MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.