Six the Musical creators: ‘How can you be an emerging artist when there hasn’t been a real-life theatre industry?

We all know the rhyme about King Henry VIII’s wives: Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Chances are, that’s probably all you know about these six historical women. Back in 2017, determined to look beyond the refrain and educate the world about the wives’ backstories, writers Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow created the feminist pop musical Six. As the show’s tagline reads, these women were instead “divorced, beheaded, live in concert!”

Six is a true musical for the digital age, with an army of fans on social media and nearly one million monthly listeners on Spotify. Its ability to tap into that youth audience is surely helped by the fact that its creators Moss, 27, and Marlow, 26, were in their early twenties when they wrote the show. Theatre has a reputation for being stuffy and outdated, but the duo are lively and energetic as we speak over Zoom, with Moss at one point getting distracted as a man passes the window on a skateboard pulled by his dog. They are also, understandably, ecstatic about the reopening of venues this week and the prospect of seeing “so much goddamn theatre” again.

Six’s premise is simple: what if Henry VIII’s wives performed in a girl band? The members (Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, Catherine Parr) compete among themselves to decide who suffered the most at the Tudor king’s hands, telling their stories through a wide spectrum of pop songs. There’s a German techno/oompah band mash-up about the “Haus of Holbein”, while Anne Boleyn’s Lily Allen-esque “Don’t Lose Ur Head” features phenomenal lines such as: “The rules were so outdated/Us two wanted to get X-rated/Soon, ex-communicated/Everybody chill, it’s totes God’s will.”

Moss and Marlow’s own narrative has only added to the mythology around Six. The pair wrote the musical while studying at Cambridge University, a place which they say had “money to throw” at student theatre. The show was performed for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, where they were scouted by a theatre producer from London and offered the chance to stage a showcase at a West End venue. They never looked back.

Moss and Marlow have a clear talent when it comes to songwriting and have spent lockdown working on a new full-length musical together. But they’re keen to stress that their story – and in turn, Six’s story – is one of privilege. With the financial backing of Cambridge University, they didn’t need to make a profit at the Fringe and say they likely would have still appeared at the festival this year, had they been starting out mid-pandemic. “If we hadn’t been at a really fancy privileged institution, we wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Moss says. “I feel really sad for people that can’t.”

Coming at a time when London’s West End was dominated by US imports, Six felt like a true British success story when it opened in 2019. The show was poised for global domination, with a residency at a London theatre, a UK tour on its way and new productions opening on Broadway and in Australia. Then… well, you know what happened next. “It was open in all these places at once and then it was open nowhere because of the pandemic,” Marlow says. “There was a pandemic?” Moss jumps in. “Oh my god, I haven’t checked my phone for a while.”

When Broadway shut down last March, the Stateside cast of Six were mere hours away from their opening night. It was a naturally disappointing moment, but as Moss recalls, “the main feeling on that day for me was relief that we didn’t have to worry about being the ones making the decision as to whether to pull it or not”.

Moss and Marlow were told that the show would likely reopen “in a month”, later readjusting to a presumed debut in September 2020. The day that we speak, Six has finally been given a go-ahead date for September 2021.

Understandably, they’re a little sceptical, even when Marlow points out this is the “most tangible” timeline they’ve been given so far. “I feel like I’m not gonna be like, ‘Okay, cool’ until it’s been on Broadway for like a month,” Moss says. “Even on the opening night, I’m gonna be like, ‘Are we going to be here tomorrow?’”

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But while Broadway audiences will have to wait until the autumn to see Six, socially distanced productions are starting up in the UK this very week. The Tudor song-fest begins its national tour on 18 May, with the London production back just three days later on 21 May and the pair are itching to return. They’ve been burnt before, but as Moss reasons: “Previously it was just like, ‘Yeah it’ll probably be fine’, but there was no reason why it would be. At least now with vaccinations … there’s a plan [of] how to get there, as opposed to, ‘We think [coronavirus] will have just gone by then’.”

As the creators of Six (Moss is also the show’s director), the pair feel an intense sense of responsibility when it comes to their cast and crew. It’s why they agreed to adapt Six as a drive-in concert tour last summer, even if “I wasn’t thrilled about doing a watered-down version of it”, Moss says. The main impetus ultimately was giving the company an opportunity to work. Sadly, like many other mid-pandemic ventures, it was eventually cancelled due to ever-changing restrictions.

Having made the leap from young performers to Broadway playwrights in a short number of years, the pair are acutely tuned into the concerns facing young theatre makers when it comes to the pandemic and beyond. The impact of the last year on those starting out in the industry, Marlow says, has been, in Marlow’s words, “devastating”. “How can you be an emerging artist in the theatre industry when there hasn’t been a real-life theatre industry?” Marlow also fears that “the people in charge are going to feel more hesitant about taking risks with emerging artists” due to the financial impact of lockdown on the arts.

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However, there are slivers of hope. Moss and Marlow have spent lockdown watching digital theatre shows, which they say have broadened the conversation around accessibility and how it can be seen by people other than those who “can afford to be in that room”. There’s also been the Black Lives Matter movement, Marlow says, and the conversations it has prompted about representation in theatre and “the voices that are platformed and commissioned and given importance compared to other ones… I feel like, hopefully, when new work is being funded and new writers are emerging, the people in charge who have the money and the power [are] thinking more about the kind of voices that they are platforming”.

Because Six is a delicious fantasy, where Henry’s wives are a hyper-iconic 21st-century girl band, casting is mercifully wide open. The show features racially diverse casts in all its productions, which is something Moss and Marlow strictly stipulate. “[We] make sure that it’s not an audition room where there’s two people of colour and 100 white people and then we’re tokenistically choosing. If you widen the pool, then it organically happens,” Moss says. The look they’re trying to recreate is that of a girl group and in 2021, girl groups are rarely “five short white brunette women standing next to each other”.

While Moss and Marlow are theatre makers, they’re also first and foremost fans of the art form. The easing of lockdown restrictions means not only the return of Six, but of many other shows and the pair are in the process of mapping out their summer plans. “We have a plan to go to The Ritz for afternoon tea, get incredibly drunk and then go and see [fellow pop musical] And Juliet again,” Moss says. “I’m just so excited about seeing lots and lots,” agrees Marlow. “Quantity? Oh yeah, f*** quality,” he says, with a laugh. “Quantity of theatre.”

Six begins its national tour on 18 May, and resumes its London run at the Lyric Theatre on 21 May