You Can Be the King (But Watch the Queen Conquer)

When I first heard of Six the musical, it was, as strange as this may seem, not through the various Broadway newsletters that are sent to my email nor was it through another musical theater fanatic. Instead, I learned of Six’s existence from TikTok, a mobile app that is primarily used for lip-syncing, bad dances, and capturing the dumb things that people do in their every day life. The song “All You Gotta Do” was becoming a popular sound that many TikTokkers began to make videos to, and anytime it would come across my For You page, I was always curious as to what the entire song was (TikTok allows for videos to be up to sixty seconds in length, but most audios don’t exceed thirty seconds). After scrolling through enough videos with the sound, I Googled where it originated from and was (pleasantly) surprised to see that it was from an up and coming Broadway musical.

With this knowledge, I then turned to listen to the studio cast recording and instantly became hooked. Much like Hamilton, there was little need for any visual aid or even a pre-existing knowledge of the show to understand what was happening. And the overall theme of Six had strong Hamilton energy to me: the music was pop-based which was a new sound that was entering the world of Broadway and the casting choices were primarily women of color, so it came to little surprise that Six began to be known as the English version of Hamilton.

However, the importance of Six goes beyond just bringing pop music to Broadway and being an educational musical. Through the lyrics and the overall structure of how Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow (both wrote the lyrics, the storyline, and composed the music), Six gives the wives of King Henry VIII more dimension than just being one of the six women who King Henry VIII made into his wife. The show goes into the depths of feminism, how it’s important to remember women correctly in history, and brings forward the conversation of women’s erasure from the books.

Right from the start, Six does little to disguise the fact that it is a feminist musical. The opening song “Ex-Wives” pokes fun at the small rhyme that kids learn to help keep the women in order (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived). But instead of stopping there, Moss and Marlow gave each Tudor a small but informative summary on the build up to their fate. In an interview with Kelly Apter, Moss talks about the importance of not asking the age-old question of which queen was more important than other queens and which one was ultimately the most important.

And not only does she emphasize the fact that all of the queens were important, but she also brings forth the fact that many of the women King Henry VIII married are remembered incorrectly or for all the wrong reasons. A prime example is in Catherine Howard’s song “All You Wanna Do”, which while it has an upbeat tune to it and is the song that took TikTok by storm and introduced me to the musical, the lyrics shed a light on Howard’s life and why she is always portrayed as a woman who slept around.

In the first verse, Howard sings about her first lover, music teacher Henry Mannox, who was twenty-three when he first slept with Howard, who was thirteen years old at the time. When I first gave the soundtrack a listen, the age gap (and the fact Howard was just entering teenage years) disturbed me, but the message that Moss was trying to give the audience completely slipped by me. In her interview with Apter, Moss states that Howard was always at blame for everything that happened to her when it came to men, but when someone is taken advantage of and manipulated in a very crucial developing period, it makes sense as to why she was as promiscuous as she was, and it turns the blame from being on Howard to being on the men who took advantage of her youth and naivety.

And Moss capitalizes on the fact that Howard shouldn’t be to blame for the amount of lovers she had had in her lifetime in Howard’s song. Each time Howard begins to summarize a new man, there’s the clear pattern that Howard went into the relationship believing that the man wanted more than just sex with her and that once the man got what he wanted, he deserted Howard. That idea is cemented into the audience’s mind when Howard sings, “I thought this time was different/Why did I think he’d be different/But it’s never, ever different” about her time with Thomas Culpeper.

The song “All You Wanna Do” doesn’t just bring dimension to the most scandalous of the six, but it also brings forth the conversation of how women always seem to be to blame for anything and everything. The treatment of Catherine Howard is a treatment that, unfortunately, many women who have slept around and/or have been sexually assaulted/manipulated face (men can also face it, but typically in today’s society, if a man sleeps with 100 people, he’s a legend, but if a woman sleeps with 100 people, she’s a slut).

Six does not just represent and tell the story of the six queens, but it also allows for the different generations of women to tell their own stories. In an article on TheaterMania by Suzy Evans, she writes about how the show is bringing the conversation of the different struggles and adversity that the generations of women face. Evans had three separate groups of women that she interviewed. The first was Marta Newlon, her daughter Camela, and Camela’s daughter Sydney; the second was Rosemary Maggiore and her daughter; and the final was Alisa Hurwitz and her daughter Maya.

In all three instances, all of the people in each of their respective parties were a part of a different generation, yet despite this, all of them found some common ground on their experiences of being a woman in the 21st Century. Marta, Camelon, and Sydney’s conversation revolved around how society’s views on women have changed. As she was a child from the 60’s, Marta has a different view than what her daughter and granddaughter have, and she makes a point of stating that even though they are just one generation apart, Camelon and Sydney are being raised in two different lifestyles.

The other point that was interesting was stated by Rosemary Maggiore. She brings forth a common occurrence when it comes to learning about King Henry VIII’s wifes and it’s that everyone tends to remember one queen (in Maggiore’s instance, it was Anne Boleyn). This statement intrigued me because it made me realize that prior to Six, I really only knew of Catherine of Aragon due to the fact King Henry VIII created the Church of England for the sole reason to be able to divorce her since the Roman Catholic church would not allow it to happen.

Intrigued by why my knowledge of the king’s wives was limited to just one, I discovered an article about the Matilda Effect, which basically brought forth the issue on how women are constantly erased from history. While the Matilda Effect is primarily affecting the women in the STEM fields, I find that a lot of it can be drawn to history and the arts as well. Most of the literature we read in school is written by a man, and the few pieces we do read about women, the women usually use initials instead of their name (S.E. Hinton, J.K. Rowling, etc.).

Chloe Gray, who wrote the article on the Matilda Effect, brought forth several points in which women in history often get the short end of the stick. We know all of the Great Scientists by their last names only (Darwin, Pavlov, Freud) but when it comes to Marie Curie, next to no one refers to her as just “Curie”. And even then, many of the women in history are tied back to a man. To bring Hamilton into this, whenever I talk of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton’s many accomplishments, it’s often prefaced with, “Eliza, the wife of Alexander Hamilton”. And even in the musical itself, while Lin-Manuel Miranda was quite revolutionary in the writing, all of Eliza’s post-Hamilton accomplishments are related back to her husband (see Eliza’s part in “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”).

This brings back the importance of having all of the six women that King Henry VIII married getting their own spotlight and solo song. In having each of the women have their own song, it does not minimize any of their roles in King Henry VIII life and instead shows just how little people really seem to know about the six wives other than their fates. Moss and Marlow’s execution of the musical is much like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in that it has catchy, upbeat tunes that are easy to keep the audience entertained as well as being educational. And because of this, it brings forth interest in doing more research on the women (ironically, in this research I learned that King Henry VIII took the throne at age 18, he had a waist of 34.7” and when he died, his waist was 51”).

The importance of Six doesn’t just end with its feminst message and the telling of women who got erased from history. The musical goes into deeper meanings of how society views women, and how, even though we had made tremendous progress in the 500 years since King Henry VIII was the Monarch over England, we still have much more progress to go, and we have many more stories of women’s roles in history that we need to begin to teach and not hide behind that of a man.

References

Apter, K. Lucy Moss: 'It Was Important We Didn't Just Use the Same Old Tired, Historical Question about Which Queen Was the Most Important'. (2018, Nov.) The List. Retrieved March 10, 2020 from https://www.list.co.uk/article/104964-lucy-moss-it-was-important-we-didnt-just-use-the-same-old-tired-historical-question-about-which-queen-was-the-most-important/

Evans, S. Empowering Message of SIX Brings Mothers and Daughters Together. (2020 Jan.)

TheaterMania. Retrieved March 10, 2020 from https://www.theatermania.com/broadway/news/sponsored-content-six-feature_90432.html

Gray, C. What Is the Matilda Effect? (2019 May). Stylist. Retrieved March 10, 2020 from https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/matilda-effect-what-is-it-erasure-achievements-by-women-susan-sontag-hidden-women/267412

Smith, J. L.. SIX: The Musical about Henry VIII's Wives That's Making History Hip. (2020 Feb.) Daily Mail Online. Retrieved March 13, 2020 from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-7978999/SIX-musical-Henry-VIIIs-wives-thats-making-history-hip.html

Thorpe, V. From the Fringe to Broadway, Tudor Musical Six Is Now a Global Hit. (2019 June). The Guardian. Retrieved March 13, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jun/22/six-musical-henry-wives-fringe-to-broadway-lucy-moss-toby-marlow