6 reasons why Six the Musical is the breath of fresh air Broadway needs

It’s official: Six is Broadway-bound. The “concert” musical about the six wives of Henry VIII will be coming to the Great White Way next season at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. 

Divorced, beheaded, Broadway-bound. What started out as a way to procrastinate for two British students during finals week has now become an international sensation.

Though we’ll have to wait until next year to see Six live on Broadway, here are six reasons why this unconventional historical musical is the breath of fresh air Broadway needs.

It brings new creative voices to Broadway.

While most major shows on Broadway right now are written and scored by veterans of the industry, Six is the exact opposite. Not only does it come from off west-end writers, but the two creative minds behind the musical have no previous experience in Broadway at all.

The show’s writers, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, are a pair of British students studying at Cambridge. In fact, the show was written and composed while the pair were studying for finals, and was presented by the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society during its debut in 2017.

We have nothing against the big names in broadway today, but we also think that it’s important to let new voices shine as much as the older ones do. Given how young Moss and Marlow are, Six is a sign to aspiring writers that age is no limit when it comes to success on Broadway.

It has a unique sound that isn’t common in modern Broadway.

To fans of musical theater, there are certain hallmarks that make music sound like a “typical Broadway song.” We’ll always love the classics, but sometimes it gets tiresome when so many shows sound the same musically.

Enter Six. Unlike most Broadway musicals, which feature a full orchestra, Six only uses four instruments, all of which are onstage during the performance of the musical itself. Six also draws inspiration from famous divas of modern music. In fact, many fans have pointed out that each individual queen seems to be emulating the style of specific pop artists — from Adele to Beyonce to Alicia Keys.

The cast is incredibly diverse.

The beauty of Six is that its leads have very few requirements in terms of looks. Any actress can play any role, and we love that. Throughout the show’s run, many of the actresses featured have swapped characters; one night they may perform as Anne Boleyn and the next as Jane Seymour.

In terms of diversity, such flexibility gives the creative team behind Six the ability to cast anyone in the role, regardless of their looks.

It’s full of kickass women.

One of the central themes of Six is the concept of previously sidelined women taking back the power in their own stories and rewriting the narrative that history has laid out for them. When people think of Henry the VII, they frequently think of the fact that he cycled through six wives, but not so much about how those women lived or felt.

Take Katherine Howard, for example. In most history books, you’ll read that Katherine was a flirty young woman who cheated on her husband and was thus beheaded for it. However, in the musical, her song tells the story of lifelong abuse and manipulation starting from when she was a child, and her desperate struggle to find a man who isn’t interested in her purely for her looks.

Six gives power to a group of women who have thus far been rendered powerless, and it’s incredibly empowering to watch them tell their stories live on stage.

It’s more of a concert than a musical.

Though we tend to give most stage productions set to music the blanket title of “musical”, in truth, Six is actually more of a concert. The show isn’t quite sung-through like Hamilton, nor is it a traditional musical like, say, Anything Goes.

Instead, Six acts as a concert, with each queen performing her individual story as a song, and frequently breaking the fourth wall to interact with the audience. Instead of characters, the queens are presented more as real-life performers who started a band. We love this twist on the traditional Broadway format. It’s an uncommon but still very effective way of telling a story.

It’s an original story that hasn’t been told on Broadway before.

While you’re likely to find the story of Henry the VIII in PBS documentaries or history books, Six the musical is certainly unique when it comes to its story — which cannot necessarily be said for the majority of Broadway today.

Broadway seems to be taking a page out of Hollywood’s book, rebooting and adapting dozens of well-known stories. Shows like Spongebob, Beeltejuice, Pretty Woman, and Waitress, while great, are all based off prexisting material instead of original concepts. We’re always in favor of originaility over adaptations, so Six is a step in the right direction in our eyes.

Are you a fan of Six? Do you plan on seeing it next year when it comes to Broadway? Sound off in the comments below.