Six the Musical Live! Review: All Killer No Filler

Six the Musical Live! brings the original West End Queens to American screens, and Aimie Atkinson’s Katherine Howard alone is worth the ticket.

What happened next still seems unlikely. The Fringe run sold out, the West End transfer opened in January 2019, and by that autumn two separate productions were running on Norwegian Cruise Line ships, meaning Six was playing the Atlantic before it ever played Broadway. Previews began in February 2020 and shut down three weeks later along with everything else. The show finally opened in October 2021, and at the 2022 Tonys it won Best Original Score for Marlow and Moss and Best Costume Design for Gabriella Slade.

I came to it late and by accident. The show was playing in Chicago in the summer of 2019, months before anyone said the word Broadway, and the title told me nothing at all. Then I put on the studio cast recording. I was sold inside the first thirty seconds of “Ex-Wives,” bought a ticket that week, and have not stopped recommending it since.

The film was shot at London’s Vaudeville Theatre over three performances in the summer of 2022, so Americans have been waiting for four years for something that has already been a hit elsewhere. Six the Musical Live! opened in UK and Irish cinemas in April 2025 across the widest screen count an event film has ever had, past Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, and posted the biggest opening day any musical has managed. Australia and New Zealand got it in January. The staggered rollout is a business decision rather than a warning sign, protecting the tours and the Broadway run still going strong.

The setup is a competition. Catherine of Aragon (Jarnéia Richard-Noel, of Wicked), Anne Boleyn (Millie O’Connell, of Wonka), Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris), Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson, of Unforgotten) and Catherine Parr (Maiya Quansah-Breed) have formed a band and intend to settle which of them had the worst time with their shared husband. Whoever suffered most gets to “front the band.” They take turns at the mic, and the bickering between numbers is as sharp as anything in the score. Marlow and Moss wrote an all-killer, no-filler show, and nine years on there is still not a track worth skipping.

Here is why this particular reunion carries weight. Most of these women never appeared on the 2018 studio cast recording; only Paris and Atkinson got their songs to disc, so a whole generation of fans has known the other four through wobbly bootlegs and secondhand description. They also did not just open the West End and move on. They grew into these parts across a tour, a transfer, a shared Olivier nomination and a shutdown, and you can hear all of it in how they play off one another. The timing between them is muscle memory. No newly assembled company could fake it.

The capture also makes plain how hard the job is. Each performer sings lead, then drops back to supply harmonized backing vocals for whoever is up next, all while executing Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s choreography in heels with a microphone occupying one hand. There is no ensemble to hide behind and nowhere to catch a breath. It also makes the case for the swings and understudies who cover several of these tracks at once, one of the least appreciated jobs in the business.

They are all worth watching. Richard-Noel opens “No Way” like she is taking a door off its hinges, and the runs she piles onto the last chorus deserve a rewind. O’Connell plays Boleyn as a gleeful troublemaker who knows exactly how funny she is, which is much harder than it looks. McIntosh has the loosest physicality of the six and turns “Get Down” into a victory lap. Paris has sung “Heart of Stone” longer than anyone alive, and her voice carries the clarity of a performer who stopped needing to prove anything.

Aimie Atkinson has always given the definitive Katherine Howard. This is the version that proves it. “All You Wanna Do” starts as a funny, flirty brag about how many men have wanted her and ends somewhere awful, and in a theater you can look away, or watch the band, or study the lighting rig. The camera does not offer that. It stays on her face while the smile stops working, and the grasping hands in the choreography close in on a girl who never stood a chance. A pop banger goes claustrophobic, and the dark seam under this show sits where casual listeners cannot miss it.

The sound engineering on Six the Musical Live! deserves its own special mention. The Ladies in Waiting, the all-female band onstage in costume, can swallow lyrics in a live room if the mix is off, and Marlow and Moss write fast enough that poor acoustics cost you half the jokes. Paul Gatehouse’s design keeps the low end punchy and the vocals separate, so the wordplay lands and, for the first time, you can hear the harmonies the other five stack behind whoever has the spotlight. If you have only known this show from a theater seat, that alone justifies the ticket.

Then there are the costumes, which I have been underselling for years. Slade, who dressed the Spice Girls and their dancers for the Spice World tour, built each queen around the modern pop muse their songs were inspired by: Beyoncé for Aragon, Adele and Sia for Seymour, Rihanna and Nicki Minaj for Cleves, Ariana Grande for Howard, Alicia Keys for Parr. She worked from Alexander McQueen and Balmain silhouettes, then cut them into Tudor shapes. The lattice work borrows from stained glass. Most of the skirts open at the front the way four-part Tudor skirts did.

When the show reached Broadway, Slade gave the principals what she calls a glow up: heavier studding, more lattice, and custom Roman numeral earrings marking each queen’s place in the marriage order. That detailing has since worked its way through the international productions. I have watched Six from the front row three times and never clocked the earrings, or that the nail colors match the rhinestones, or that the mics are studded to match the gowns. The camera catches all of it, which makes it a coherent design right down to a level almost nobody was ever going to see.

It is not flawless. Around the seventy-minute mark the show has to remember it has a structure, and the competition conceit clanks back into place right when the momentum is best left alone. That is a writing problem rather than a filming one. Quansah-Breed hauls it back with “I Don’t Need Your Love,” and the “Megasix” sends everyone out grinning.

Hadestown: The Musical just proved a proshot can hold a multiplex for weeks, not just a long weekend, and the comparison flatters Six more than it might seem. Hadestown is a dense, scenic tragedy that asks for cinematic scale. Six the Musical Live! is a ten-track pop concert with no set changes whatsoever. Six women, six microphones, some lights, and it still fills a movie screen. That is the harder trick, and it says everything about the charisma standing on that stage.

It arrives for an audience that has been ready for years, raised on TikTok clips, cosplay, and fan art. Eighty minutes without an intermission also makes it about the easiest sell a family will find this month, and the history buffs will get the jokes, too. Fans should go loud and not be embarrassed when they catch themselves singing along in a room full of strangers doing exactly the same thing.

Six the Musical Live! will be released in US theaters on August 14, 2026.