Review: SIX THE MUSICAL at Blumenthal Performing Arts

Many of the people who know nothing more about King Henry VIII of England than the number of wives he married erroneously assume that he executed them all. Not so. Only twice did he behead a wife – no more often than he divorced or, more accurately, annulled one of their marriages – so four of the dears died of natural causes. Still a half dozen is a large portion of partners and death-do-us-part oaths for any grown man, especially one who lives out his life very much in the public eye.

You don’t earn a pass, even as a king, for summarily ordering your wife to be beheaded just because you refrained on other occasions. Nor is it a moral lapse if, three wives and six years later, you do it again after thinking it over.

What’s important, then, is the solidarity of these wives as Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss bring them all back to us in SIX THE MUSICAL. No matter that the ladies’ villainous tormentor has been dead for 476 years – and barred from appearing this week at Belk Theater as the touring version, adorned with Tony Awards for best costume design and musical score, spends a holiday week in the Queen City, PLUS a second week through July 16. These resurrected queens are out for revenge.

Queen-spired by Beyoncé and Shakira, Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne, Adele and Sia, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, Ariana Grande and Britney Spears, plus Alicia Keys and Emeli Sandé, they are here to SLAY!! Glittering in eye-popping skirts, dresses, and slacks worthy of hardcore heavy-metal thrashers. Dazzling tops, bustiers, shoulder plates, ruffles, collars, and sparkling sleeves ready for the battlefield. Wicked platform shoes and boots. A couple of lolling Kiss tongues. State-of-the-art hand mics.

Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr are not here to play – not even with each other. They are here to ask us to decide, night after night, which of them suffered most under cruel King Henry’s hand. This is their battle, their consecrated competition.

If you are capable of biting your nails over the outcome of this high-stakes, high-decibel throwdown, then you’re likely to believe that I’m fully acquainted with all the inspirational pop queens I’ve just cataloged. Throngs of fanatics were no doubt pre-sold on Marlow & Moss’s handiwork before opening night at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, for their high-decibel responses often increased my difficulties in discerning what these dead queens were telling us.

A good portion of the screamers and shriekers had no doubt primed themselves by listening repeatedly to the cast album before the show or – like I did afterward – by counting on Spotify and Apple to post the lyrics as it played. My recommendation would be to follow their example, though the sound crew’s performance on opening night was far better than average.

Intelligibility aside, as well as pertinence to the issue at hand, each of the six solos the queens sing has an unmistakable élan, and all six of the women onstage are powerhouses when the spotlight is most piercingly upon them. Of course, a Charlotte crowd is going to favor its own, and Amina Faye’s return to the Belk Theater stage as Jane Seymour, seven years after she took home a Blumey Award there for her stirring portrayal of Sarah in Ragtime – and a subsequent Jimmy Award up on Broadway – is already a triumph.

Clarity and intense emotion are already baked into “Heart of Stone,” so Faye is doubly set up for success with the Belk audiences. It’s the only song besides “I Don’t Need Your Love,” sung with searing urgency by Sydney Parra as Catherine Parr, that rises to the level of heartfelt testimony, a strange commonality for the two queens who have the least reason to feel aggrieved by Henry. Buoyed by this handicap, they are welcome counterweights to the prevailing glitz and silliness, and Faye is better to my ears than her cast album counterpart, Natalie Paris, who is comparatively plastic. Or pop plastic, if you don’t warm to that brand of singing.

Gerianne Pérez is surprisingly saucy as the senior – and longest reigning – among the royals, Catherine of Aragon, singing “No Way” in retelling how she rejected divorce and annulment from Henry. Nor does she fade into the background after taking the first solo, indisputably the most confrontational and contentious in the group. Her primary adversary, Zan Berube as Anne Boleyn, is by turns weird, wacky, lewd, and irreverent in “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” confiding that she lost her head only after giving some. Could be me, but it seemed like she was bragging, not gagging.

By the time we reached Jana Larell Glover as Anna of Cleves and Taylor Pearlstein as Katherine, the idea that these badass queens were trying to point up their marital sufferings – or anything else besides telling their stories with varying degrees of attitude – was pretty much forgotten. Paradoxically, that made it easier to enjoy Marie’s “Get Down” as she went from down-low grooving to childish taunting. Anna seemed to be adopting Aragon’s playbook. Despising Mayagoitia’s all-men-are-alike messaging in “All You Wanna Do” came just as naturally as she narrated her way, chorus by chorus, to the hatchet man.

Interesting that the two women whom Henry beheaded get the most annoying songs. It’s a nice little hint from Marlow & Moss that the man was provoked. But then, so was the woman I heard complaining that, for 100 bucks a ticket, we should be able to understand the lyrics that these dead-queens-resurrected-as-rockstars are singing. Personally, I discarded such naïve notions at the last Avett Brothers concert I attended. At least at SIX, you can remain seated for the whole 80 minutes.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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