At a brisk 80 minutes running time, Six: The Musical may not feel like a full evening’s meal, but it packs more entertainment value than any show in less than an hour and a half.
Perhaps you might think of it as the appetizer before next month’s main course, Hamilton, for they have much in common. Both, of course, relate history lessons – English for Six and American for Hamilton. And both rely on anachronistic song stylings — pop, rock and hip-hop — to tell tales hundreds of years before their time.
Those who have a problem with that need not apply, but you would be missing two of the more innovative musicals of the past decade.
Six, of course, refers to the six wives of King Henry VIII. From Catherine of Aragon to Catherine Parr, they were — as any British schoolboy could tell you — “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” But their fates are so much more memorable when related in song.
Perhaps you already sense the factual problem that these half-dozen women were never together at the same time to lift their voices in six-part harmony. Such details were surely deemed irrelevant by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the young songwriting team said to have begun sketching out the idea for Six during poetry class at Cambridge University. (Unreported is how they did in that class, though their lyrics in Six are full of sore thumb almost-rhymes like “castle” and “rascal.”)
No matter. From out of a smoky haze, the sixsome arrive onstage to directly address the denizens of West Palm Beach and announce a competition among themselves to determine who had it worse at the hands of hard-to-please King Hank.
Then, to plead their cases, they each get a spotlight solo, often in the signature style of a contemporary popstar. For instance, Jane Seymour (Amina Faye) belts out a power ballad, “Heart of Stone,” channeling Adele. Or Katherine Howard (Aline Mayagoitia) on the uber-catchy “All You Wanna Do” in the style of Ariana Grande. And so on.
In fact, Six is more rock concert than musical theater, but that did not seem to bother Tuesday’s opening-night Kravis Center audience, which hooted and responded on cue from the royal flush of queens. The staging by Moss and her co-director Jamie Armitage may be short on subtlety, but there is no denying that they know how to whip a crowd into a frenzy. In that they are aided considerably by the kinetic choreography of Carrie-Anne Ingrouille.
The lighting by Tim Deiling is full-on eye-popping rock arena style, topped only by Gabriella Slade’s Tony Award-winning costumes, an array of color-coordinated metallic mini-dresses.
Historically speaking, King Henry may have had the upper hand over his wives, but Six: The Musical is decidedly an exercise in girl power. Not only is the cast entirely female, but so is the design staff as well as the scorching four-member band, dubbed The Ladies in Waiting.
You wouldn’t want to fact-check Six’s version of history, but it comes close enough. And what it lacks in accuracy, it more than makes up for in fun.
SIX: THE MUSICAL, Kravis Center Dreyfoos Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, March 31. $55-$129. Call 561-832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.