An anti-Hamilton blowout hits the screen.
The lead performers of the hit stage show Six are not just female victims; they’re famous personages — the six wives of England’s Henry VIII — reimagined as loud, proud, booty-shaking Millennial feminists. Raised from the grave, these historical figures proclaim new status as rock stars. Each woman states her case in a concert format — sort of a court of public opinion and fandom, complete with an all-female backing band called the Ladies in Waiting.
This idea is so blatantly vulgar — and so anti-Hamilton — that it’s almost fun. The show premiered at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, opened in London’s West End in 2019, and the next year became a fixture on Broadway and then around the world (reportedly seen by 3.5 million people). It’s preserved in a video version in which the original cast members return to their roles at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, directed by Liz Clare and now released in cinemas.
Like the Disney+ roll-out of Hamilton and the Stephen Sondheim show Merrily We Roll Along, Six confirms the sorry misfit of musical theater and cinema. Fearing that untutored Millennial audiences won’t accept traditional theater conventions, contemporary filmmakers lack the artistic confidence to transfer theater to film as in the past (On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Brigadoon, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Cabaret).
Six caters to this fear through a conceit that combines the live-concert format with the reality-TV competition show. Henry VIII’s wives compete for our attention — Tudor queens Catherine of Aragon (Jarnéia Richard-Noel), Anne Boleyn (Millie O’Connell), Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris), Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson), and Catherine Parr (Maiya Quansah-Breed) tell their stories in numbers geared for applause — today’s unsophisticated audiences readily give standing ovations to performers for holding long notes, extending melismas, or simply showing up.
History becomes modern when its politics convey current styles of ambition and competition. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the two British women who wrote and directed Six, update feminism in terms of their own careerism. It taught them the need to be disinhibited. The format is influenced by Mamma Mia! — the ex-wives dress sillier than the ladies in that movie; like bedazzled versions of medieval knights, they even don Day-Glo spectacles. But it’s more honest than Hamilton. In Hamilton, the politically connected Lin-Manuel Miranda and Broadway elites celebrated the advent of Barack Obama by recasting American political history in diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) terms. (John Bolton even wrote a scandalous D.C. memoir named after a Hamilton song, “The Room Where It Happens.”) Hamilton is not a crowd-pleasing warhorse; it’s a spectacle of stealthy political subversion.
Six, however, is about sex. The show flirts, sashays, and hectors its way past political objections with obvious humor — a jokey, female-empowering fairy tale. Looney tunes such as “Ex-Wives” (“Divorced beheaded died / Divorced beheaded survive / Divorced beheaded LIVE!”) suggest a perverse Disney-princess cartoon. While nothing in the Marlow-Moss songbook matches the narrative and psychological opulence of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s Once Upon a Time double-disc album that reimagined Cinderella as a disco-era odyssey, Six and its revved-up version of “Greensleeves” recalls how Destiny’s Child hits like “I’m a Survivor” reconfigured post-Madonna pop. That’s why the Ex-Wives are portrayed by multiculti, multiracial actresses as if all are trying out for American Idol.
Liberal feminists loved Spice Girls for music no less artistic than Marlow-Moss. The between-song speeches are maudlin, but these songs do POP (which Hamilton achieved only with its Destiny’s Child rip-off “The Schuyler Sisters”). When the first wife sings, “I’m Catherine of Aragon / I’m a paragon,” it initiates flashbacks of all those Tudor and Plantagenet films that dramatized Britain’s perfidies, subsuming malefactions that only historians recall; those outrages covered up by “progress” like our own era’s political persecutions.
These feminist vixens mock virginity; they’re hip to male instinct and weakness. In “All You Wanna Do,” Katherine Howard sings “I get you and you get me / Playtime is over.” She belittles “Henry the Eighth / Supreme head of the church of England / Globally revered / But you wouldn’t know it from the look of that beard.” The cleverest song, “Haus of Holbein,” uses Germanic parody to address female objectification in art. Somehow it evokes Vanessa Redgrave’s silent-movie sexiness as Anne Boleyn in A Man for All Seasons, and Genevieve Bujold’s fervor and Irene Pappas’s regal sadness and passion in Anne of the Thousand Days, while outclassing the insipid, insulting The Other Boleyn Girl.
This week’s irony of the media promoting Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Toy Story 5, and The Odyssey for each grossing over a billion dollars but not cheering the billion-dollar biopic Michael exposes Hollywood’s depreciation of pop-music culture (or maybe something more cynical). With cinematic imagination, Six could have been the next step of Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux if he gave in to the bourgeois teenybopper in himself. Only a drudge would condemn Six as kitsch — it’s kitsch with a zircon crown.
