SIX Soars, As Shubert & SCSU Build A New Dramatic Bridge

Kelly Denice Taylor as Jane Seymour in The North American Tour Boleyn Company of SIX. Photo by Joan Marcus, Courtesy of the Shubert Theatre. The third photo, which shows Tasia Jungbauer as Catherine Parr, is also by Joan Marcus.

On stage, Anna of Cleves was ready to get down. She bobbed her head, and breathed a new, poppy energy into the 1540s. She gyrated in slow motion, and her red skirt caught in the light and gleamed. Bathed in sheafs of gold and purple, she raced through a chapter of Tudor England, from her time at Richmond Castle to an infamous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. In the front row, students in Michael Skinner’s theater history class leaned in, hoping to catch every reference.

Anna of Cleves is really Hailey Alexis Lewis, a professional actor who plays Henry VIII’s fourth wife in the North American tour of the musical SIX. Skinner is the chair of the theatre department at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), where students are starting to think about devising a new play for young audiences. Wednesday night, they bridged space and time on College Street, as SIX entered its final dress rehearsal at the Shubert Theatre.

The tour, which is premiering in New Haven, runs Thursday through Sunday at the theater’s 247 College St. home; tickets and more information are available here. As in years past, SIX has used the Shubert to tech the show, a process whereby cast and crew finalize the performance before they go on the road. This is the first time that the tour is opening at the theater, harkening back to a long history of innovation on the stage.

It also marks the kickoff of a partnership between the Shubert and SCSU, whereby students will devise, build out, and act in a work of children’s theater for New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students before the end of the academic year. The collaboration is part of a $1.2 million gift that the theater received from the tech company ASML to grow its educational programming.

“It’s another connection to New Haven,” said Skinner, who grew up in Orange, and later attended SCSU and the Yale School of Drama. “Our students have been working for almost every other theater company in New Haven, so this is kind of exciting that it’s the big one. It is a roadhouse, in its own sense, so we’re excited to join a partnership where we actually get to create stuff and bring it around.”

Children’s theater, sometimes called theater for young audiences, is theater created and produced by professional actors and made specifically for children (it is not the same thing as theater made by children, of which New Haven has plenty). Some cities, like Philadelphia, New York, and Birmingham, have entire companies dedicated to the form.

But in New Haven, there’s no one entity or organization devoted to it.  While the city has seen smatterings—Brad Goren-Wilson’s The Whale In The Hudson in 2018, for instance, or touring performances like Ada Twist, Scientist at the Shubert earlier this year—there hasn’t been a place for it. The closest the city has gotten is the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, which has occasionally invited visual artists and poets into its programing for young audiences.

At least, until now. Last month, Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School dipped a toe into the genre, with a practicum in children’s theater that alumna Sumiah Gay is now teaching. Next month, Skinner will begin teaching a hands-on course, also called practicum in children’s theater, at Southern. By the end of the year, the Shubert will have brought a finished show into Bishop Woods Architecture & Design Magnet School, Barack H. Obama Magnet University School and Hill Central Music Academy.

The latter is made possible by ASML’s recent gift, which the Shubert earlier this year described as transformative. Kelly Wuzzardo, director of education and engagement at the theater, estimated that the cost of getting a project like this off the ground and beginning to tour it is over $100,000. For Skinner, who first saw theater when he was a kid growing up in Orange, it’s a full-circle moment.

Azaad Mamoun and Mike Skinner after the final dress rehearsal Wednesday, with a confetti memento. Lucy Gellman Photo.

“The Crescent Players, or maybe it was Southern, came in and did a show for us,” he said. “I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is something that I’m interested in doing.’”

What he didn’t bargain for was that SIX would become an unlikely and formative bridge for his students. While the musical is not children’s theater (although if you too have been up with a toddler recently at 4:38 a.m., the soundtrack is a welcome reprieve from Chiki Toonz), it presents a learning opportunity for its audiences that can translate to the classroom. And by the end of the night, it had students on their toes, thinking of the work that they too wanted to create. 

Set sometime between the 16th Century, the German nightclub Berghain, and the Renaissance World Tour, the play follows the six wives of Henry VIII as they compete to see who has suffered the most. Surrounded by a minimal stage—a dazzling backing band does a lot of the work here, as do some smart projections—the format is a kind of Pitch Perfect style riff off, complete with glittering, punk-kissed corsets, spiky headbands, custom hoop earrings and bedazzled mic holsters. 

Band members, who are referred to as “Ladies In Waiting,” include Music Director Valerie Maze on keys, a fun-to-behold Emily Davies on bass, Rose Laguana on guitar and Camila Mennitte Pereyra on drums. The associate conductor is Lizzie Webb.

At the center of it, of course, are the eponymous six queens: Catherine of Aragon (Emma Elizabeth Smith), Anne Boleyn (Nella Cole), Jane Seymour (an outstanding Kelly Denice Taylor), Anna of Cleves (Hailey Alexis Lewis), Katherine Howard (Alizé Cruz), and Catherine Parr (Tasia Jungbauer, who also steals the show). On stage, all six trade as many barbs as they do cultural references, from PBS to pinky swears and nods to Lily Allen, Céline Dion, Adele, Ariana Grande and Rhianna.

If the concept is bonkers, it’s also smart: who doesn’t want a feel-good, earwormy, girl power-charged subversion of the dominant narrative? The play, which leapt from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to Broadway in 2019, is hard not to root for: it became an early casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, spent months in musical purgatory, and then finally opened on Broadway in 2021. It’s been one of very few new plays to recoup its profits since.     

As they settled into the front row, over a dozen of Skinner’s students were all in, ready to immerse themselves in the world of the play. Around them, gem-colored light flooded the stage, where heavy red curtains waited to part. A harpsichord cover of Camila Cabello’s “Havana” floated through the space. In the center of the theater, crew members gathered around a table, ready for one last run through and production meeting before the show could open.

Sophomore Azaad Momoun, a history major who began acting as a student at New Haven Academy, was especially interested in how the writers, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, would present Tudor history. In his classes in high school, he found the history of Britain and Europe “really boring,” a story of who colonized whom that somehow became less interesting the more he learned. If left to his own devices, he prefers the “old world,” particularly ancient Sumeria. But Wednesday, he was doing his best to keep an open mind.

“I know that there’s good stuff to be had there,” he said. “And like, the stuff I don’t know is what’s most interesting to me. Learning new history is cool to me, but overanalyzing the same bit of history gets boring to me. [In the show,] I’m really interested in how they subvert the narrative.” 

As he watched, that world opened to him in ways that he couldn’t have imagined. As lights went down, cloaking the auditorium in darkness, the front rows came alive, the seats suddenly a knot of raised hands, extended arms and fingers, O-shaped, cheering mouths and applause doled out with abandon. In the front row, SCSU educator and director Gracy Brown put aside her skepticism about musical theater, settled in beside her teenage daughter, and dug in. Behind her, students from Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School looked as though they were ready to go clubbing.

The cast received it all, giving a performance that left no crumbs, and no question of whether they were ready for opening night. As the curtains opened, six actors took their place across the stage, silhouetted as a synthy riff on “Greensleeves” gave way to guitar, keys and percussion “so sick it'll give you gout,” as actors introduced it. Brown, along with Mamoun and dozens of other students, raised her hands to the stage, as if already prepared to bow down.

Four years and just as many North American tours in, actors made the show their own, imbuing the work with a sensibility and cheekiness that felt made for this moment. At first, it wasn’t clear if a doe-eyed Smith had the firepower and sass to capture Moss’ intended Aragon, and it made it all the more exciting when she did, reaching deep down to summon something fierce and full.

In the original work, a green-clad, selfie-snapping Boleyn is modeled on Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne, but Cole gave a Shania Twain circa 1997 vibe, without any of the political foolishness that accompanies the real-life artist. As Seymour, Taylor found a whole stash of extra, often ethereal notes that made her into the heartbeat of this production, with a particular gift for finding the pauses and rests in the music. That ability to find the space in between, of course, allowed her to return with the full vocal force of six women, and she did.

Some heads rolled, and so did these bops, propelling the show forward. As Lewis found her footing in knee-high, studded black boots, she became fun to watch, with all the unapologetic, haughty energy and bravado you want for a wronged woman. Cruz nailed the Ariana Grande spirit that the character was built on, while making clear how abused and manipulated Katherine Howard was by a system that failed her (the line “times were different then,” which has always hit hard, is squirm-worthily prescient now). As Parr, meanwhile, Jungbauer brought it all together, with a poise and moxie that made her feel born for the role.

It was, in that dark space that lives somewhere outside of reality, a reminder that the arts often meet the moment, because they are made of all the moments that have come before. In the show, a group of women all suffer at the whims of an insecure, paranoid, power-hungry, sexually rapacious, violent, vile, disease-ridden, wealth-hoarding scrub of a man with chronic venous insufficiency. Always, they are victims of the same system meant to contain them, to shame them, to make them small.

And then they push back, working together because they can no longer stand tearing each other down. They say to each other what they never had the chance to say in real life, which is a harmonized version of “I see you, let’s go slay the patriarchy.”

Wednesday, it felt a little on the nose, but not in an overwrought way. Three days before SIX opened on College Street, birthing people across the country watched two conspiracy theorists walk up to a podium on broadcast television and make a sweeping move to minimize women’s pain, blame them for adverse health outcomes, and sideline evidence-based medicine. By then, they’d (we’d) already watched the silencing of women and political critics, the rat race of blaming people instead of systems, the move to undo decades of progress in the name of a culture war.

Maybe these women, despite their access to wealth and resources that most people cannot dream of, are not so different from many of us, standing on the edge of this fractured world and trying to look forward. When Anne Boleyn miscarried multiple times—including a would-have-been heir that became a source of very public shame—Henry blamed her, in a pattern that is still entirely too common  (he then executed her on bogus charges, which is luckily far less common).

Parr survived Henry, but only because she figured out how to live within the boundaries he created and sublimated so much of herself in the process. And Jane, who died two weeks after giving birth, probably could have used a goddamn Tylenol (and like, postpartum care with more science and less astrology).   

Gracy Brown. Lucy Gellman Photo.

For attendees like Brown, it resonated, able to balance the heft of that meaning with the joy and ebullience of the Eras Tour. For her, putting a contemporary twist on centuries-old history opens up completely new channels for engagement.

“They sang, they sang their asses off, and the acting … I was actually surprised by how much of the story it told,” she said. “I was in it. I was in it, in it. They were so ready for us, and it’s something that made me very, very excited.”

“For me personally, it just made me feel very empowered as a woman who is a little bit in transition and trying to find her way again,” she added. “And to experience it with my daughter, to see how excited she was about it … it is really, really awesome.”

Back outside the theater, Mamoun was also still floating on the score, ready to dive back into the show during his Thursday theater history class. Skinner, nearby, was still unpacking the musical, a Russian Doll of cultural references that he was excited to dig into with his students. 

“That was amazing. It was like, I don’t know how to say it,” Mamoun said. “It was it. They were able to get the other side of the story. It’s just as valuable and important as every other history is … it’s about everything and everybody in the past, and in the present. Like, this will become history.”

“I think it becomes more powerful under certain contexts, and this is definitely a big, big context,” he said. “Like, this is a big, big header in the book of the world.”