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At some point, the wives of Henry VIII were reduced to one word in a mnemonic, but one musical-cross-pop concert is bringing their stories to the forefront.
Six, which heads to Canberra Theatre Centre next month, takes the stories of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Par, telling them as if the royal women were pop singers, with each emulating the sound and performance styles of modern singers including Adele, Beyoncé and Britney Spears. It's a history remix, if you like.
But it's Six's high-octane, concert-style performance, and in particular the soundtrack, that has been the key to behind an international swell of support.
And in a lot of cases, this swell of support is from fans - known as the Queendom - who in some cases haven't even had a chance to see the live performance.
Since it was released in August 2018, the cast album has had 400 million streams and videos from the different international companies - which include West End and Broadway - have clocked up 3 billion views on TikTok.
"Those numbers are almost too big to reconcile," Six's Australian producer Louise Withers says.
"I've been doing what I do for a very long time, and those weren't the kinds of numbers you could ever attract even in the days of Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Les Misérables.
"Of course, now, your popularity can spread so easily because of the digital world that we live in. But I think why it did spread so quickly and into so many countries was because the tracks stand up alone, without the musical. The album sounds like a pop album so you just get into it because it's great music."
The music itself is unlike most, if not all, musical scores. The songs that make up the 75-minute musical don't just emulate pop music, they are pop songs, that in some cases are filled with samples from some of the world's top divas.
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Samples from Beyoncé's Formation, Destiny Child's Survivor, Spice Girls' Wannabe and Demi Lovato's Sorry Not Sorry all make an appearance in the lyrics - and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Everything from nursery rhymes and wedding marches to Kanye West's Gold Digger makes an appearance.
It gives this familiar feeling to the songs, even if you're listening to them for the first time. But from a storytelling standpoint, it's more than just good music.
The setlist - because with the overall concert-feel of the performance, it is a setlist - is the result of writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's bid to give multiple women the 11 o'clock number - aka the big, show-stopping song in a musical usually reserved for the second act.
"They wanted this to highlight the talent of a number of women and they found that the six wives of Henry VIII gave them a great opportunity to do that because each of the queens has a particular story and they each have a particular personality," Withers says.
"So these songs are a real mix between the history and what we thought we knew about the queens, but you will find that there was a lot we didn't know about the queens and what made them unique, and their stories, and combine that with the musical sounds of today."
- Six the Musical is at Canberra Theatre Centre from April 23 to May 15. For tickets go to canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
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