PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — People are always looking for ways to make history more fun — how about having a powerhouse girl group tell it in a musical?
“Six” is a Tony-winning Broadway show that tells the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII from their point of view, with some pop star sparkle. The national tour is here in Philadelphia for the next two weeks.
“Every queen has this specific pop inspiration,” says Gerianne Pérez, who plays Catherine Of Aragon, King Henry’s first wife.
“My song has a lot of Latin beat, my costume is very inspired by Beyoncé. So I always say that I'm a hybrid between JLo and Beyoncé. We have Anne Boleyn who is our punk rock princess. She is inspired by Pink, by Avril Lavigne. Then you've got Jane Seymour…the heartbroken song. Oh wait, we're going to make her Adele. Then we've got Anna of Cleves — Terica Marie’s inspiration is Megan Thee Stallion.”
Aline Mayagoitia channels Ariana Grande and Britney Spears in her portrayal of Katherine Howard, but she says the actors aren’t just mimicking other singers.
“Our creative team really allows us to put ourselves in the portrayal,” she says. “The funnest part about the show is I think we as women get to put our own stamp on these historic roles and just kind of bring our soul to it in a way that…doesn't happen a lot in other shows where you're just kind of copying what the original actors did.”
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Even before it opened on Broadway, “Six” had fans — “the queendom”, as they’re called — all over the world. The style and message harken back to the Spice Girls “girl power” era of the ‘90s, and naturally, teenage girls have flocked to it.
Each queen’s ending is laid out in the first words of the show: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. They’re sad tales from history, turned into songs you can’t help but dance to. The characters, who have always been talked about in relationship to a man, get to reclaim their own stories.
“I think that Toby [Marlow] and Lucy [Moss], the writers of the show, wanted to literally turn it on its head,” Pérez says. “There is a lot of sadness and heartbreak that's in it, but they took that story and completely were like, ‘we're going to retell this…from their perspective.’”
Mayagoitia notes how much more personal and relatable these stories can be when they’re taken out of a history book and put on stage.
“I think it's very different to be like, ‘oh, yeah, she was beheaded’, to be like, ‘I was beheaded,’” she says. “It hits you differently when it's humanized that way.”
“Six” is on stage at the Academy of Music through April 9. You can find tickets and more information on the Kimmel Cultural Campus website.