Culture
Last Sing-Along for the Queens, Six Sets Its Broadway Goodbye
Five years after it reopened Broadway, the Tudor pop concert plans one more loud night at the Lena Horne before it closes in January
Six opened on Broadway on October 3, 2021. The city had been dark for a year and a half. The theater district was a row of empty marquees, and then six women in studded costumes walked out at the Lena Horne Theatre and sang as if they had been waiting the whole time. They had. It was the first new musical to open on Broadway after the shutdown.
This Saturday is the fifth anniversary of that night. It will also be one of the last birthdays the show gets on 47th Street. Six plays its final Broadway performance on January 3, 2027. By then it will have given 2,178 performances.
Before it goes, the producers are throwing one more party. On Thursday, October 29, at 7 p.m., the show will hold its final sing-along performance. At these nights the usual theater rules are suspended. The audience is invited to sing every word, and plenty of them already know every word.
A Concert Disguised as a History Lesson
The idea still sounds like a dare. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss took the six wives of Henry VIII and turned them into a pop girl group. Each queen gets a solo and a sound. Each one competes to prove she suffered most at the hands of the king. Then the competition falls apart and the queens decide to tell their own stories. The queens are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for the microphone.
It began at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and ran all the way to a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 2022. Along the way it collected 35 international awards. Moss co-directs with Jamie Armitage. The choreography is by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille. Gabriella Slade's costumes, all metal studs and neon, became the look of a generation of theater kids.
The show is short, about 80 minutes with no intermission. That is part of why it works as a night out. You can make an early dinner, see the show, and still be in a bar before ten with a song stuck in your head.
The queens are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for the microphone.
A Long Run at the Lena Horne
Six had a rough start. It began previews on February 13, 2020, and its opening night landed right as Broadway shut down for the pandemic. When it finally opened in the fall of 2021, it became a symbol of the street coming back.
According to BroadwayWorld, it is now the longest running show ever to play the Lena Horne, the 39th longest running show in Broadway history, and the seventh longest running Broadway show to come from Britain. That is a lot of nights for an 80 minute concert about the Tudors.
The current company includes Khaila Wilcoxon as Catherine of Aragon, Chloe Tucker Caine as Anne Boleyn, Natalie Paris as Jane Seymour, Olivia Donalson as Anna of Cleves, Aimie Atkinson as Katherine Howard, and Stephanie Jae Park as Catherine Parr. Paris and Atkinson are making their Broadway debuts. They were also part of the original West End cast, and they appear in Six The Musical Live!, the filmed version that reached American cinemas on August 14. From October 5 through November 22, Najah Hetsberger steps in as Catherine of Aragon.
The numbers have softened. The tracking site Theatre Gold noted that the show's capacity fell to about 59 percent for the week ending September 28, after Broadway Week discounts had filled the house in the weeks before. Long runs end that way. The crowds thin a little, the producers pick a date, and the last months turn into a farewell tour on home turf.
The Queens Are Not Going Anywhere
Closing on Broadway does not mean the show is going away. A national tour keeps crossing the country. The London production continues in the West End. There are tours in the United Kingdom and Australia, a return to China later this year, and a new Spanish language production in Madrid, according to Playbill.
What closes in January is the New York chapter, and that chapter mattered. Six was the sound of Broadway turning the lights back on. It felt built for people who did not think of themselves as theater people. It made the musical feel like a concert, which is exactly what a lot of New Yorkers were desperate for after a year at home.
The sing-along is the right way to say goodbye. It turns the house into the chorus. For one night the queens get backup from a full house of people who have played the cast album on the train, in the kitchen, and at the end of a long night out. Then there will be a few more weeks of regular shows, and a last curtain in early January.
Broadway's fall is already moving on, with a baseball revival on the way for spring, as we reported in Devil at the Stadium. But on October 29 the room on 47th Street belongs to the six women who reopened it.