Leading Actor Joined: 12/9/23
Me and my family found this the weakest out of all of the West End Live performances we saw this summer and decided to skip it as a result of that performance. My family loved SIX... but you could hear it all over this soundtrack. Like, melodies directly lifted. I agree, it made me wish I was watching SIX...
I’ll say it again: it takes tremendous guts to reveal your true self on the commercial stage, even through a (semi)fictional lens. Give some credit to Toby and Lucy here (and they’ve written another pretty good score, for the most part).
It just so happens, though, that Larson, Stew, Hunter + Jeff, MRJ, and Gould / Matthews wrote autobiographical musicals that were more coherent and consistently structured.
I appreciate the attempt and I sincerely hope Toby and Lucy keep writing for the theatre in the future.
Also, Jo Foster is a star and I hope they can come over to the States someday.
Maybe they'll find that their real gift is as songwriters –– not bookwriters/directors. Few people have the skill to write book, music, and lyrics and direct, and having other perspectives bringing equal weight to the process is ideal. When a team is doing that much on their own, it can be easy for one area to suffer.
Understudy Joined: 9/14/04
I’m sorry because normally I hate to dump on any show - the closure of any show is a tragedy since it puts so many hard working people out of a job. But I really thought this was awful.
Marlow and Moss evidently have very high opinions of themselves but two extremely wealthy, upper class, terrifyingly well-connected (they ARE talented, but would Six have been the hit if was without a godparent who is one of the most powerful people in theatre looking after it?) white people making a West End musical about how amazing they are is just tone deaf. The “we’re amazing, it’s all men who are the problem” conclusion might have worked with fictional characters but not in autobiographical work. And a wilful refusal to acknowledge any kind of identity or marginalisation other than queerness, which is problematic for a show about identity.
They are talented at writing insanely catchy songs but they should have brought in an experienced book writer and director. The whole show felt narcissistic and arrogant to me, albeit superbly performed by the two leads.
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