Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past.
Today on History Calling I bring you a podcast rather than my normal video documentaries
and the topic is a review of the musical SIX which I recently saw in the Grand Opera House
in Belfast.
I’ll be telling you a little bit about the background of this show, what I thought of
its music and lyrics, how historically accurate the information provided was and what I made
of its costumes and staging.
I’ll also be comparing it to some other famous musicals you may have seen and telling
you whether I would recommend it to you to see for yourselves.
There are therefore lots of spoilers in here, so if you want to avoid those, you should
stop listening now.
The musical SIX was created by Cambridge university students, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss as a contribution
to the Edinburgh Fringe festival held in 2017.
It is based on the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII, who were, in order of marriage;
Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine
Parr.
Anne of Cleves is called Anna in the show, no doubt to help distinguish her from Anne
Boleyn and because that’s what she was sometimes called in life too, so I’ll be calling her
Anna for the rest of this podcast as well.
According to the beautiful but still rather expensive programme I purchased (it’s not
very long and unfortunately has quite a lot of grammatical errors in it), part of Marlow
and Moss’s original idea for the musical was to offer a new perspective on the Queens
separate from their experience as wives.
They also wanted to have them tell their own stories as they believed at the time they
wrote their original manifesto that the lives of the Queens have been predominantly told
by men over the centuries (which isn’t actually a very accurate view of the historiography
on the six wives, but it is something which is backtracked on elsewhere in the programme)
and they aimed to show that even today ‘there are still parallels to be found in the female
experience’.
They likewise wanted to demonstrate that women can tell great stories which aren’t about
and don’t include men.
The show sets the mood before it even begins.
A large purple curtain covers the stage (purple being the colour of royalty of course and
one which is also carried through into the show’s merchandise) and there’s harpsichord
music playing in the background to evoke the 16th century.
When the show starts, we are immediately introduced to each Queen and to the live band who play
on stage with them.
No other characters ever join them.
The plot is very simple.
The former Tudor queens are forming a band and they compete with each other as to who
should be the lead singer.
The one who can show that she was the worst treated by Henry, wins.
After the initial group number, they mostly sing solos with the other wives as backing
singers, with the notable exception of the song Haus of Holbein, which I’ll come back
to.
In the end though, Catherine Parr points out that they shouldn’t be defining themselves
by Henry and that they should own their own stories.
They then do another joint number, then each sing an imagined happy ending for themselves,
which of course none of the women ever really got.
This realisation came a bit late in the day for me, as I would have liked to see the women
joining forces with, rather than against each other much sooner, but I’m sure many others
won’t mind it.
The music is a mix of pop, rock and (in the case of Jane Seymour) a ballad and while I
don’t think it’s of the standard of something like Phantom of the Opera (again, let’s
remember this was written by students) the tunes are still very catchy, the performers
have excellent voices that span every octave you could ask for and I defy you not to tap
or even sing along with them during the show and find yourself humming at least one of
the numbers for days afterwards (for me, it’s the titular song, Six).
Something you’ll notice very quickly however if you have any experience with musicals,
whether on stage or in movie format, is that SIX is actually much closer to a concert.
There is very little conversation in between songs and nowhere near the amount of acting
or narrative storytelling that you would get in something like Chicago, Sunset Boulevard,
The Sound of Music or Hamilton.
I suspect this is thanks to the show’s roots as a Fringe event written by then-students
and it also helps to account for its very short runtime.
At 80 minutes it is by far the shortest show I have ever been to in a theatre and the only
one I’ve ever attended which had no interval.
The only other thing I’ve seen which was this brief (in fact it was briefer being only
60 minutes long) was, funnily enough, a student acapella show held in a lecture hall at the
Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2022.
Moving onto the content of the songs.
As an historian, what did I make of these?
Gang, I have to tell you, I was mighty impressed.
With very few exceptions the lyrics provided an accurate retelling of the history of the
six wives of Henry VIII, a task which is no mean feat when you consider that the whole
thing had to rhyme as well.
There were just a couple of factual slips, such as when Anne Boleyn mentioned having
had three miscarriages when the actual number was two (though this is corrected in the programme)
and when the wives sang that Christina of Denmark (a teenage princess whom Henry had
wanted to marry after Jane Seymour’s death), went on to marry the Duke of Milan.
In fact, by the time Henry sent his court painter, Hans Holbein, to take Christina’s
likeness, she’d already been widowed by the Duke of Milan and later went on to marry
Anne of Cleves’ ex-fiancé, the Duke of Lorraine.
These are minor quibbles though and you’ll get a much more factually correct version
of the wives’ story from SIX than you would do from many TV shows about them.
I also like that we usually hear what these women’s lives were like before and sometimes
after Henry.
Catherine of Aragon mentions her first marriage to his brother Arthur.
We hear a little bit about Anne’s time in France and Anna of Cleves has a blast recounting
how great her post-Henry life was, living in a Castle with lots of money and no man
to tell her how to spend it.
Mind you she then has to admit that this means she can’t win the competition for who was
treated the worst and drops out.
Catherine Parr’s first two marriages and her love for Thomas Seymour (who later became
her fourth husband) are examined in detail, though I don’t recall the fact that Thomas
was Jane Seymour’s brother ever being mentioned, nor was Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard’s
relationship as first cousins.
Maybe the writers thought that would get confusing for non-historian viewers or that the idea
of these women competing against each other might not play so well if you realise that
two of them were close blood relations and another two were sisters-in-law.
Catherine Parr is of course portrayed as the survivor, just like her entry in the rhyme
divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived suggests and we don’t therefore
hear about her tragic end 19 months after Henry, when she died after giving birth to
her daughter by Thomas.
We do hear about her work as an author though (she was the first woman who published an
original, English-language work under her own name in England) and details like these
help to vindicate the writers’ claim that they wanted to show the women’s lives outside
of their connection to Henry.
That being said, I have to admit that on the whole I don’t think this desire was realised
as much as some might like it to be.
Though I know some will disagree with me, I personally believe that the sad fact of
the matter is that these women are primarily famous because of who they married, just as
Henry is most famous for having married all of them.
I don’t think it’s really possible to view them as entirely separate entities from
him and vice versa.
They will always be remembered first and foremost because of their famous royal marriages.
With Parr’s true end omitted and Anne apparently choosing not to dwell on the fact that her
death left her daughter without a mother at the age of two, the way is left open for Jane
Seymour to sing about never getting to see her child grow up after also dying from childbirth
complications.
The song which broke my heart though, wasn’t her ballad about leaving Prince Edward without
a mother (he was a wee terror by the way, just like his Dad and signed off on the execution
of Jane’s two brothers).
No, the one which got to me was Katherine Howard’s solo which ran the full gambit
from fun to tragic as she took us through her life.
I told you that the show is pretty much entirely accurate and when you hear the litany of levied
against this girl by a series of older men starting when she was only about 13 and only
ending when the last of them, Henry, had her killed in her early 20s (at most), it’ll
be a hard-hearted listener who doesn’t empathise with her and feel a strong mix of anger and
sorrow at what happened to this very young queen of England.
I must admit I was surprised at how good a job the writers and the singer did at making
me feel for her in this way in the middle of what is generally a very upbeat, funny
musical/concert.
Kudos to all involved for doing such a good job.
The other thing we have to talk about in relation to the content of the songs and the short
conversations in between them, is the humour.
SIX isn’t the funniest thing you’ll ever see, but I did laugh out loud a few times
and it’s definitely played as a comedy.
Anne Boleyn in particular gets some great one-liners, such as when Jane opines ‘what
hurts more than a broken heart’ and Anne chips in with ‘a severed head’.
There are a couple of pretty raunchy jokes in there too however including one to do with
Anne’s head (I’ll say no more about that), so bear that in mind if you’re taking younger
children to see it.
The writers have also done a good job of making the wives’ story relevant to modern times.
We’ve already touched on the perennial problem of certain men abusing women, as seen in Henry’s
treatment of all his wives and especially in what Katherine Howard suffered throughout
her life, but the relevance of their experience to the 21st century is also made in a more
light-hearted manner in the song Haus of Holbein.
This song looks at Henry’s aforementioned attempts to find a new wife after Jane’s
death and describes how Holbein was sent around Europe to get paintings of all the eligible
young princesses, including Anna of Cleves, her sister Amalia and Christina of Denmark.
The song is staged like the women are being viewed in a dating app, with Anna eventually
chosen based on her looks, only to be rejected for not closely enough resembling her profile
picture and it’s a clever little skit on modern internet dating and the problems of
photo filters.
Speaking of the staging of the show, overall this is quite simple.
There is nothing as elaborate as the chandelier which descends from the ceiling in Phantom
of the Opera, there are few props and with no interval there are almost no costume changes
either (a notable exception being a quick change by Anna of Cleves, but I don’t want
to give too much away there).
The outfits are very loosely based on some aspects of 16th century female dress, particularly
in the shape of the bodices, the square-cut necklines and Anne Boleyn’s famous B necklace
but they also have a real rockstar twist, with plenty of metal work and sharp edges.
Katherine Howard also has pink hair and clothing to emphasise her youth and supposedly wild
spirit.
Some of the historical references are from the wrong time period, including the use of
ruffs which were an Elizabethan accessory, but I can’t say I really cared about this.
Obviously we aren’t meant to take such things entirely literally.
So, what are my final thoughts on SIX and would I recommend it to you?
Well, I found this a very enjoyable night out.
The songs are great, the energy from the performers is infectious and the history is almost entirely
spot on.
I do wish it was a little bit longer as it’s an expensive ticket for an 80-minute show
and it’s not something that I would rewatch as often as I might do other musicals, but
if you love these Tudor queens and enjoy concerts or musical theatre, I think you’ll have
a great time.
Admittedly I don’t feel that the writers met their goal of telling a story about women
that didn’t include men (something they admit to themselves in the introduction in
the programme), as Henry VIII still looms over the entire thing even if he doesn’t
appear on stage.
However, as I said earlier, I also don’t think it’s possible to tell these women’s
stories without mentioning Henry a lot (and vice versa) so I wouldn’t let that fact
put you off.
I think this was an unachievable goal set with the best of intentions by some slightly
over-enthusiastic university students.
The fact that they didn’t realise that particular ambition doesn’t take away from the scale
of their overall achievement.
Even with his shadow over the Queens’ lives and their songs, SIX still brings a huge amount
of fun to the stage and it would be a great introduction to the theatre for anyone not
sure if it’s their thing.
At the end of the showing I saw the cast and band got a standing ovation which isn’t
something I’ve ever experienced in such a venue before and it was well deserved.
I’m giving this four out of five stars and happily recommending it to you if you have
the chance to see it.
If you enjoyed this content, please remember to give this video a like and subscribe to
the channel with notifications switched on so that YouTube lets you know every time I
upload.
Before I head off, I’d also like to say a quick thank you as always to my wonderful
Patrons and to those of you who support my channel using the thanks button beneath the
videos for your unstinting kindness and generosity which helps to make this a viable career.
If you’d like to learn more about the real six wives, try one of these options next and
let me know in the comments below what you thought of SIX if you’ve seen it, or if
you haven’t seen it yet, whether you’d like to.
I’ll be back next week with a new video for you and until then, keep learning.