Six the Musical at Lyric Shaftesbury Avenue review: YAASSS QUEENS
Yes, queens! Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s pop-feminist “histo-remix”, reclaiming Henry VIII’s wives as sassy, lung-bursting girl power icons, is the first musical to reopen in the West End, and it’s a smash. A glorious, exuberant 75-minute blast, by turns hugely smart and hugely silly, this little Edinburgh fringe show from 2017 has become the biggest cult hit since Rocky Horror. A transfer from the 350-seat Arts Theatre to the 967-capacity Lyric to allow for social distancing has done nothing to dampen the party atmosphere in the auditorium. You go, girls.
The setup is simple. Ranged in front of an all-female band, dressed in glittery Tudor-Samurai videogame outfits, Catherine, Anne, Jane, Anne, Katherine and Catherine belt out group numbers about their shared experience, then take turns at the mic to argue over who had the worst time with the fat, murderous, monastery-dissolving monarch. Eventually, they realise they are stronger together; and that if the patriarchy defines them as Henry’s wives, he is equally pigeonholed as their husband. I never said it was subtle.
The format enables composer Marlow and his co-writer Moss – who also co-directs with Jamie Armitage –to skip through genres, from Jane Seymour’s yodelling power ballad Heart of Stone to the raunchy R&B of Anne of Cleves’s Get Down (now there’s a sentence I never expected to write). Among the group numbers, the totally unexpected bierkeller techno of Haus of Holbein, sung by the company, made me laugh out loud.
The lyrics are deliriously witty. “Tried to elope but the Pope said nope,” trills Courtney Bowman’s flirty good-time girl Anne Boleyn. “Couldn’t wait any more to get my corset on the floor,” smirks Sophie Isaacs’ slinky Katherine Howard, before her song about being a plaything of powerful men takes a turn for the solemn.
The voices are strong across the board, the band is tight, and one of the chief joys of the show is in watching six women who look substantially more diverse than the average West End lineup revel in their power and charisma. Terrific fun. Henry who?
Booking to Sun 18 April, sixthemusical.com
