Six

Monday

Robert S. Erickson

& Juliet and Titanique: two newly minted cult classics

Fears that the new pop-parody musical & Juliet would be a vehicle for steamrolling Shakespeare are understandable but unfounded. It’s true that, on Broadway as in the rest of the arts, holding dead white males up for flagellation is now almost a cherished ritual — a recent example being last season’s Six, a glitzy feminist paean danced on the grave of Henry VIII. There’s a healthy dose of girl power in & Juliet, too, and I don’t doubt that a few heedless theatergoers came with tomatoes in hand, hoping to find the Bard pilloried. Let me tell you a secret: the theater world still adores Shakespeare, even in 2023. To renounce him is to swear off your mother’s milk.

Juliet

Thursday

Robert S. Erickson

Broadway’s back(side)

Six, a British musical about the wives of Henry VIII, is a scrupulously specious masterclass in frivolity. These onetime queens, blinged and bedazzled as fabulous pop-diva Kweens, undertake a six-way singing competition to decide who had “the biggest, the firmest, the fullest... load of B.S. to deal with” from their kingly husband. Backed by a live band, the sextet’s set amounts to the love child of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Super Bowl halftime show. Those hoping for revisionist revenge fantasy will leave disappointed. Those seeking dramatic tension, character development, tragedy — anything having to do with the second half of the phrase “musical theater” — won’t find it here.

six

Thursday

Nicola Christie

How the British musical conquered the world

From our UK edition

What do Henry VIII’s wives, a Rastafarian musical icon and a drag queen have in common? They are all the subjects of new stage shows that are heralding a golden age of the British musical. Let’s start with the court of Henry VIII. A pair of friends at Cambridge University, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, decided to write their own musical four years ago because the student theatre society couldn’t afford to pay the royalties for an existing one. They based it on the life stories of the six women who were unfortunate enough to marry Henry VIII. Six, as this debut effort came to be known, opens on Broadway this week, with huge advance ticket sales already achieved. ‘Historically, Britain was a place of Shakespeare, and new plays.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Six sequels that outdo the original film

From our UK edition

‘Sequels are whores’ movies’, the great screenwriter William Goldman once opined. As with so much that Goldman said, it’s pithy, witty and often accurate. All of us have been lured into cinemas with the promise of the continuation of a great film, only to be sorely disappointed by the cynicism of a lazy cash-in. Several of these have deservedly gone down as some of the worst pictures ever made: there is no need for any sensible person to watch Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights or Jaws: The Revenge. Yet there are also examples of sequels that equal, even surpass, the original, where either the original filmmakers return to a story with new passion or a new director manages to revitalise a narrative with vigour and enthusiasm.

Tuesday

Tim Dawson

The six wittiest conservatives

From our UK edition

Left-wing people are funny and Conservatives are not. That’s the myth the Left like to perpetuate – particularly left-wing “comedians”, usually with all the wit and subtlety of John McDonnell at a Palestine Solidarity rally. We have in Boris Johnson a Conservative Prime Minister famous for his wit and wordplay – a man who famously declared during the 2005 election campaign that “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” But, he’s not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, Tory to light up Parliament with his quips.