Review of Six on Broadway

As someone who spends a ton of time seeing Broadways shows whenever I have to come up to New York City for work, it’s shocking that I haven’t gone to see Six yet. This came out years ago and has been massively hyped, but I could never really justify the price point for a show I knew that I wasn’t going to care for as much.

One thing about running a blog and spending a ton of time ruminating about what kind of things I like in a show/movie/book has really led me to have a defined sense of what I don’t and do like, which means that I have a good idea of what doesn’t end up catering towards my tastes.

The only reason I ended up seeing Six this trip was the fact I ended up spotting that TodayTix was having a sale. There was no way I was going to pay up to $100 for back row normally, but the chance of having a more decent seat for $65 seemed like a better opportunity for me, and so I took it.

I was seated through TodayTix in Row J, right in the center, and I thought that it was a pretty nice seat compared to what I paid considering this was TodayTix I’d bought it through.

Here’s my review!

The story of Henry VIII’s six wives, told through a musical format.

Six, as a musical, is pretty brief. I’ve seen people describe it as a very short concert, and I was shocked at the run time even though I knew what it was beforehand. In a nutshell, the show is each of the wives coming together, deciding they need to have a competitive, and decide who got screwed over by their shared husband the most.

They then each get a solo song to divulge all of their trauma, which is inspired by various pop stars in the contemporary era.

At this point, Six has been out for several years, but I genuinely think that for me personally, it’s dated. This isn’t a show that could probably be revived again and again because of how rooted it is in contemporary styles of music, and the singers that are popular now aren’t going to be popular in twenty-something years.

It’ll serve more as a time capsule of this specific period in time, but I can’t imagine it getting revived when it has run its due course on Broadway.

One of my larger critiques of the show is about its lack of plot, especially since we pretty much just get power solos from each girl, having the other girls as their backup, with some funny little quips in the background in-between songs.

Granted, there are some great puns in this, but I think that that humor just didn’t line up with mine throughout. The audience loved it though, and there were quite a few people getting up to dance at certain points of the show.

There’s also the question for me is the feminist nature of the show. I tend to specialize in women/gender studies, so what I was thinking when I was watching the show is that it needed to be established earlier on that they’re fighting for themselves and the right to be seen as they are versus their relationship to Henry.

In the show’s current framework I think it feeds into narrative that they are nothing without Henry, and that last little song at the end is just the “oh right” moment. I wanted more of that and their lives outside of him, as that’s what would truly make their individual stories shine. It shows them as individuals.

Besides all of this, the cast was great. I don’t know much about the original English or Broadway casts, but I thought these ladies did a fine job. We had the understudy for Catherine of Aragon and honestly, I would have never even know if I hadn’t had the slip in the Playbill.

Understudies rock, y’all. Don’t miss a show just because the lead’s not in.

Overall Thoughts

I know I complained a little bit in this blog post, but I think it’s a fun show if you don’t think too hard about it. The performers they select to portray the queens are always pretty good from what I’ve heard, and I wasn’t disappointed in the quality in no way what so ever.

I’m glad I saw this, but I wouldn’t pay a ton of money to see it instinctively and I was right about that. It simply wasn’t my cup of tea for what I look in theater, and that’s fine. I’m sure it is for other people.