(Photo by Joan Marcus)
With its themes of queerness and female empowerment wrapped in a pop-concert style score performed by an all-female cast, “SIX” has become one of theatre’s most popular and most influential productions in years. And for American theatre-loving gays specifically, “SIX” is the most important and most influential stateside appearance of British queens since The Vivienne first entered the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Werk Room.
“SIX” turns King Henry VIII’s queens into modern day pop princesses; a history-mix, if you will, of the six ex-wives’ lives. Here, the half-dozen women are alive and mostly well and they’re forming a pop singing girl group à la The Pussycat Dolls. They need the audience’s help in choosing who should be the one to lead the band by deciding which gal had it the worst with good ‘ole Hank.
What started as a university theatre project for the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, “SIX” soon landed in London’s West End. Mere hours before the show was to have its Broadway debut in March 2020, Broadway’s theaters were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A year and a half later, and already enough of a global sensation to have a fan base nicknamed The Queendom, “SIX” became Broadway’s first new show to open after the lockdown, quickly earning rave reviews from U.S. critics and fans alike.
The show’s book, music and lyrics were written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, winning them the 2022 Tony for Best Original Score. “SIX” also boasts three cast recordings: one featuring the original U.K. cast, a second sing-along version and a third recorded live on the original Broadway production’s opening night. Earlier this summer the original West End cast reunited to record a yet-to-be-released filmed version of the show.
Now, appropriately enough, “SIX” has six land-based casts across the globe plus two more out at sea on Norwegian Cruise Lines. The U.S. Aragon Tour opens Orlando’s 2022-23 Broadway season Oct. 4-9 at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. After stops in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, the tour then opens the 2022-23 Broadway season at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa from Nov. 1-6. A second U.S. tour – the Boleyn Tour – launches in Las Vegas later this month.
For Jasmine Forsberg, who portrays Jane Seymour in the Aragon cast and sings the show’s lone power ballad, “Heart of Stone,” the tour’s Orlando run is also a homecoming. The performer grew up in Waterford Lakes and graduated from Timbercreek High School.
“Orlando is my theatrical origin story,” Forsberg says. Starting dance lessons at the age of two and piano lessons at three, the performing arts became not just a hobby, but a way-of-life passion. Playing the title role – well, one of them anyway – in a youth theater production of “101 Dalmatians” provided an introduction to acting. Forsberg says learning about theatre and its nature of storytelling is what sold her on the art.
That theatrical upbringing also introduced her to the LGBTQ community. One of her early mentors was Joshua Eads, aka “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum and star of stage and screen Ginger Minj.
“My first impression was, ‘Wow! This kid is a star!’” Eads recalls, adding that they had initially heard about Forsberg from a friend before meeting her and that she “totally lived up to those expectations.”
“There is an honesty about her when she is on stage that is so rare,” Eads says. “She’s beautiful, she’s talented, and that voice is unreal!”
Forsberg’s resume includes performances with the Winter Park Playhouse, the Orlando Repertory Theatre and the 2016 Orlando Fringe Festival Patron’s Pick production of “Dora and Diega Explore Middle Class America.” Watermark, in its review of the show at the time, wrote “Among the show’s major highlights was Forsberg’s incredible singing voice.” The show’s venue was the Rep’s Black Box Theater, a space where Forsberg had previously performed only family-friendly youth-theater productions; “Dora and Diega” was not that.
“People growing up in the theater community tend to learn about things at a younger age than probably some other people do,” Forsberg says. “Telling jokes that were clearly not child-friendly, saying words that were not family-friendly, in a place that I considered to be the home for young audiences … it was so much fun and a hysterical opportunity.”
She’s enough of an Orlando theatre veteran that she’s already performed on the Dr. Phillips’ Walt Disney Theater stage — thanks to winning a 2017 Applause Award for high school musical theater productions — and even at downtown’s Bob Carr Theatre.
“Yeah, it’s a little ancient,” she says of the venue’s no-middle-aisle continental seating. “It’s the most inconvenient way of seating, but when you’re on stage looking at it, it’s like, wow! That’s a sea of people!” Which, of course, she’ll have performing in Tampa’s Carol Morsani Hall.
Still, it’s the Orlando stop she’s anticipating most. She sees performing at the Dr. Phillips Center as a “full-circle moment, especially since it’s my first big job out of school. I know we’re gonna have some hyped crowds in Orlando. I mean, Orlando; c’mon now! Theater culture, arts culture, gay culture: let’s go! It’ll be really special for sure.”
Show creator Marlow, who is gay and identifies as nonbinary, has previously said, “It’s a queer thing to take something that oppresses you and say, I’m going to turn it into something that fuels me.” That theme resonates throughout the show as each queen takes a turn in the spotlight to tell her side of the story.
Also present: the theme of strength in diversity, which appears not only in the story being told, but also in the performers telling it.
“We have cast members in our particular company who are lesbian, bisexual, pan; we identify all across the board,” Forsberg says. “I think the intersection between being a woman and being queer, there’s something to be said about that. In both instances people judge who you are because of that. ‘SIX’ is a perfect opportunity to flip that switch and say, ‘No, no, no. I’m taking up my space, I’m taking my power. You can’t tell me what to do. I’m going to live my life and I’m going to own it.’”
Also making “SIX” stand out: its color-blind casting.
“What is so special about this company, the six onstage queens that you see, we are all women of color,” Forsberg says. “I’m the first Asian principal actress to play Jane Seymour and I don’t take that lightly.” She’s already received messages from fellow Filipinos who’ve found inspiration in her performance.
“To step on stage, night after night, in a center spotlight, downstage … taking up that space as a mixed-race Asian-American woman … there is nothing that makes me feel more powerful. And I recognize that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. There are so many people that it took for me to be a leading lady today. And I never take it for granted.”
Consider Forsberg a lady in waiting no more.
Becoming Jane: The Remix
With “SIX,” each cast of six principals and four alternates don’t just learn the production’s songs and choreography before the curtain rises. As the show is rooted in history, the company undergoes intense research into the backgrounds of each of Henry’s ex-wives.
“The way Toby and Lucy have intertwined key details about the six wives in the wittiest way possible is brilliant,” Forsberg says of learning the historical context of each line of the script and its songs. That educational process started with watching a BBC documentary series and reading a lengthy historical account about what these women were like.
“She was a chunky book, like thiccc, with three c’s,” Forsberg says.
The herstory classes included individual presentations performed in the voice of their character.
“Jane, being the complete goofball derp that she is, she did a rap,” Forsberg says. “Was it a ‘mom rap’? Absolutely.”
Theatre history shows that a Broadway musical has been truly accepted by the gay community once one of its songs has been remixed into a dance club hit. (See: Dreamgirls’ “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”; Evita’s “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”; Rent’s “Seasons of Love”; Aida’s “Easy As Life”; Dear Evan Hansen’s “Waving Through A Window”; et al.) Apparently, this lesson was missing from the “SIX” producer’s pre-show curriculum.
“Does ‘Heart of Stone’ have a dance club remix?” Forsberg asks incredulously when first presented with the idea of the track’s mere existence. “You are blowing my mind right now. I knew I’d been living under a rock; well, a stone, in this case.”
After hearing the power-ballad-turned-dance-floor-anthem – recorded by producer Joel Dickinson with disco legend France Joli (“Come To Me”) handling the vocals and released the same week as “SIX’s” 2021 Broadway debut — Forsberg says her world has been rocked.
“Adding this to our communal warm-up playlist STAT; what a jam,” she texts after hearing the song for the first time. “Communal playlist being the Queens’ shared playlist that we use for our group pre-show warmups. We like to listen to strong female artists to embrace and harness all that girl power before our show. C’mon, France Joli!”
“SIX” opens at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts Oct. 6-9, with tickets available at DrPhillipsCenter.org, and at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts Nov. 1-6, tickets are available at StrazCenter.org.
