British talents have reaped a phenomenal array of nominations for this year’s Tony awards in New York. The musical Six picked up eight nominations, including best musical and best original score for Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow who wrote the show when they were undergraduates in their final year at Cambridge University and first took it to the Edinburgh fringe as a student production. The musical, in which Henry VIII’s wives return from the dead to give a pop concert, was inspired by historian Lucy Worsley’s TV series and Beyoncé’s Live at Roseland show.
Moss, who at 26 became the youngest female director of a Broadway musical for Six, was in technical rehearsals for a new London production of Legally Blonde when her phone began to ping with news of Six’s nominations on Monday afternoon. “My head’s very much somewhere else right now,” she laughed. “There’s a lot going on.” Moss added that she had been unsure about whether US audiences would flock to a musical about Tudor queens. “We were originally worried about whether they would get it – do they know enough about British history, how much do they care about Henry VIII? But although it’s not American history, the pop concert is an American form. American audiences know what to do in a pop concert situation.”
