Review: SIX

As the year rolls around, the new season at the American Repertory Theater (ART) starts. This year, Kate and I decided to go all-in, getting preview tickets for all seven major shows. The first one, SIX, was last night.

tl;dr: Let's set this relative to other ART musical productions. It's not quite as good as Jagged Little Pill, but that's a high bar -- I expect JLP to win a pile of Tonys next year on Broadway. IMO, SIX is better than either Finding Neverland or Waitress, both of which started here and went on to become major Broadway hits. So yeah -- go see it, it's great.

I went into the show expecting some sort of historical rock opera, a la Hamilton. It turns out to be very much not that. Instead, SIX is specifically a big, loud, glorious pop concert, starring six divas in competition: the six wives of Henry VIII, each of whom gets one song to prove that her marriage sucked the most.

Mind, this is not a collection of downbeat woe-is-me: each of the Queens is fierce in her own way, and the only really down-tempo song is Jane Seymour's power ballad ("Heart of Stone") of sticking by her man and then dying when things were going well.

One of the delicious conceits of the show is to draw the musical inspiration for each Queen from one or two distinctive pop stars, so while it's all modern pop music, each has her own distinctive style. So you get Catherine of Aragon's Beyonce, a Nicki Minaj-flavored Anna of Cleves (putting wonderful swagger into "Get Down" as she describes how absolutely terrible is was to be kicked out of Henry's bed, to wind up with her own castle and fortune to enjoy), and Catherine Parr's Alicia Keys trying to bring everyone together and heal some wounds.

The standout for me was Katherine Howard, whose number ("All You Wanna Do") starts out as simply Britney Spears sexy bubblegum pop but gradually unfolds a biography of sexual abuse that left the audience gasping. (A great showstopper brings the audience instantly to their feet, but a brilliant one can leave them so unsettled that they don't know whether it is okay to clap.)

Add three ensemble numbers for all of the Queens (including the over-the-top-German "Haus of Holbein" in mid-show), and you have a crisp 80-minute one-act that is by far the highest-energy show I've ever seen at the ART. It lets each Queen shine in her own way, grapples with the central problem in their lives (suffice it to say, Henry doesn't exactly come across well here), and in the end does a nice job of reframing the narrative. The cast (all but one of them visiting from the Chicago Shakespeare production) are all distinctive and fabulous, with good enough pipes that if you'd told me they actually were stars I couldn't naysay it.

I know that not all of my friends appreciate modern pop music, but to everybody else: it's playing through the end of September. Go see it -- it's a blast...