To best enjoy this musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII, it’s good to brush up on the history. The lyrics contain a lot of jokes and references that I wouldn’t have gotten had I not learned a bit about the real-life stories.1
The songs are catchy, though unexceptional. The best song for me is the one for Catherine Howard. Through several repetitions of the chorus, she comes to realize that men objectify her, and goes through an emotional journey from playful to tragic. The singer ends the song with a sob, a surely challenging feat for an actor.
Footnotes
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by watching The Tudors TV show, which is not necessarily the most historically accurate, but close enough ↩
