Six: The Musical
More concert than musical, the 80-minute show's libretto adds little to its cast album, with the lyrics of each queen's autobiographical song also pruning their individual histories to a point even a Wikipedia writer might consider reductive. The English nursery rhyme "Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived," which the women recite at the beginning of the sing-off, pretty much sums up writers Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow's level of interest in the lives of Catherine of Aragon (Adrianna Hicks), Anne Boleyn (Andrea Macasaet), Jane Seymour (Abby Mueller), Anna of Cleves (Brittney Mack), Katherine Howard (understudy Courtney Mack in the performance I saw), and Catherine Parr (Anna Uzele). In between the songs, the women disparage one another's suffering, all in an attempt to snipe their way to the grand prize: leader of the group and, with it, the audience's adulation. [more]