Homegrown ‘her-story’ hit ‘Six The Musical’, concocted by Cambridge students Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss in 2017, is now a world-conquering smash-hit, with productions springing up everywhere from Broadway to South Korea and Sydney. This theatrical phenomenon is still just as enjoyable a watch at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, where rapturous audiences applaud its feisty reclamation of women’s stories.
The evening is a super-slick 80-minute irreverent blast from the past aimed at setting the record straight. It is laudably succinct: many more bloated shows could learn from Six’s laser-like focus. The absence of an interval enhances the shows propulsion and dynamism.
The format is mock Tudor pop concert cum talent-show, with the audience in the imaginary position of judge. Each cast member (in combatively kittenish, slightly kitsch, period-allusive attire – think Vivienne Westwood meets warrior woman) takes it in turn to make her case (via vocal prowess and potted autobiography) for having had it the worst, to gain the prize of victimhood’s crown. The tightly drilled sextet also act as backing singers for one another.
The score adroitly toggles between pop and R&B genres, striking gold with a session of German techno. Lots of clever ideas lurk beneath the glitter, and the lyrics are packed with poise and witty rhymes (‘tried to elope but the pope said nope’). Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s choreography, Tom Curran’s orchestrations and Joe Beighton’s vocal arrangements are unswervingly sharp.
Add in a rocking four-piece band, and it’s a compact company – but one that makes a disproportionately large impact. That’s partly thanks to the performers’ enormous personalities: the show doesn’t just allow for their individual interpretations; it actively thrives on them.
Thao Therese Nguyen is the seductive scene-stealer of the current cast. Playing the sardonic Anne Boleyn, Nguy?n portrays her as a live-action vixenish cartoon character: eyes wide and lips pouting like Betty Boop, with a girlish giggle and a convincing mock-naiveté. She makes a point of reiterating that, in the domestic trauma stakes, nothing quite competes with being beheaded.
Excellent too is the company’s Dance Captain Gabriella Stylianou, who confidently embodies the teeth-gritted, tested-beyond-endurance Catherine of Aragon. It’s an oddly relatable female stance, even if the behaviour she’s describing is being shipped over to England to marry a prince who then dies – ‘so naturally I’m imprisoned for seven years.’ Stylianou builds from a controlled vocal delivery to ferocious riffs.
As Jane Seymour, Caitlin Tipping invests her confessional ballad with real feeling and electrifying high notes. But the number that’s grown most in resonance belongs to Katherine Howard, who was constantly abused by older men. In ‘All You Wanna Do’, Inez Budd viscerally expresses her sickening experiences of violation.
Reca Oakley is a riot as Anne of Cleves, whose divorce left her wealthy and independent. Oakley ‘gets down’ with flirtatious body rolls and slinky drops in her raucous, hilarious ‘Haus of Holbein’ number, which skewers women’s beauty standards in a Berghain-esque arrangement – the other queens donning neon shades and ruffs for the number - a surreal mash-up of German oompah music and banging House. Each member of the cast performs in their natural accents, and the American Oakley brings a distinctive attitude.
Hannah Lowther plays a pulchritudinous Catherine Parr. She is the first of the six to point out that comparing traumas isn’t exactly healthy – leading to the show’s girl-power denouement.
Amidst the comic cat-fights, preening, posturing and flippant backchat, there is profound question here: who, in the last analysis, suffered the most? Is it no contest if you got beheaded? What about the broken heart, the shattered romantic dreams, the death during child-birth? In conveying the ‘real’ experience of these corseted characters, the show demands we put ourselves in their restrictive place and asks whether their outrage and their hurt would be so very far removed from that of their modern-day sisters? History is spun on its head to become herstory and you’re left wondering if Henry himself was in fact the sideshow.
The infectiously fun production (directed by Moss and Armitage) is more polished than ever – the choreography and lighting silkily synchronised like the deftest human embroidery. None of the cast misses a beat – or mischievous wink – as they hurtle through Hamilton-like rap, stirring soul, Hi-NRG beats and girl-power anthems. Six is a riotous, life-affirming act of restoration:these queens are set reign over the west end for years to come.
Vaudeville Theatre, The Strand, London WC2R
