Fans are losing their heads to the songs of Six
listener.co.nz has had an overwhelming reaction to the news that the musical Six is coming to Auckland to headline the region’s art festival. Here Chelsea Dawson, who portrays one of Henry VIII’s ex-wives, talks about the heartwarming reaction from fans.
Chelsea Dawson knew she wanted to audition for the musical Six even before she left drama school. She’d already been listening to the soundtrack on Spotify for a couple of years before there was talk of the award-winning UK musical coming to Australia.
“The show kept popping up on my suggested songs,” says Dawson. “As soon as I heard them, I was like, ‘What is this musical?’ It was so different from what I was used to hearing from classic musical theatre.”
And Six is different. Frequently described as the Spice Girls meets Hamilton, it clocks in at just 80 minutes, is nearly completely “sung through”, meaning there’s scant dialogue, and reimagines the six unfortunate wives of Tudor king Henry VIII as influential pop stars dressed in fantastical costumes to match their fiercely feminist attitudes.
Rather than being overshadowed by an abusive and tyrannical husband, the women are centre stage, telling their life stories from their points of view. There’s even a number called Ex-wives, where they speculate on what they might have become had they been alive today.
Headlining the 2025 Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival, Six is likely to attract a good number of mainstream musical fans.
“Not only are we celebrating these 500-year-old queens and the lives they led, but we’re also celebrating ourselves at the same time,” says Dawson, who plays Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife. “I think that’s also another thing that attracts audiences, because it’s a celebration of just being you and having the power and agency to write your own story.
“We’ve got some musicals that are led by strong women, such as Wicked, but to see something where it’s just six women on stage, with a band also made up of women, and they’re reclaiming their stories, tearing out the pages from the history books and retelling it their way, I found it so inspiring – and audiences do, too.”
Suffice to say Six isn’t a conventional history lesson, but it has made history by being one of the first musicals that fans have widely used social media to promote.
Six fans are now so numerous that there’s a collective noun, the Queendom, to describe them, and they’ve driven some impressive numbers: the musical has 1.5 million followers on social media and has had more than 32 million views on TikTok; the original studio cast recording has been certified gold and this album and SIX: Live on Opening Night (Original Broadway Cast Recording) have a combined streaming figure of more than 1 billion.