SIX

SIX is a pop musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII, staged as if the queens were a girl group playing one short, intermission-free concert. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr take the microphone in turn, each arguing that Henry treated her worst.

This is a new British musical, not a revival or an adaptation: its story is drawn from Tudor history. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss wrote the book, music and lyrics as students at Cambridge University, and a student company premiered it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017. An open-ended run in London's West End followed in 2019.

The Broadway production lost its first opening night to the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020. When SIX finally opened on October 3, 2021, no other new musical had reached opening night since Broadway went dark. It won the 2022 Tony Award for Best Original Score and later set the record for the longest run at the Lena Horne Theatre.

The setup is simple and comic. Henry's six ex-wives have formed a pop group and agree that whoever suffered most at his hands will sing lead. The opening plays on the old schoolroom rhyme for their fates: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Henry never appears; the queens and their onstage band are the whole show.

Each queen gets a turn to argue her case. Catherine of Aragon, the loyal first wife, refuses to accept the annulment or the nunnery Henry has in mind for her. Anne Boleyn plays her own downfall for laughs, with plenty of attitude. Jane Seymour, brushed off by the others as the wife who had it easy, slows things down to explain that Henry's love depended on her giving him a son.

Halfway through, a visit to Hans Holbein's portrait studio turns Henry's search for a fourth bride into a dating-app parody. Anna of Cleves, rejected for not matching her portrait, admits she came out ahead: wealthy, single and settled in her own palace in Richmond, she happily quits the contest.

Then the mood darkens. Katherine Howard's flirty number about her many admirers gradually reveals men who used and abused her from a young age. Catherine Parr, the last wife, asks why six women should rank themselves by one man, sings about the love she had to give up and points to what she achieved on her own.

The show keeps the big historical facts, including the marriages, the annulments and the two executions, but takes liberties with the details; its view of Katherine Howard as a survivor of abuse is one that historians still debate. At heart, it is about six women remembered mostly as one man's wives taking their stories back.

Marlow and Moss wrote a pop score and drew on Beyoncé's 2011 concert film Live at Roseland: Elements of 4, which blends live performance with storytelling. Each queen is a mix of two real pop stars, which the show calls queenspirations:

• Catherine of Aragon: Beyoncé and Shakira
• Anne Boleyn: Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne
• Jane Seymour: Adele and Sia
• Anna of Cleves: Nicki Minaj and Rihanna
• Katherine Howard: Ariana Grande and Britney Spears
• Catherine Parr: Alicia Keys and Emeli Sandé

"Ex-Wives" opens the concert by introducing all six queens and the rules of the contest. "No Way" is Catherine of Aragon's refusal to step aside, and "Heart of Stone" is Jane Seymour's ballad. "Haus of Holbein" is the dating-app spoof in the painter's studio, and "All You Wanna Do" sets a story of abuse to a bright, flirty pop sound. In "I Don't Need Your Love," Catherine Parr questions the whole contest.

The concert idea shapes the staging. The queens sing into hand-held radio microphones instead of the head-worn mics that most musicals rely on, and they wear in-ear monitors. An all-female band, the Ladies in Waiting, plays live onstage in costume, each player with a Tudor-style persona: Maria on drums, Bessie on bass, Maggie on guitar and Joan on keyboard. The writers wanted a cast made up mainly of women and non-binary performers, and they built queer themes into the show.

As of October 2026, two queens from the original West End cast are in the Broadway company, both having made their Broadway debuts on August 17, 2026: Natalie Paris plays Jane Seymour through December 13, 2026, and Aimie Atkinson plays Katherine Howard until the matinee on October 31, 2026. Chloe Tucker Caine (Anne Boleyn) and Stephanie Jae Park (Catherine Parr) joined the same day, and Olivia Donalson plays Anna of Cleves.

In late 2016 the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society chose Toby Marlow, then a final-year student at Cambridge University, to write a new musical for the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and Marlow recruited fellow student Lucy Moss. Marlow read Antonia Fraser's The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Moss watched Lucy Worsley's documentary series Six Wives, and the pair have said they cared more about how musical theater portrays women than about the Tudors. The first draft took roughly 10 days of writing, not all in a row.

After a preview at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge on July 31, 2017, the student production sold out its Fringe run (August 3 to August 27, 2017) and was invited back for 2018. Producer Kenny Wax saw it back in Cambridge and teamed up with George Stiles and Wendy and Andy Barnes. Its first professional run, six Monday nights at London's Arts Theatre, started December 18, 2017. A UK tour followed from July 11 to December 30, 2018, and the studio album, SIX (Studio Cast Recording), came out on August 31, 2018.

An open-ended West End run opened at the Arts Theatre on January 17, 2019, and earned five Olivier Award nominations that March. It later moved to the Lyric Theatre and then, on September 29, 2021, to the Vaudeville Theatre. As of October 2026, it is still running in London, alongside a UK tour, a production in Australia and a Spanish-language version that opened in Madrid in September 2026.

The North American premiere opened at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on May 14, 2019, as a likely Broadway tryout, and was extended. In August 2019 the producers announced a tour and a Broadway transfer; the company went on to Cambridge, Massachusetts (American Repertory Theater), Edmonton (Citadel Theatre) and St. Paul (Ordway Center).

Broadway previews began at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on February 13, 2020, and stopped on March 12, 2020, the planned opening night. They resumed on September 17, 2021, and the show opened on October 3, 2021, with the 2019 touring queens: Adrianna Hicks (Catherine of Aragon), Andrea Macasaet (Anne Boleyn), Abby Mueller (Jane Seymour), Brittney Mack (Anna of Cleves), Samantha Pauly (Katherine Howard) and Anna Uzele (Catherine Parr).

That performance became SIX: Live on Opening Night, released May 6, 2022, and described as the first original Broadway cast album recorded live on opening night; it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard cast album chart. On November 1, 2022, the Brooks Atkinson was renamed the Lena Horne Theatre, the first Broadway house named for a Black woman, and the show recouped its investment in December 2022. On June 27, 2025, its 1,545th performance passed Waitress (1,544) for the longest run in the theater's history.

A live film of the original West End queens, shot at the Vaudeville Theatre in June 2022, reached UK and Irish cinemas on April 6, 2025, and US and Canadian cinemas on August 14, 2026.

At the fifth-anniversary performance on October 3, 2026, the company told the audience that close to two million people had seen SIX on Broadway. As of October 2026, it had played 2,081 regular performances and 47 previews, and a North American tour was on the road. On August 27, 2026, the producers announced that the Broadway run would end on January 3, 2027, after an expected 2,178 performances.