SIX Reviews: What the Critics Say

SIX has been reviewed in London since January 2018, and the notices got better as the show did.

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The Critics' Verdict

It started at three stars and finished with a Tony.

The first London reviews, at the 350-seat Arts Theatre in 2018, were warm without being excited. By the time it reached the Lyric in 2020 it was collecting fives, and in 2022 Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss won the Tony Award for Best Score.

New York agreed. SIX opened at the Brooks Atkinson in October 2021 as the first new musical to reach Broadway after the pandemic, having had its original opening night cancelled hours before curtain in March 2020. Jesse Green made it a Critics' Pick in the New York Times, calling it "a fantastic physical production with unimprovable performances." Peter Marks in the Washington Post had it as "the pulse-quickening musical pleasure trove that Broadway has been waiting for."

What almost every critic agrees on: the songs are very well made, the cast can sing, and the eighty minutes go quickly. Where they differ is whether that adds up to a musical, and your answer to that is the same as theirs.

What the Reviews Praised

The score, consistently, from the beginning. Even in the lukewarm early notices the writing was the thing that survived. Lyn Gardner in the Guardian picked out Anne Boleyn's "catchy Lily Allen-ish number", and Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph called Jane Seymour's ballad one "that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up."

The performances. Cavendish described a company with "a Spice Girls slick-ness as they strut and synchronise their moves", and Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard wrote that "one of the chief joys of the show is in watching six women who look substantially more diverse than the average West End lineup revel in their power and charisma."

The band. Clive Davis in The Times noted "a smart, all-female four-piece band" and orchestrations that are "unfailingly sharp."

And the jokes underneath the jokes. Cavendish again: "The jokiness conveys a subtle pain."

Where Reviews Were Mixed

The early notices doubted the structure, and said so clearly.

Mark Shenton in The Stage, January 2018, thought it "still feels a little raucously and unashamedly undergraduate" and that "there's not (yet) quite enough variety in the writing: each of the wives strikes an attitude and then holds and repeats it, a lot."

Gardner was gentler and reached a similar place: "It's a nice idea, neatly done", "seldom laugh-out-loud funny", and a "lively calling card" from its writers.

That criticism never entirely went away. Davis, giving it four stars at the Vaudeville in 2021, wrote that it "barely qualifies as a musical in the traditional sense... it's really more of a pumped-up concert."

He did not mean it as a complaint. The same sentence goes on: the songs are "packaged with a degree of poise and wit that makes juke-box shows such as Jersey Boys look ponderous by comparison."

Is SIX Right for You?

Book it if you want a very good gig with jokes. Eighty minutes, no interval, live band, six singers who can genuinely sing. On that measure every critic agrees.

Book it if you are bringing teenagers. Curtis called it "the biggest cult hit since Rocky Horror", and the fan following is real.

Think harder if you want a plot. The criticism that it is a concert rather than a musical has been made from 2018 to now, by people who liked it. If a story is what you are buying, this is not the show.

And this is the one thing worth getting right before you book. Audience ratings for SIX are high on the theatre platforms, better than nine in ten positive, but on the general travel sites a quarter of reviewers rate it one or two stars, and they say the same thing every time: no scene changes, no story, not what they expected. Most of them praise the singing in the same review. People who know they are buying an eighty-minute pop concert love it. People expecting a traditional musical do not. Call us if you are unsure which you are.

Think harder if you are sensitive to volume or strobe, and read the content warning on the show page before booking for a younger teenager.

Call us on 020 7193 9050 and we will talk it through.

Book SIX Tickets

At the Vaudeville Theatre, booking to 28 November 2027. Seats from around £35, and the cheapest ones cost the same on a Saturday as on a Tuesday.

SIX tickets • Call us on 020 7193 9050

Sources

The Guardian · The Daily Telegraph · The Times · The Stage · Evening Standard · WhatsOnStage · The New York Times · The Washington Post · Variety