SIX: The Musical Live! review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.23.26
★★★★ 4 / 5
Spoiler-free review
SIX reimagines Henry VIII’s wives as a fiercely talented girl group, each Queen arguing through song that she endured the worst marriage before becoming backup for the next woman’s spotlight. That structure gives all six performers room to shine while building the generous ensemble spirit I enjoyed most. The show is energetic, smartly paced and exactly as long as its premise needs. Putting a lengthy making-of documentary before the performance is a baffling presentation choice, but once the music begins, this becomes another persuasive argument for bringing more great stage productions—and great casts—to movie screens.
Full review — contains spoilers
I've seen SIX the Musical Live! a couple of times in theaters over the last few weeks and I really enjoyed it. Bringing popular theater productions and proshots into movie theaters seems to be a thing now. Hamilton did it, Hadestown did it, now we've got SIX, and it doesn't disappoint.
If you don't know the premise, the six women play the six wives of Henry VIII as a girl group, competing over which one of them had it worst being married to Henry. Each Queen gets her case, her solo, her turn as the star, and while one of them is having her moment the other five have to turn around and become her backup singers and dancers. That dynamic is the thing I enjoyed most about it. All six have good voices, all six have a lot of energy, and they're doing an awful lot of dancing throughout this thing. Everybody gets her chance to shine and then has to be willing to step into the background and support one of her sisters when it's her turn, and by the end they really do start feeling like an actual girl band. The Queens.
The musical itself isn't particularly long. It's just enough time for all six to get through their material without dragging the premise out.
My one complaint is with the presentation. They put a documentary about the musical in front of the actual musical, around 20 or 25 minutes of it. Why? Normally you show me the performance first, and then if I want to stay afterward and watch everybody talk about how they made it, I'll do that. Putting the behind-the-scenes material ahead of the thing I came to see feels backwards. Bad choice.
Once the musical starts, though, I had a great time, and I still feel the way I did after Hadestown. I want more of these. I don't know exactly what the economics are and I don't want to sit here advocating for something that ends up hurting Broadway or live theater, but there has to be some way to take productions that have had their run, preserve really good casts and performances, and get them to people all over the country and the world who are never going to make it to New York or London. SIX is another example of why I think that's worthwhile. If you like musicals at all, I really recommend this. It's very well done.
Main fix was the repetition. You said "I really liked that" twice about the same backup-singer dynamic, so I merged those into one beat and let it carry the paragraph.