The Broadway hit Six The Musical is about the six wives of Henry VIII deciding to — spoiler alert — quit competing and enjoy their shared place in history.
That spirit carries over to Las Vegas sharing the musical. For the first time in 10 years, a Broadway show has played the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, then returned for a casino run.
If no one loses their head, it could create a path for Broadway to return to the Strip, which has lately struggled for alternatives to concert stars and acrobatics.
Six, a youthful transformation of English royalty into Beyonce-style pop divas, is at the Palazzo for seven weeks through May 7, after playing the Smith Center for two weeks last fall. That’s something that hasn’t happened since the Smith Center’s earliest days, when Million Dollar Quartet visited in 2012, then returned to Harrah’s Las Vegas the following year.
Granted, Six is kind of its own thing, with its youthful cult following. Most Broadway musicals do not start with a cast member yelling, “Las Vegas! How are you doing? … You came here tonight to party with us old-school — really old-school!”
But a solid run might open the door for other casino-friendly titles (because they don’t like super-long or serious stuff): maybe Moulin Rouge, Tina – The Tina Turner Musical or Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations.
Smith Center President Myron Martin says the show’s casino return could be a triple win: “A win for the local population, a win for the producers, and a win for the Strip, because they get something that’s proven and vetted” — a stamp of approval from being part of the Broadway series at the arts center.
(Casinos have played host to Broadway-ish products: musicals that didn’t technically open on Broadway but could claim to be new or exclusive. Some, such as Baz – Star Crossed Love — a Moulin Rouge variant in the same theater as Six— weren’t bad. Others, such as the recent Meat Loaf jukebox musical Bat Out of Hell, were godawful.)
The Smith Center’s arrival mostly ended an adventurous era on the Strip, when Broadway hits were tested repeatedly. There were a couple of home runs — Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia! — but many more strike-outs: Does anyone remember Saturday Night Fever?
Most of those were not part of a longer tour but separate enterprises financed expressly for the Strip, with more money riding on the bet. Recent Broadway hits already on the road, booked for limited runs with reigned-in expectations, might be a more viable model.
One of the Six producers, Kevin McCollum, has been bullish on Las Vegas as far back as 2005 when he and Steve Wynn brought Avenue Q to Wynn Las Vegas before it went on tour. But that run turned out to be a challenge, as did so many Broadway shows that followed. Knowing that history, McCollum likely had no quarrel with Martin’s request that Six be part of the Broadway Las Vegas series before it played a casino.
The Smith Center’s base of locals is strong enough that it doesn’t go out of its way to vie for tourists. “Advertising has changed a lot since the Smith Center opened,” Martin says. “We’re not in the in-room magazines and things like that.”
The Six producers weren’t available to discuss exactly how the show got back to town, but the Palazzo run wasn’t announced until mid-November. The original schedule listed longer stays in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Whether the Palazzo run is a deliberate experiment or an accident that became an experiment, one thing is clear: Six seems more at home in a casino than in a concert hall.
The whole show plays out in front of a four-piece band on a riser as Henry’s wives — now modeled after pop queens such as Beyonce, Rihanna, and Ariana Grande — tell their stories in a brisk 80 minutes. And in case you were wondering, the King wasn’t invited — it’s a girls’ night out, in spangly boots and bedazzled corsets.
While it’s officially a Broadway musical, it’s one with a concert format where the cast members talk right to you. Giving Anna of Cleves (Olivia Donaldson at this performance) a Nicki Minaj ‘tude is pretty silly, yet pretty smart. There’s actual history sprinkled into the slang-peppered script by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.
The common vocabulary is the music, full of both hip-hop bangers (Don’t Lose Ur Head) and power ballads (Heart of Stone) which stand on their own outside the theater better than many a recent cast album. It’s a young show, both in terms of the cast and the target audience — another reason why it might sit better on the Strip than as part of a season-ticket package where older patrons might just tolerate it.
The songs are styled after the pop music its cast grew up on, so the performers know how to belt them. And that female empowerment message rethinking the old wives’ tales? You might snicker, but they don’t. It’s a declaration, not an apology.
All this made Six into something of a phenomenon since its pandemic-delayed Broadway debut in late 2021. It played for two weeks instead of the one-week minimum at the Smith Center in September and October, and two touring companies are now on the road. (The ‘Boleyn Tour’ launched at the Smith Center and is now in Philadelphia, while the ‘Aragon Tour’ brings a different cast to the Palazzo.)
It could still take a lot of girl power for this to work, though. The Palazzo run could answer some questions about whether the chalice is half-empty or half full:
- Does this return give locals a second chance? Did people see friends’ social media posts and say, “How did I miss that? I get a second chance!”
- Or did the 16 shows last fall, with about 32,000 available tickets, kill the market for locals? (Martin explains that in a one-week run at the Smith Center, about three-fourths of seats go to season ticket holders. If a show runs longer, it’s that second week, which opens up primarily to single-ticket sales.)
- And when it comes to the tourists, will it be the age-old question of whether Six is something they can’t see at home versus a one-of-a-kind spectacle such as Cirque’s O? Las Vegas was first, but this “Aragon company” moves on to two feeder markets: Los Angeles and Costa Mesa.
photo by: Joan Marcus
Locals generally love going to the Smith Center and loathe going to the Strip. But for locals and visitors, there are a couple of leveling factors: Parking is still free at the Palazzo, and most of the audience in the Palazzo Theatre will have better seats than at least half of the seats at the Smith Center. Closer, if not more comfortable: Many chairs are the stackable banquet type.
But remember, Six is short. And they want you on your feet for the last five minutes anyway.
Tickets for Six The Musical are on sale now through the Venetian Website here.
