Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss won the 2022 Tony Award for Best Original Score for SIX, with Marlow becoming the first openly nonbinary composer-lyricist to win a competitive Tony.
Broadway shows commonly run a digital lottery and same-day rush-ticket line for discounted seats — check the show's official ticketing page for those options.
Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss wrote this as Cambridge students and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, which accounts for its shape: no scenery to speak of, six performers, a band, and a running order that would work in a room above a pub. The conceit is a competition. Henry VIII's six wives are staged as a pop group, each arguing that she suffered most, and the songs are the evidence.
Each queen is written in a distinct pop idiom, with the models openly acknowledged — Catherine of Aragon in the mode of Beyoncé, Anne Boleyn as pop-punk, Jane Seymour as a power ballad, Anna of Cleves as a rap-inflected boast, Katherine Howard as bubblegum turned sour, Catherine Parr as a singer-songwriter. The band, called the Ladies in Waiting, is entirely female and plays on stage in period-adjacent costume. Gabriella Slade's designs, which won a Tony, put all six in studded and jeweled armor that reads as Tudor and as tour wardrobe simultaneously.
The Broadway story has an unusual footnote. Previews began at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in February 2020, and the scheduled opening fell on 12 March 2020 — the day every Broadway theatre closed. The production finally opened at that house in October 2021; the theatre was renamed for Lena Horne the following year, its new marquee going up in November 2022 while the show was still in residence. It won two Tony Awards in 2022 from eight nominations, for Best Original Score and Best Costume Design; Marlow, who is nonbinary, shared the score award with Moss.
The show is easy to mistake for a concert with a history theme, and it does run without an intermission at concert pace. But the historical detail is deliberate — Anna of Cleves' number is built on the actual terms of her settlement, which left her wealthy and unmarried — and the final song abandons the competition entirely, with all six refusing the premise that their worth is measured by their suffering.
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Six is a British musical with music, book, and lyrics by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. It is a modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII, presented in the form of a singing competition and pop concert. In the show, the wives take turns telling their stories to determine who suffered the most from their shared husband, but ultimately seek to reclaim their individual identities and rewrite their stories.
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