Top image: London West End Cast, SIX the Musical in “Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens,” National Portrait Gallery © Dave Parry
At The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, the six wives of Henry VIII are moving from textbook margins to center stage.
“United Queendom: Adapting the Tudors through SIX and Historical Collections” will explore how the hit show “SIX the Musical” and major U.K. institutions have turned the queens into global pop icons while drawing new audiences toward archival collections.
The concert-style musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss recasts the wives as rival pop divas, “remixing 500 years of Tudor drama into a high-voltage celebration of female agency” and reframing the queens “on their own terms.”
Producer Kenny Wax has argued that this retelling has done more for popularizing Tudor history, “and specifically the Ex Wives,” than anything else in decades.
Historian and educator Caroline Marcus, a longtime “herstory” consultant for collaborations between SIX and institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery and Royal Collection Trust, will lead the Feb. 26 program.
The event is presented in conjunction with “United Queendom: Legacies of Gendered Power in the Early Modern British World,” a two‑day conference at The Huntington examining femininity, monarchy and authority from the Tudor and Stuart eras to the present.
United Queendom: Adapting the Tudors through SIX and Historical Collections will run on Thursday, Feb. 26, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Rothenberg Hall, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, Calif.For more information, visit https://www.huntington.org/event/united-queendom-adapting-tudors-through-six-and-historical-collections. Ticket: Free with reservation
