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Queens of Pop: SIX is a Splendid if Shallow Concert

The concept of SIX is quite fun for a musical. It is also exactly the kind of concept you would expect from a pair of theatre kids in university -which is indeed when Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss first created the show. Crossing the stories of the wives of Henry VIII with the aesthetics of girl pop and some very blunt themes on patriarchal readings of history and the notion of restoring these women’s own agency to their stories feels like the kind of idea that would originate in the context of learning academic theories of historiography and feminism for the first time and melding that with some familiar nostalgia. That’s not a knock on the show necessarily, it clearly worked -and Marlow and Moss had the talent to compose it all in a competent way and the foresight to understand the structural limitations of the idea. This likely wouldn’t work as a Hamilton-style epic, it needed to be a short and simple yet striking concert.
And as a concert it is a pretty good one. SIX is the latest pro-shot musical to make its way to theatres after having built up its power and popularity on stage since 2019. This production is a 2022 reunion of the show’s original West End cast explicitly for the sake of a film, which is clear in several little details of how it is shot and composed -applying a couple techniques unconventional for live recordings. But then it isn’t emanating the immediacy and intimacy of a live recording as much as the spectacle of a concert film.
The conceit of SIX is essentially that of a concert though in the format of a music competition show. Bookended by ensemble numbers, the movie presents each Queen in succession in her own terms with a solo emphasizing her history, story, and the impact of being married to Henry -the contest seeking to determine who had it the worst off. These numbers are broken up by small interstitial bits of rapport to give the characters a chance to play off each other and showcase their individual personalities as assigned for this show.
They are a group, but they are all individuals. It is the central contradiction of the show, which aspires to present the Queens as both a pop collective brand in the vein of British girl groups of the 90s, particularly the Spice Girls, and as singular women with their own lives and agencies deserving of more than simply being connected to the legacy of one man -a man whose legacy as they note is broadly informed in popular culture by the fact of his marriages to all of them. It is a theme that works against the show's premise and format which thus broadly defeats its intended meaning and impact. If anything, the Queens are reinforced as six parts of a whole, distinguished merely by slightly different backstories and aesthetics that fit in with a singular overarching persona. For a show that is very proud of itself and fairly smug in its final stretch through a meta commentary explicitly laying out what it believes its message is, it is not as sharp or bold or effective as its writers clearly perceive. As in many of the pop acts it takes after, its girl power is rather shallow.
And yet that shallowness, though certainly not intentionally so, functions as a part of the charm in the group’s presentation. It fits the image at least of what the group SIX is aiming for. And a lot more thought was clearly put into that than the politics of the show. Each Queen is styled in a unique way that melds Tudor fashions with pop star glamour, often a specific brand of glamour evocative of a specific pop figure. Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is modeled in part off Ariana Grande, Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris) is very clearly a pastiche of Adele, and there is certainly some Rihanna on display in the boisterous costuming and attitude of Anne of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh). It is reflected aptly as well in their songs which take on the tenor associated with their adopted identities -most bluntly in the case of Seymour, whose melancholy ballad "Heart of Stone" mimics well the grand operatic gravitas of a "Someone Like You" or "Hello". It's worth noting her solo features the other Queens less prominently than they appear in each others' songs.
The eclectic variety to the musical performances keep the show fresh and engaging, and they never feel entirely discordant from one another, because they match so well onto the singers and characters -at least as this show chooses to cast its characters, which are extrapolations off of some of the historical details we have of their namesakes. There is a touch of reductiveness in this -Catherine of Aragon (Jarneia Richard-Noel) is 'the woman scorned', Anne Boleyn (Millie O'Connell) is the exciting flirt- but enough historical details are worked in that the show demonstrates a modest educational value. The romance that Catherine Parr (Maiya Quansah-Breed) was forced to give up for example is often forgotten, but it is a fascinating and crucially sympathetic part of her story that here adds a layer of depth to the least spotlighted character of the show.
Hers is a really good number too -"I Don't Need Your Love" being perhaps the dark horse highlight of the musical. Some songs are better than others, a couple just don't quite hit, such as the ensemble's German techno parody "House of Holbein", and for as much as I appreciate the show acknowledging the luxury Anne of Cleves lived in the rest of her life despite the bad hand of "ugliness" she has been tainted with by history, the uproariously hedonistic tone to her "Get Down" feels hollow. But Aragon's "No Way" and Howard's "All You Wanna Do" are fun and while the "Ex-Wives" opening ensemble number is dulled by the ghastly lyric "Divorced, Beheaded, LIVE", their closing number "Six" is a great showcase of all the Queens in harmony. Both songs lean heavy into the girl group aesthetics and associated charm, and luckily the fact the performers have good chemistry is very tangible.
That is made explicitly clear in the lengthy puff-piece documentary that precedes this movie showcase charting the history of the show's success and the relationships between the cast to impart a sense of the show's importance. It's rather obnoxious and does little for audiences who are not already diehard fans of the show. Apart from that, the cinematic choices made with this production are more relevant and intentional. The camera moves a lot more freely on the stage than in most other pro-shot musicals, rarely ever showing the audience or even a long shot of the singers on stage. It brings the audience for the movie more intimately into the space of the performers, perhaps a little at the expense of the audience in person. It is clear that even the marks for the actresses are sometimes different as they perform for the camera as much as the crowd. And on a couple occasions the movie employs an original tactic to translate an aspect of the show built for live performance, such as a couple cuts to black for transitions and adapting a moment where the house lights come up (a distinction that would not come across on film) into the more grounded perspective of a handheld camera in the audience. An odd choice, but one that does somewhat capture an equivalent effect.
SIX is not a particularly rich show -it doesn't live up to its thematic intents and is in fact even a touch gauche in the dated form of girl power with which it reframes history. But it can't be denied that the concept is fun and the style in the execution is genuinely thrilling. It's understandable why the show has been so successful as a live act -the aesthetic nostalgia attached to the gimmick is very appealing and the songs can be quite catchy and the performances (at least these ones) highly charismatic. This movie version suggests more the better experience than it replicates one -the disappointing qualities to the musical are more apparent in this format, but it is a worthy enough capsule of the show for those who can't catch it another way.

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