SIX the Musical — Vaudeville Theatre
There is a particular kind of fatigue that sets in after you've seen a show enough times to know exactly which lyric gets the biggest laugh, exactly where the light cue lands, exactly which Queen the crowd will lose their minds over before she's even finished her first verse. I've sat in the Vaudeville stalls for Six more times than I can count on both hands, and I walked in this time half-expecting to spend the evening admiring the machinery rather than feeling anything from it. I was wrong, and I am delighted to have been wrong.
For anyone who has somehow avoided the cultural juggernaut that Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss built in their final year at Cambridge: Six takes the six wives of Henry VIII — Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleeves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr — and reimagines them as a pop girl group, each stepping up to the mic in turn to make her case for who suffered most at the hands of history's most notorious serial husband. It runs a lean 75–80 minutes, no interval, and it plays less like a book musical and more like a genuinely brilliant pop concert that happens to have a plot folded quietly inside it.
What struck me most on this viewing wasn't the concept — I know the concept intimately by now — but how completely alive it still felt in the hands of the current company. New casts have come and gone at the Vaudeville since the show made this theatre its permanent home, and the temptation with a show this tightly choreographed is to simply slot performers into pre-carved grooves. That is emphatically not what's happening here. This line-up brings a distinct, lived-in chemistry to the stage; there's a genuine sense of six women who've found something between them, not six soloists taking polite turns. Vocally, the standard is as high as I've ever heard it at this venue — every Queen gets her showstopper, and every one of them earns it, with the kind of pop-belt control that would hold up on any arena stage in the country.
Gabriella Slade's costumes remain, for my money, one of the great design achievements of the modern West End — Tudor silhouette collapsed into glitter-soaked pop-star armour, instantly legible as both history and headline act. Tim Deiling's lighting still knows exactly when to turn the Vaudeville into a nightclub and when to pull back and let a ballad breathe, and the "Ladies in Waiting" — the show's onstage all-female band — continue to be criminally under-praised for how hard they're working underneath all that spectacle. Carrie-Anne Ingrouille's choreography, meanwhile, has aged not one day since I first saw it; it still looks like something these six women invented themselves on the spot, rather than something drilled into them.
The thing that keeps bringing me back, though — and the thing I think a first-time audience underestimates walking in — is the turn in the final third, when the competitive premise (who had the worst marriage?) quietly dissolves into something more generous: an insistence that these women be allowed to exist as more than footnotes in someone else's story. I've seen this moment land a dozen times now, and it has never once failed to catch me slightly off guard. There's something almost sneaky about how Six does its emotional work — it disguises a genuinely moving argument about narrative ownership as 80 minutes of glitter and key changes, and by the time you clock what's happened to you, you're already on your feet.
If I'm holding back a star, it's for reasons that have less to do with this particular company and more to do with the show's own architecture, which by now I know as well as my own address. The book still leans on a handful of jokes that have been doing the same work since 2017 (yes, we know about the beheading; the show knows we know), and the format — thrilling as it is — necessarily sacrifices the kind of narrative shading a full book musical could offer any one of these women. For a first-time audience this barely registers. For a reviewer on their tenth or eleventh visit, it's the only place the show shows its age.
None of that dents what remains a genuinely rare thing in London theatre: a homegrown show that has grown into a global phenomenon without losing the scrappy, fringe-born joy that built it in the first place. I came in braced for diminishing returns. I left, once again, singing on the Strand.
Verdict: Still one of the most purely joyful 80 minutes in the West End, delivered here by a company that has genuinely made the roles their own rather than simply inherited them. Essential, even — especially — on your umpteenth visit.
SIX plays at the Vaudeville Theatre, London.
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