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A singer and dancer in Japan, Marie Sugaya first heard about a musical featuring King Henry VIII’s wives through a friend on a cultural exchange in London. “She spoke of Six so highly that I thought if it were ever to come to Japan, I’d love to be involved. But it was a faraway idea, just a dream.”
Similarly, Airi Suzuki, an actor and “pop icon” famed across Japan, travelled to Britain to watch the show last year, purely as a punter. Neither Sugaya nor Suzuki imagined they would ever take to the same stage to perform the Tudor-era musical-cum-rock concert themselves. But they are part of an all-Japanese lineup of queens who are taking over Vaudeville theatre for a week-long run which producers think is the first of its kind: a West End show, translated into Japanese and performed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya as part of a sold-out tour, now brought back to the West End with a cast who sing in Japanese (with English captions).
It is the latest twist in the life of this feted musical “queendom”, originally arising out of the Edinburgh fringe of 2017, now a global phenomenon. The UK production was performed in Japan at the start of this year followed by its Japanese iteration.
When co-producers Kenny Wax and Andy Barnes saw the latter, along with co-creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, they felt it had an irrepressible energy that deserved to be experienced in London. “We thought it’d be wonderful for the queendom to do something different,” says Wax. “Six likes to be different; we often do crazy things.”
Sugaya plays Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII whose marriage ended in annulment (at least she escaped with her head intact) while Suzuki is Catherine Howard, the wife who replaced Anne of Cleves in Henry’s affections but was beheaded less than two years after their marriage, aged only 18 or 19.
Both actors are sitting in a rehearsal room in London wearing branded T-shirts and speaking of being “super excited to be here”.
“Six lasts 80 minutes and it is 80 minutes in which these queens jump out of their oil paintings to speak their own truths, their own histories and individualities,” says Suzuki. “Catherine Howard’s message hasn’t really changed in all these centuries: as humans we all have our own value.”
The first piece of music she connected to from the show was, in fact, All You Wanna Do, her character’s solo, which became the entry point for her. Sugaya, also a vocal coach and sailor who was working on a boat a few weeks before being cast for the show, feels a natural affinity with Cleves: “She was also someone who did what she wanted to do. She felt the same sort of freedom [as Sugaya].
“There is great value to doing the show in a different language from its original,” she adds. “It feels like a good opportunity to prove we do it with the same passion.”
Their characters are an amalgam of the historical and personal. “I am playing 50% Catherine Howard and 50% myself,” Suzuki says, and Sugaya agrees: “The show is not only different in every country but different with every cast because of this 50-50 mix.”
While Tudor history is not ubiquitously known in Japan, many are aware of this musical and are well versed on the fate of these queens, says Hiroko Murata, director of Umeda Arts theatre and producer of the Japanese Six. “We have two different types of audience in Japan – the Six fans who don’t know the history but love the music and those who do know the history. Theatregoers in Japan really love stories about the throne and the royal family. They are familiar with Shakespeare too.” That means they know about about British royal history.
A key theme is giving historical women a voice, says Wax, as well as empowering today’s girls and women. “We talk about it very much as the show being ‘her-story’ rather than ‘his-story’. These women are given the opportunity to tell the story of their lives with Henry, and almost, dare I say it, stick two fingers up to him.”
For Sugaya, that message is clear. “History is obviously written around men, and the women [so often] just become accessories. There are a lot of layers behind history. The important thing here is that each person has their own individual history, so there is the importance of making your own history, and also making yourself regal, in a way.”
Is this message evident for Japanese audiences, and does its feminism resonate today, especially given the recent election of the first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi? Murata says the Japanese Six is “not screaming about empowerment or feminism as a show – audiences can take on that sort of message and ignite that feeling of feminism themselves in their hearts”. But at the same time, she speaks of empowerment and extends an open invitation to Takaichi to see the musical for herself.
Aside from appealing to diehard Six fans, the run is likely to pull in the West End’s substantial international audience as well as Japanese tourists, says Wax. The international reach of the musical on the whole has been phenomenal, he adds. Currently 15 countries are licensed to perform it with more unlicensed, non-replica shows further afield. It has been staged in far-flung terrain, from Korea and China to Singapore and the Philippines. “So many already know the music. Its soundtrack has been streamed 1.1bn times – second only to Hamilton in musical theatre streaming.”
For Sugaya, it is incredibly emotional to be performing in the West End, not least because the friend who first told her about it will be in the audience. “She’s coming back to London to watch it with me on stage this time. It’s very moving,” says Sugaya. That faraway idea, or dream, come true.
