SIX APPEAL

Playwrights Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss talk to YOLANTHE FAWEHINMI about making Six The Musical into a big-screen experience

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WHEN pals Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss were students at Cambridge, they became aware of a lack of representation in musicals.

Well-written, layered and humor-ous characters for female and non-binary actors where few and far between. The answer? They wrote their own.

When Six The Musical premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017, the pair never expected it to pique the interest of West End producers with the show finding a home at the Vaudeville Theatre in London.

They certainly didn't see it being released as a film, yet Six The Musical Live has just arrived in cinemas.

"We wrote it when we were at uni, and at the time, we were just having lots of conversations between us, amongst our friends, about the representation of women and non-binary people in musical theatre," says Toby, 30.

"There were often not enough characters for women and non-binary performers that were meaty, hilarious, took up a load of space and were charismatic enough to show off the whole range that a performer has.

"And if there were those roles, it was maybe, like, one or two," adds Toby, who along with co-creator Lucy, 31, won the 2022 Tony Award for Best Original Score (Music and Lyrics) for Six The Musical.

"It came from wanting to write something that showcased a really amazing, talented group of people on stage who weren't cis men [assigned male at birth], essentially.

"Then the six wives came about, because we thought, if we're doing that, it would be good to do it with a famous subject matter that people recognise and know.