But the empowering musical sold out from the second performance on. When Six opened at the Edinburgh festival, Moss expected “maybe, like, four people would see it”. “That’s mandatory! I’m kidding – we just want everyone to come as their interpretation of who they are as a queen.” So should audiences dress up? “One-hundred per cent,” Moss laughs. The costume style is Tudor meets futuristic: robot corsets and studded jewels. Or they can join the whole company in the oompah-techno number Haus of Holbein (about the king’s favoured painter), performed in neon rave glasses. The six queens will encourage fans to join in with solo numbers such as Anne Boleyn’s sour bubblegum pop song Don’t Lose Ur Head and Jane Seymour’s aching ballad Heart of Stone. Now that the songs are better known, she says, the singalong nights will enable the actors to “use more call-and-response with the audience and play more on the pop-concert vibe”. She says they didn’t want to create a ‘“classic book musical, going from scene to song” but aimed to use the conventions of a concert within a theatrical format. Lucy Moss was in her final year studying history at Cambridge when she wrote the show with fellow undergraduate Toby Marlow. It might be a new musical but, with the album getting 60,000 streams a day and its “queendom” fanbase expanding, plenty of theatregoers already know Six’s lyrics off by heart. Runaway success … Alexia McIntosh as Anna of Cleves in Six. “Remember us from your GCSEs?” they ask, before each takes the lead vocal on their own song. The premise is that Henry VIII’s wives have come back from the grave to form a girl group, reclaiming their stories in a live “histo-remix” gig. While Tina’s producers have to emphasise that their show is a not a concert, Six is styled as exactly that. Six has grown from a student show at the Edinburgh festival to a West End smash in under two years and, later this month, will compete against Tina and Broadway successes Fun Home and Come from Away for the Olivier award for best new musical. The first singalong production of Six, at London’s Arts theatre, will take place in June and has already sold out. Surprisingly, it is original new musicals that are leading the way rather than revivals of classics or jukebox shows stuffed with hit songs. However, a trend of karaoke nights is emerging in theatre. They are asked to save their singing for the medley finale. Tina – The Tina Turner musical has pre-show announcements requesting that audiences refrain from wailing out Nutbush City Limits during the drama.
While stage shows such as Bat Out of Hell, based on the songs of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf, have held similar performances, theatregoers are usually discouraged from joining in with all those rousing choruses. F rom The Sound of Music to The Greatest Showman, singalong screenings of musicals are no longer a novelty in cinemas.