Your Favorite Feminist Killjoy Goes to See Six, The Musical

6 min readJan 27, 2024

You might think I’d be the target audience for Six. I am, after all, obsessed with reframing old stories so as to give women some power they otherwise might not have in their narratives.

But while Six seems to think it’s doing that, it almost feels like the opposite.

The premise is paper thin. The six wives of Henry VIII gather together to put on a show and have a contest to see who had it worse. (Spoiler alert?) That’s really all there is to the show. Each wife sings a song about her troubles and then they spend the last five minutes trying to imagine an alternate history. That is literally all there is to the show. It’s a variety show disguised as a musical. Which, you know, fine, what do I care? Variety shows can be fun.

I resent it, though, and I suppose it’s because they’re framing it as if they are doing these historical women a favor by dressing them up in pop star girl boss outfits and giving them some bland songs with vocal calisthenics to sing. Somehow I doubt any of Henry VIII’s wives would appreciate it.

They call it a history-mix. Get it? It’s like a remix but with history.

Maybe it’s my background in Shakespeare — but I get kind of twitchy at all attempts to make old stuff “cool”. There was a period in the 90s where everyone was putting Shakespeare in shades and headphones in their graphic design. Six was like that marketing trend put to music, but with history, instead of literature. “Hey kids — history is cool!”

And, you know, it is. History is ACTUALLY cool; You don’t need to dress it up in shades or whatever. But history is also pretty famous for suppressing women’s stories, accomplishments and concerns. It’s such a pervasive problem, we had to create a whole additional field of Women’s History to address it. But Henry’s wives have been some of the few women who were included in history, even before Women’s History was a thing. I suspect that is because having six wives is a story about Henry’s virility and masculinity — but also because his divorces (and beheadings, etc) are intimately wrapped up in the religious schisms they caused. British kids have had to learn about these women because Henry’s choices around them dramatically changed the country in ways that reverberated through time.

But none of that has anything to do with those women themselves. And the show has nothing to do with the women themselves, either. Because the thing that ties them together is a man, they are all always, speaking to him or about him. Despite the stage being occupied exclusively by women, the show barely passes the Bechdel test, just because even when they’re talking to each other, they’re still really talking about a man.

But it’s probably not fair to ask for a thinly premised variety show to give us nuanced women’s history or feminist perspectives.

I know, I know, I’d like to relax and just sit back and enjoy some historically themed songs tossed off by some Cambridge students. But — I suppose this show sits right in that spot that makes me squirm, where it seems like it’s feminism but might really be doing some retro weirdness.

I mean it is a show in which the characters’ only identity is as wives. They are only significant (or in this show) because they are wives. There’s a lot of talk of them as Queens but we never see them with any kind of power — so Queen just means wife in this context. We get to know them at the point that they marry the King and at the point that the marriage ends, however it ends (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived). It’s only stories about their relationship with a man. We hear about things like Catherine Parr’s writing. (“I wrote books. I even got a woman to paint my picture.”) but having her report her accomplishments like a book report is not like seeing her as a person separate from her husband.

Catherine Parr sings, “Without him I disappear.”

Does she? Or maybe they all do. Women’s History would reclaim them all, especially Catherine Parr who was the first woman in England to publish a book under her own name. And maybe this is what bugs me about this show, it’s self aware enough to know that it’s pretty retrograde to have a bunch of wives singing about being wives and then give them an alternate history (“For five more minutes!”) at the end. Which is, yes, funny. Five minutes of a different story separate from the man is not a lot of feminism to hang our hats on.

A truly feminist musical would bring these six women together to DO something, to make something, to storm the castle, change things for the women after them, start a revolution, or a wives’ union. Instead we get slightly better individual narratives (many of which involve starting singing groups?) Catherine Parr’s song is all about how she doesn’t have a choice and even the Choice feminism crowd would support giving her some actual choice.

It’s just, like, the vibe of empowerment without any actual empowerment. It’s all “You go, girl!” feminism without the girls really going anywhere. I mean, all those characters have died, even the ones who survived and sure, that’s true of anyone in history but somehow it all feels more pointless here. Instead of walking away empowered, I felt a kind of bleak nihilism. All those women are dead and even their dream histories are kind of a bummer. We’ll all be dead before too long and women who were wives will only be remembered as a wife.

Huzzah! With sparkles! Sing it!

This story was so wafer thin, I looked right past it into the void. You go girl!

And if there are people who feel empowered by this show (empowered to do what? Marry a king? Sing pop songs? Dream up an alternate life for five minutes? Come back from the dead to have a competition about whose life is shittier?) I really don’t want to yuck their yum. IF this show speaks to young women and gets them fired up in some way, I’m all for it. I just don’t see how it would or could. Maybe just seeing women dominating the stage is enough. It’s not enough for me but this show was not made for me, so fine. Sparkle Away!