Six takeaways from watching ‘Six: The Musical’ with a feminist Renaissance scholar

Six: The Musical, at the Academy of Music through April 9, is a feminist retelling of the tragic and violent lives of King Henry VIII’s six ex-wives. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr compete to be the queen victim of his cruelty through — what else? — pop songs.

The musical sensation has toured globally, flipping this frequently revisited Tudor history into a modern take-back-the-mic fairy tale. What would an expert familiar with this history think? I invited Villanova professor Alice Dailey to watch Six with me. She is a Shakespeare scholar who teaches medieval literature and historical drama.

Dailey and I chatted about the musical’s rewriting of history, and here are six hot takes.

From The Tudors to The Other Boleyn Girl, pop culture has kept this 500-year-old history in our memories. Six offers these ex-wives a literal platform to redress their husband’s abuses. Their transformation into a multicultural group of young pop stars — inspired by Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj — instead of sad and dead queens symbolizes a greater shift.

“This history that has been used to advance the interests of white Western politics, white Western economics, education, and culture is being co-opted by women of color and young women whose power comes principally from their voices,” said Dailey. It is a “fascinating turning on its head of these structures of culture, power, politics, white male dominance, patriarchy.”

With its international reach, the musical now becomes part of Henry VIII’s history. “[For younger audiences,] their idea of the history of Henry VIII will be irreversibly entangled with this production … There’s a sort of joke, right, that we’re doing ‘historemix.’ But it works. It’s real.”

» READ MORE: Want a live concert, a game show, and a musical? Watch ‘Six’ at Academy of Music

Shakespeare famously rewrote history through his plays about English royalty. Though he wasn’t born until Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, took the throne, his influence on dramatical storytelling impacts Six.

When we walked into the Academy of Music lobby, we saw a table where guests picked up purple paper crowns. Dailey was delighted. Later, I learned that the humor was in the symbolism. A paper crown appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VI: Part 3. The Duke of York claims the throne when he’s captured by a group that ridicules his royal ambitions by placing the paper crown on his head — before stabbing him to death.

“The paper crown is this important prop for making a spectacle of his humiliation,” said Dailey. When handed out to Six’s guests, “it is a camping up of the whole idea of monarchy, of history, and of democratizing that, and letting everybody have one.” Instead of being a site of political power, the crown lands in Burger King zone.

To marry the Renaissance with the present, Six has high-tech background lighting for that pop concert feel while the queens glitter with bedazzled Tudor-meets-sparkle-punk costumes. “It calls back to the ostentatiously glitzy fabric adornments, elaboration of Tudor dress, [which was] the richest and most technologically sophisticated clothing available,” said Dailey. “But glitzy in a way that I think cheapens it … It’s a camp aesthetic.”

The queen with the best fate is Anna of Cleves, whose song “Get Down” is all about how Henry VIII rejected her and essentially left her alone in a lavish castle. The story is that he fell for the German maiden’s portrait (by renowned painter Hans Holbein), but when they met, Henry VIII found her unattractive, and they quickly divorced.

That royal rejection is a pathway to her safety and liberation.

“I thought the way they did that was quite brilliant,” said Dailey. “There are ways out of that paradigm [of women’s beauty and objectification], and they’re not about asserting, ‘No, I am pretty,’ they’re about occupying alternative forms of power, right? And alternative forms of self-actualization.”

By the middle of the show, Six provides a break from the trauma olympics for an EDM sidebar. “Haus of Holbein” pokes fun at the famous painter and transforms the royal portrait process into Tudor Tinder. The queens don sunglasses and neon green neck ruffs before cheekily singing about restrictive corsets and lead makeup: “We must make sure the princesses look great / When their time comes for the Holbein portrait.”

“Who would have thought anybody would care — outside of, you know, me, and nerd people like me — about Holbein?” said Dailey. “But here he is in Six. It’s truly, like, the greatest thing to happen to Holbein.”

As we exited the theater, we saw a little girl in the lobby in a geometric green dress: an Anne Boleyn cosplayer. It was a strange sight — these are thrilling pop star characters, surely, but Disney princesses they are not.

“There’s just no separating that figure from, you know, decapitation,” said Dailey.

Who wants to be Anne Boleyn? It’s a strangely contradictory empowerment. Girls are excited to be the cutesy singer Anne Boleyn of Six, but they inevitably play a queen who was beheaded. “Is that a way of teaching that young girl a model of femininity and female heroine-ism that is tainted?” asked Dailey.

Ultimately, we don’t know the answer. But audiences aren’t really struggling to square the real-life violence with the musical’s undeniable appeal. It’s Broadway, not History Channel.

“Six: The Musical” runs at the Kimmel Cultural Campus’ Academy of Music through April 9, 240 S. Broad St., Phila., 215-893-1999 or kimmelculturalcampus.org.