The Broadway Pop Stars of Tudor England in ‘Six’
Gaby Albo as Anne Boleyn (center) in Six, the Broadway musical starring Henry VIII’s half dozen blighted wives.
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Henry VIII met his fourth wife, Anna of Cleves, before OkCupid, Christian Mingle, or Match.com. They didn’t have such things in Tudor England, not even for such a powerful lad. Impressively, however, he did manage to reduce her to an image, a Holbein portrait, in fact—the Raya of the day—then complained that she was way hotter on canvas. “I like her not!” whined the king at their first IRL meetup. This horrible anecdote, and the equally upsetting tales of his five other wives, become pop songs in Six, the Broadway musical in town for a short run at the Keller Auditorium (April 29–May 4, $49.75+).
Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss developed the book, music, and lyrics for Six as students at Cambridge University. They dreamt up a very modern retelling of the notorious legend for a musical theater festival. Each of Henry VIII’s wives—Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr—are styled as composites of pop queens, drawing inspiration from Beyoncé, Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, and many others. The musical itself is a singing competition. Each queen sings about how terrible their time with H was, and whoever is decided to have had it the worst wins. What could go wrong? What effectively started as a student production in 2017 landed in London’s West End by 2019 and on Broadway a year later—and won a Tony for best original music score.
Henry VIII has quite the reputation, but his most enduring legacy may be for changing an entire country’s government over a personal grievance: He separated the Church of England from papal authority after the pope refused to annul his first marriage. Of course, there would be five more uneasy consorts; he had two of his queens beheaded. He continued on in his rule power-hungry, fighting and usually losing battles for land, and defying established protocols at whim. He spent public money lavishly and was often short on cash. He disparaged information against his cause as “false fables.” Last year, a feature-length documentary aired on British television drawing parallels between Henry VIII and Donald Trump. Earlier this year, Fareed Zakaria made the same comparison on CNN.
Holding all of this, Six is no doubt “a work of blatantly commercial theater,” as Jesse Green put it in a New York Times review. Henry VIII wasn’t subtle. Nor is Trump. As much as things change… Yet, “How can a show formatted as a Tudors Got Talent belt-off among six sassy divas also be a thoughtful experiment in reverse victimology?” The answer seems to be that you should never underestimate the power of a little campy self-awareness.
More Things to Do This Week
THEATER Another Dialogue
7:30PM FRI–SUN, APR 25–27 | PICA, $0–45
“What I say often counts for little,” begins a quote from Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck that stands as the epigraph for the latest play from the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE). It’s an odd but effective start for a production titled Another Dialogue: The play is about that thing that rides beneath the words of an exchange, the wordless magic of a back-and-forth. Company members Rebecca Lingafelter and Amber Whitehall star in the sparse, two-person production, with musicians Mark Valadez and Elsa Dougherty playing a live score that adds another layer to the conversation. To crudely paraphrase Maeterlinck, everything besides words, everything else imaginable—“that is what speaks.”
VISUAL ART Nut Job
2–5PM SAT, APR 26; THRU MAY 24 | HELEN’S COSTUME, FREE
Residential gallery Helen’s Costume cast an excitingly wide net when curating its three-person show this spring. In their drawings and paintings, artists Morgan Ritter, Maggie Chen, and Katya Kirilloff cite references to junk mail, the Taiwanese snack foods brand Hot Kid, and 1970s Wacky Packages trading cards. The press release mentions consumerism and also vitalism, the theory that something past the empirically measurable aspects of physics and chemistry distinguishes life forms from inanimate objects—that life relies on something like a soul. Collected, this grab bag of cultural references promises to be a practice of slyly observed, and no doubt winking, contemporary archaeology.
PHOTOGRAPHY Jordan Gale
6–10PM Fri, APR 25 | PORTLAND DARKROOM, FREE
Though based in Portland (see his recent photo essay on seasonal affective disorder for the magazine), Gale’s photojournalism career often has him on the road. Long Distance Drunk, a new zine with an apparent affinity for Modest Mouse, collects photos of “life between spaces”—photos Gale took while traversing the country on assignment for outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Self-portraits and intimate moments of his personal life sit beside photos with the unmistakable gaze of someone just passing through towns big and small, which lends the project a distinctly vulnerable tone: a journalist’s journal.
Elsewhere…
- Following Portland’s North Pole Studio, a nonprofit supporting artists with autism and intellectual/developmental disabilities, to New York’s Outsider Art Fair. (Variable West)
- Unpacking the latest dance work presented by PICA and BoomArts, and its “curious and loaded title.” (Oregon ArtsWatch)
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