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Dive deeper into the her-story of the six queens.

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the creators of SIX, talk about the show and its inspiration.

The show gives its singing, dancing queens a second chance at royal sisterhood, having the leads finally band together in song. That, too, is rooted in history, say the playwrights, even if it is less well known.

When [Toby] Marlow, then a student at Cambridge University in England, first proposed writing a tongue-in-cheek, pop music-inspired show about the six wives Henry VIII, his friend and classmate [Lucy] Moss was skeptical…Marlow’s brainstorm was to stage the female-empowered show as a pop concert-turned-singing competition featuring each of the queens. Their musical styles would be drawn from Marlow and Moss’s mutual love of pop stars like Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Adele, and Sia.

Marlow and Moss were just trying to get through finals when they wrote a musical that turned the six wives of Tudor monarch Henry VIII into pop stars.

Writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss dug into the history of Tudor England and the royal court for the lyrics to their pop opera…Here are the CliffsNotes to help you navigate this chapter in British history.

Director Zack Winokur and Chanel DaSilva, the show’s choreographer, evoke the spirits of Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers and Cab Calloway. “It’s the eternal joy and glee of African-Americans in society behind the mask,” Chanel said.

It challenges its audience members, creates enough of a tension between frivolity and terror to make them uncomfortable, as in the noose scene, or the plantation scene, which, [choreographer] DaSilva said, is meant to hold viewers accountable as witnesses to tragedy.

“The Black Clown,” [Co-creator and performer] Mr. Tines said in a recent interview, “is our most earnest attempt to realize Hughes’s project for making the larger humanity understand a single person, and thus understand itself.”