Do you enjoy the following: puns, parodies, pop music, noise, neon, shiny stuff, shrieking audiences. If you answered no, then The newest bunch of West End Queens sing, dance and banter across the Vaudeville Theatre stage in Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' brash, hyperactive musical.
Jane Seymour, Anne Boleyn and Cleves, and Katherine Aragon, Howard and Parr, are "live in consort" for a pop gig/competition to set the record straight about their famous ex. Each Queen has a different artists' influence, from Lily Allen to Rihanna. Marlow and Moss' mastery of these different genres within pop is impressive and exciting. While Seymour's Adele-style ballad Heart of Stone doesn't have the emotional resonance it's intended to, it's the only weak link in a show full of bangers. Howard's solo, All You Wanna Do was the standout song for me. What begins as an Ariana Grande-style track laden with cheerful innuendo becomes increasingly disconcerting as Howard explains how she was manipulated and exploited by the men around her. By the end of Koko Basigara's rendition, you could have heard a pin drop.
Dionne Ward-Anderson has a blast with the role of Cleves. Dismissed by history as "the one in the painting who turned out not to be as pretty in real life", Marlow and Moss characterise her as living her best life in her free palace post-divorce. Ward-Anderson is living her best life too, and hers was my top pick for performance (Six's conclusion suggests that we don't need to pick a Number One Queen. However, like Pokemon and Quality Street, everybody has their favourite).
Six is best-described as full-on. Gabriella Slade's costumes drip with jewels and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille's choreography is frenetic and fun. The show veers from a parody of dating apps to a 90s Euro-disco interlude (the random, ridiculous, hilarious Haus of Holbein). Jokes and wordplay ping all over the place, frequently LOL-worthy, occasionally grating. The effect of all this is a lot to keep up with though, and Six's 80 minute runtime avoids it becoming overly exhausting.
The show's swerve into feminist messaging at the end is crumbly, but just about hangs together in a Spice Girls girl power sort of way. Arguably, the signposting in unnecessary because Six's all-female/non-binary cast and band, who are of a variety of races and sizes, is already powerful feminist stance. It's also refreshing that the Queens perform in their own accents. Whoever would have thought of an Aussie Anne Boleyn!?
Like Hamilton and &Juliet, Six's casting and musical genre appeal to new audiences who might otherwise not be fussed about musicals. And actually, while the conceit of Six is a pop concert, it's musical theatre at its purest: storytelling distilled, both in the writing and the acting. The franticness of Six won't win over everybody, but the skill of Marlow and Moss' songwriting, and the musicals' showcasing of acting talent, demonstrates the grit beneath the glitz.
