wolffyluna

I have been listening to Six a lot since I found out about it last week. Six is a pop musical about Henry the Eighth's wives, where they compete for the title of the one most done wrong by Henry and thus the ? leader? of their ?band?. It's good fun, and the songs are catchy, and I have some Thoughts and Feelings about it.

So, below are my Thoughts and Feelings, in rough order of coherence.

1. There's part of my that wants to write a meta-essay comparing and contrasting Hamilton and Six. On the one hand, they are both musicals about historical people, . On the other hand, that's kind of a superficial similarity.

But on the mutant third hand-- there's something about how both musicals care about the historical narrative, and the slightly different way they approach them, that's interesting to compare between the two. Hamilton cares about who gets remembered, what leads to people being prominent in the historical narrative. Why is Jefferson better remembered than Hamilton? Why do we remember either of those people at all. It cares about the fight for the proverbial quill of history. While Six cares a lot more about how people get remembered. It cares about how Anne Boleyn gets remembered as Henry's wife while Henry is rarely remembered as Anne's husband. It's about how the wives are treated as a set, as a sequence of 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.' It cares, to a lesser but still noticeable extent, to the tension between women's personal achievements getting overshadowed by who they are married to, while at the same time often the major reason those women are historically significant is because of... who they were married to.

There's something there, I think.

2. I know intellectually that acting has a big effect, that what a character is like is really affected by who plays them. I keep forgetting this.

But Six really reminds me.

Studio Cast Anne Boleyn, played by Ashleigh Weir, is kind of... annoying. Grating. (Sorry, Ashleigh.) Definitely doesn't deserve having her head chopped off, but really not someone who makes good decisions.

West End Boleyn, played by Millie O'Connell, is endlessly charming. Beautifully over the top. I would want to be friends with her, but I would never be able to keep up. The way she delivers the "Haha... not my thing" and "I'll think about it mayber, XO baby" is delightful and charming and it feels like I have a great raconteur telling me a story, instead of someone trying to justify their bad decisions.

Acting, man. It's weird.

3. Six is really fictionalised. Like, 'it features a literal fix it fic' levels of fictionalised. All the people portrayed are very very dead, and have been for a long time. It is technically RPF, but it's the kind of RPF I am of the opinion is very much fine.

...doesn't mean I am not embarrassed by the amount and way I feel fannish about it. I have a favourite fictionalised wife of Henry the Eighth now. (Katherine Howard. I feels so goddamned sorry for her.) I have shippy fanfic ideas about the characters. I do not know where these have come from, and yet I have them. (This confusion and embarrassment is made more acute by the fact the ideas I have are for a trope I usually find somewhere between 'overly saccharine' and 'eyebrow raising.' What happened here?)