
Hahnville High School’s Talented Theatre program will perform “SIX: Teen Edition,” a musical that portrays the six wives of Henry VIII as pop icons, Jan. 30 through Feb. 2, according to Megan Harms, Talented Theatre director. This is the first production of the musical in St. Charles Parish.
When purchased in advance online, tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for children under 10. Tickets will be available at the door for $25 for adults and $20 for children under 10, Harms said.
Harms said the pop concert style of the show feeds off audience responses.
“This show is ready for an audience – it needs an audience,” she said. “I am most looking forward to seeing how the audience reacts and engages with the performers.”
She said the show is not a traditional high school musical.
“It moves very quickly,” she said. “It’s 75 minutes long with no intermission. It engages the audience, and it features an ensemble of actors that never leave the stage.”
Harms said she is always most proud of the students and how they tackle the material and make it their own.
“We have incredible vocalists and performers,” she said. “A student choreographer who created original dances and taught them to her peers, a student costume designer who envisioned her own take on the individual queens, as well as an entirely student led technical team running lights and sound.”
Harms said students began preparing for the show last fall, after auditions ended in August. Students built the set, hung and focused the lights and assembled costumes.
Harms said the musical offers a new perspective on the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives. The original Broadway production has been revised to make it suitable for teen performers and family audiences, she said.
“I want to give the audience the sense that each queen is taking her own place in history – stepping out and establishing that they are each one of a kind,” Harms said. “Six women who step out of the history books and stand on their own, six women who not only allow for each other’s individuality to shine through, but who also lift each other up by the show’s end.”
She said it was eye-opening to discover that the six women have been largely identified as a group based solely on their relationship to one man, instead of as individuals.
“I found myself digging more into the historical facts presented in the show’s text, educating myself on each queen as an individual, and relating so many ideas presented in the show to the messages today’s society is sending young women,” she said. “Knowing the caliber of actresses that I teach and the qualities of womanhood that my students embody, I knew this was a story we needed to tell.”