Six were six, the wives of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon (divorced and cloistered), Ana Bolena (beheaded), Jane Seymour (dead), Ana de Cleves (divorced), Catherine Howard (beheaded) and Catherine Parr (survivor).
All of them are resurrected on stage, with an explosive mix of costumes from the Tudor era and
paraphernalia from samurai video games
, calling for war and declaring themselves insubordinate in
Six
, the musical of the moment.
The coronavirus halted the meteoric career of the six queens, who were at least able to debut in the West End and briefly return before the end of the year, although they stayed at the gates of Broadway.
However, the
success of some of its numbers among the TikTok youth (such as
Ex-wives
or
House of Holbein
) has led to the phenomenon in the networks that has compensated for all the torture of 2020 for the world of theater.
More than a musical,
Six
is something like a pop opera, with hardly any dialogue, rather a succession of
hits
inspired by the most popular singers of the last three decades and with a rabid message of female empowerment, with subliminal references to the # movement. MeToo.
E
nrique VIII thus appears as a macabre predecessor Harvey Weinstein
.
The creators of
Six
, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, went straight to the sources to write the musical.
Marlow was inspired
by Antonia Fraser's
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
;
Moss soaked up
Lucy Worsley's
documentary series
Six Wives
.
Together they saw a concert pulling
Beyoncé's
performance
,
Live at Roseland
, and that's when the spark caught, when they were still students at Cambridge.
Image of a dance uploaded by the 'Six' actresses on TikTok.
Catalina de Aragón, very Catholic herself, in her work turns into a creature in
the style of Beyoncé or Jennifer López
, and sings a powerful solo titled
No way
(which includes parts of her famous Blackfriars speech).
Ana Bolena wears her hair with "space buns" a la Miley Cirus and makes up like Avril Lavigne at the time of singing
Don't lose ur head
, with sarcasm directed at the jealous and decapitating husband: "I couldn't wait to see my corset on the floor. "
Jane Seymour likes ballads in the style of Adele or Celine Dion, like that
Heart of stone
("heart of stone") that marks the transition to the fourth
ex
, Ana de Cleves, where Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea converge.
Catalina Howard refers us to distant Britney Spears with
All you wanna do
, and Catalina Parr laughs the last with
I dont need your love
, sung to a hypothetical dying husband.
The six queens compete before the audience as in a television contest: viewers must determine which of them suffered the most at the hands of the perfidious monarch.
On the fly - and with a lot of march - they discover that unity is strength and they join the chorus of "I don't need your love", and from there they go on to
Six
and
Megasix
, and
the theater becomes a party
.
The fleeting return to the Lyric Theater on December 5, with half the capacity due to the Covid restrictions, caused a furor.
The entry of London into the "high alert" level has meant the new closure of cinemas and theaters, and we will have to wait to see how the year starts to see if the queens return to their natural space of the Arts Theater.
Meanwhile, the legion of fans of the queens
huddle
around the
virtual
Queendom
that sweeps cyberspace, before the astonished eyes of its creators, who premiered it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017 and hope to be able to shoot the film version soon .
Much of the success, they say, is due to the strength of the incredible roster of actresses-singers who infect the audience with the energy of
a concert without pause.
Image of a performance uploaded by the actresses of 'Six' on TikTok.
Jarnela Richard-Noel plays Catalina de Aragón, Coutney Bowman plays Ana Bolena and Natalie Paris plays Jane Seymour.
Alexia McIntosh, who plays Ana de Cleves, remembers the frustration they felt when they were "dethroned" by the pandemic and the high that little by little they noticed when they saw the
show take
off virtually (
Dont lose ur head
has already exceeded 11 million visualizations).
"We tried to keep the flame of the musical alive, but
we didn't have the TikTok phenomenon
," admits Lucy Moss.
"Children and young people are not usually interested in musicals, but this shows that something is changing. Maybe we even get them interested in history."
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