SIX in London: A Guide to the Concert-Style Musical

“Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” is one of history’s most efficient pieces of bad storytelling. It makes six women easy to remember by reducing each life to its relationship with one man — and, more specifically, to the way that relationship ended.

SIX begins with the familiarity of that shorthand and then spends 80 minutes arguing against it. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss do not place Henry VIII at the centre of a lavish Tudor court. Henry VIII never appears on stage. Instead, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr form a pop group, take the microphones and compete over which of them endured the most.

The concert format can look like the show’s brightest gimmick. In fact, it is the engine of its argument. These women have been remembered as a sequence; SIX turns them into performers capable of addressing the audience in the first person.

How the queens’ competition frames the story

At first, the queens appear to have found a way to control the story. Each will present her case in song, and the woman judged to have suffered most because of Henry will become the group’s lead singer. It is a witty structure because it converts familiar history into the language of a televised talent contest: distinct personas, solo numbers, audience allegiance and the promise of a winner.

But the terms still belong to Henry. Measuring the queens by divorce, execution, death or survival leaves the old hierarchy intact; it merely lets them argue over their positions within it. The competition asks six people to turn trauma into entertainment and treats pain as though it can be objectively ranked.

How each queen’s musical style shapes her character

The score gives every queen a distinct contemporary musical identity. That choice does not pretend that 16th-century England sounded like a modern arena concert. It allows the women to appear as active interpreters of their own lives rather than figures being reconstructed by a solemn narrator.

A solo song can do several jobs at once. It can deliver a recognisable piece of biography, establish how a queen wants to be seen and reveal the distance between her public performance and what she has experienced. Humour becomes part of that self-presentation. So do costume, choreography, vocal style and the relationship each performer builds with the crowd.

The handheld microphones matter. So does the all-female onstage band, the Ladies in Waiting. The production does not hide the machinery that lets the queens be heard; it displays women making the sound of the show together. The visual language combines Tudor silhouettes with the armour and shine of pop-tour costumes, refusing a choice between historical reference and contemporary power.

How the concert format involves the audience

By treating the people in the Vaudeville Theatre as a concert crowd, the queens can speak to them, invite a response and use the energy in the room as evidence in their competition. Cheering becomes part of the dramaturgy: viewers are encouraged to choose favourites and reward the most persuasive performance — precisely the habits the show will eventually ask them to reconsider.

Its length helps. At approximately 80 minutes with no interval, the show has the compact drive of a set rather than the shape of a traditional two-act musical. The lighting, haze, loud music and direct address sustain the sense that the queens have taken over a venue for one night. There is little room for an elaborate palace, and none is needed: the stage belongs to the performers rather than to Henry’s court.

How SIX adapts Tudor history

SIX should not be mistaken for a complete lesson on Tudor England. It compresses events, uses modern idiom and builds each queen into a heightened pop persona. Its purpose is not to replace biography with a definitive new account.

That distinction is especially important in Katherine Howard’s material, whose pop styling sits against a story of exploitation and sexual trauma. More broadly, the official guidance notes discussions of miscarriage and personal trauma of a physical and sexual nature. The show’s pop brightness does not erase those subjects; at its most effective, it reveals how easily an entertaining persona can conceal them.

The cleverest historical rewrite in SIX is therefore not a corrected date or a newly discovered fact. It is a change in grammar. Henry becomes the absent “ex”; the six objects of his story become the subjects of their own. By the end, the question is no longer which queen deserves to lead the group. It is why anyone assumed they needed his story — or a competition — to make them worth hearing.