry’s era.
SIX has an impactful yet taught 90 minute runtime. With only nine songs with some cheeky banter in between, this musical has no intermission and no padding. Yet I felt that it delivered nearly the same amount of insight, humor, and pop history as Hamilton in less than half the time.
SIX is also a bit more progressive than Hamilton, at least in its framing. While Hamilton invited us to see familiar history from the novel perspective of an overlooked founding father who died young, it didn’t do much to center new voices. While we may not have heard about Hamilton’s life in the juicy detail of Chernow’s biography and Lin Manuel Miranda’s hip hop remix of it, the narrative features a laundry list of dead white dudes whose perspectives we have heard from plenty: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lafeyette, and co.
Sure, Miranda did try to shoehorn in some pop feminism with lyrics from the Schuyler sisters like “We hold these truths to be self-evident That all men are created equal"And when I meet Thomas Jefferson (unh!) I'ma compel him to include women in the sequel.” He also tried to play up racial justice, most promisingly (and perhaps superficially, as my brother noted) with his inclusive casting and a few mentions of Hamilton and Laurens’s abolitionist sentiments. There was also the third rap battle about the evils of slavery that was cut for time.
SIX on the other hand is explicitly about understanding a familiar story and man through voices we haven’t heard from. The narrative explicitly centers the misunderstood and overlooked perspectives of the women he loved, fucked, and largely cast aside with wanton disregard. While the songs are upbeat earworms except for one slow Adele style ballad and another Alicia Keys-esque one, the themes are quite dark. As you connect all the cheeky couplets together, you piece together the fact that this is ultimately a story of abuse, sexualizing and then silencing younger women, and one man repeatedly getting away with being a pretty awful person. So as fun as it is, SIX is also something of a Trojan horse, a bedazzled F-U to the patriarchy.
The feminism inherent to the reframe of the production hit especially hard at the end. While the show is initially framed as a sing off to see which of them suffered more at the hands of Henry, the performers break the fourth wall before the climax. They invite us to wonder why we think about these women only in terms of their relationship to this objectively terrible man. In the closing song, over the optimistic jangling of a ukelele, the queens asks us to consider a counterfactual where non of them ended up with Henry and lived richer, longer, happier lives apart from him. In a saccharine bit of metafiction they even imagine pursuing music separately and then teaming up to form a girl group together, singing:
“We're one of a kind No category. Too many years Lost in history. We're free to take Our crowning glory”
By this point I found myself tearing up like the end of Coco, but I couldn’t tell if it was because the song was so hopeful or the reality was so sad. The contrast between the pop optimism of the musical and the dark tragedy of the real history borders on dissonance at times but the climax of the show sticks the landing with flair. The standing ovation at the end felt genuinely emotional and earned.
Everyone else in SF had the same idea to get tiki drinks after the show, so we had to pass on the rummy pleasures of Smuggler’s Cove due to the long line. Over gin cocktails at Phonobar, our conversation flowed naturally to our favorite songs and then how other abhorrent powerful men in history got away with so much for so long. Harvey Weinstein came up almost as quickly as how much one of the songs felt like a Beyoncé banger. At one point someone asked:
“Soooo beheading counts as spousal abuse, right?”
In chuckling and then earnestly discussing that point we all had to come to terms with the fact that these characters clearly lived in a very different time and also that the world we live in now is still quite sexist, exploitative, and violent towards women. For us, the themes hit just as hard as the music.
The lasting power of SIX is that, like Hamilton, it makes you see the people and drama of the past with the intensity and vocabulary of the present. I left the show wondering how many other famous women in history I only understand through the limiting and patriarchal lens of their ties to often terrible, abusive men in their lives.
We don’t have to travel back in time to find out. We just had a sleazy womanizing president with a mere 2 ex wives. I’d imagine a musical re-telling of Donald Trump from the perspectives of Ivana, Marla, and Melania would be fascinating, though perhaps not as catchy as SIX. I for one would pay money to see a rhyming dramatization of a few key moments. For example, imagine the icy breakup ballad depicting the scene at Aspen when Trump had his mistress Marla Maples there while there on vacation with wife Ivana and his children. When Ivana confronted Trump about his infidelity, he apparently told her that he had no interest in having sex with a women who’s had children- a line that could have come straight out of Henry VIII’s mouth.
After divorcing Ivana in 1992, and marrying Marla Maples with Henry VIII-esque speed in 1993, Trump said in a 1994 interview,“"I tell friends who treat their wives magnificently, get treated like crap in return, 'Be rougher and you’ll see a different relationship.'" Someone get this man his own branch of Christianity. Yikes.
Are our modern day kings really that different than the Tudor ones? Have we really come that far from the behavior and rhetoric of Henry VIII after all? I am honestly not sure. What I do know is that it takes a deft, confident hand to compress the history of misogyny and patriarchy into glittering musical diamonds. Sure, crowd-pleasing musicals can’t attone for the sins of the past nor can they prevent the injustices of the present. However, I also think people are far too quick to dismiss musicals like this simply because they’re popular and based in the medium of popular music. This intentional stylistic choice is precisely what makes them so accessible. Let’s not ignore the fact that making history accessible and relevant is not easy and is its own form of artistic success. As we got up to leave the show, I couldn’t help but notice how full the theater was of young women and girls who were as excited about this show as their parents. So I’d wager that this uptempo history concert has sparked more empathetic conversations than the efforts of dozens of history books & podcasts, which seems to me to be the biggest crowning triumph of all.