Weather 
SIX has conquered Broadway, the West End and stages around the world. Now, the Queens are ready to rule the big screen. SIX the Musical Live! arrives in movie theaters across the United States and Canada for one week beginning August 14, bringing the hit musical to audiences in a whole new way.
BroadwayWorld’s Richard Ridge recently caught up with Tony Award-winning creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss to talk about the film, reuniting with the original West End Queens and wrapping their heads around the extraordinary journey of a show they first created as university students.
Nearly a decade after SIX began its journey at the Edinburgh Fringe, Moss admits that the scale of its success remains difficult to comprehend.
“I think it’s kind of impossible to put into any kind of perspective, especially because the journey started with such little—not even little expectation. It wasn’t even slightly on our radar,” she explained. “Truly, the thinking was that no one would be asking me about it in nine years’ time.”
For Marlow, part of what makes that perspective so elusive is that SIX simply hasn’t stopped growing. With productions continuing to pop up around the globe, the musical still feels very much like a work in motion.
“There’s always new stuff happening with it all the time,” they said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s a thing that’s ended that I can really look back on and go, ‘Wow, wasn’t that crazy?'” Above all, they added, he remains “unbelievably grateful” that audiences are still interested in the show and that its success has allowed him and Moss “to be writers for a living.”
The new film captures the original West End Queens at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, but Marlow and Moss were determined that it wouldn’t feel like a conventional stage recording. Taking inspiration from both musical theatre pro shots and filmed pop concerts, the team sought to preserve the infectious live energy that has always been central to the SIX experience.
“Something that’s so special about SIX is the feeling that you get of being in the room and that kind of liveness,” Moss explained. “I actually think that really comes across in how creatively the editing and filming and camera work has been done.”
But perhaps the most meaningful part of SIX’s legacy extends beyond its catchy songs and concert atmosphere. For Marlow and Moss, the musical has always been about asking audiences to reconsider who gets to tell history—and whose voices have traditionally been left out of it.
“What I really hope the show… evokes in people is this kind of thing of, ‘When I’m learning this next thing, I’m going to really think about, okay, well, is what I’m being told as fact maybe [coming through] a subjective lens because of the person that’s telling me?'” Marlow said. “In an era where truth is something that is so hard to know… having a critical eye of things is more important than ever. And so I hope that SIX has some part to play in that.”
