Setting the Stage

Photo courtesy Tricia Baron

Tony Award-winning producer and Punahou School alum Kevin McCollum is bringing the SIX “queendom” to Broadway in Hawai‘i.

When you think of the wives of Henry VIII, what comes to mind?

Probably not a celebration of female empowerment. After all, these women were married to a man who made himself the head of the Church of England — supplanting the Pope as the supreme religious authority in his kingdom — just so he could divorce his first wife and marry one of her ladies-in-waiting.

That second marriage? It ended with the bride’s head on a scaffold, allegedly for adultery and treason, but arguably because she didn’t give Henry a son.

From there emerges a pattern best captured in a children’s rhyme: Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.

But if you’re one of the legions of fans who’ve sung along to the hit Broadway musical SIX, you can probably name all of the queens in chronological order and belt out their anthems — which are indeed exuberant, emotional and, ultimately, empowering.

Clocking in at just around 80 minutes, the concert-show hybrid eschews an intermission in favor of a tight, lively spectacle built on the bones of a concept album.

And the good news is the Tony Award-winning musical that flipped the script on the Tudor dynasty — reimagining the queens as modern-day pop stars vying to be the lead singer — is coming to the newly renovated Neal S. Blaisdell Concert Hall for the 2025 season of Broadway in Hawai‘i.

“It is a complete joyous, fun, shot-out-of-a-rocket experience. There’s so much energy,” says producer Kevin McCollum, who is in town to promote the upcoming show and the soon-to-be-reopened concert hall. “It’s not medicine, it’s not a documentary. It’s wildly entertaining.

“But what’s so great about it is, it surprises you. It looks like it’s just this amazing, high-energy show, but it has a great soul to it.”

McCollum, who was born in Honolulu and attended Punahou School (he was a year behind Barack Obama), should know.

For the past 25 years, he’s been one of Broadway’s most successful and prolific producers. He’s won three Tony Awards for Best Musical — for Rent, Avenue Q and In the Heights. (Rent also won the Pulitzer Prize.) He’s collaborated with Jonathan Larson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez. He’s founded Alchemation, a theatrical and media producing company committed to finding and fostering new talent.

So, how did a boy from one of the most isolated land masses in the world become a mover and shaker on Broadway?

“I learned everything I know about storytelling and musicals from the myths of Hawai‘i,” he says. “Hawai‘i, when I was there, was a place where schools taught you the legends of Hawai‘i and encouraged music. There wasn’t anyone my age who didn’t pick up an ‘ukulele or a guitar during the holidays and dance to Mele Kalikimaka.”

His mother also loved the performing arts. She moved to the islands from Illinois, worked at a local television station (KGMB) and landed roles in community theater productions. Her son appeared in local TV commercials, found a home at Honolulu Community Theatre (today’s Diamond Head Theatre) and sang in the Honolulu Boy Choir.

Love of the stage propelled him to an undergrad degree from University of Cincinnati College – Conservatory of Music and steady work as an actor. But eventually, he decided to pursue a master’s degree from the Peter Stark Producing Program at University of Southern California. The plan was to segue into film production. Instead, he took what he’d learned at USC and parlayed it into the theater arts.

That’s the straightforward answer to how he ended up on Broadway. The subtext — and true to his theatrical roots, McCollum loves a good subtext — is loss, found family, living in the moment and taking nothing for granted.

You see, McCollum was raised by a single mother who died when he was just 14 years old. After that, he left O‘ahu and moved to Illinois to live with his aunt and uncle.

“My life was not that convenient,” he says. “But I always knew where I was, and I knew I couldn’t rely on what was fair. I had to rely on what I did with the time I had while I was here.

“When my mom died, I found the theater to be a place where I could not be afraid of my feelings and I could process my own childhood,” he adds.
“Most musicals are about coming home, so even though I didn’t leave Hawai‘i on my own volition because I was a 14-year-old child — and it was the right thing for those adults to decide and I’m very grateful — I missed my friends tremendously,” he continues. “What’s great about SIX, what’s great about musicals, is finding your family against all odds, which is what I found on Broadway.”

McCollum, now 62, was in his 30s when he saw a workshop reading for the rock opera that would become Rent.

“I saw (Rent creator) Jonathan Larson and thought he was doing something amazing,” he recalls. “But no one was paying attention.”

McCollum was one of the producers to take a chance on the show that would soon have the world singing, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes …”

“I saw myself in the characters of Mark and Roger,” he says. “I used to have a band in college. I was a straight white man (but) in theater school I knew people, lost friends to HIV. Even as a producer, there’s a whole generation on Broadway in the ’80s who passed away (of AIDS).

“Rent started with, ‘How am I going to pay the rent?’ And the final lyric is, ‘No day but today,’ because you realize it’s not about paying rent, it’s about how you’re going to live your life,” he continues. “That’s what all of these shows are really about. We go from the literal to the inspirational.”

But Rent was also touched by tragedy. Larson died of an aortic dissection on the eve of his show’s off-Broadway premiere and never got to experience its success.

“It is surreal and devastating and hard to process still today, so many years later,” McCollum says. “I will say this, it galvanized my mission to try to help young voices get their shows produced. It’s one of the reasons, I think, I work with so many first-time writers — and sometimes their shows really capture the public’s imagination.”

The creators of SIX were still students at Cambridge University in England when they came up with the idea.

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss were simultaneously finishing their finals and banging out Tudor-themed earworms on a piano.

“It was like, ‘I’ve got a tragedy paper tomorrow, but I have to finish that bloody Anne of Cleves song,’” Marlow told Musicals Magazine.

SIX premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018 before it was picked up for Broadway.

Moss, at age 26, would go on to become the youngest female to ever direct a Broadway musical.

“Toby and Lucy wrote SIX while they were still in college and they worked with their friends,” McCollum says. “I loved what that represented. As someone who is older than I thought I’d ever be, I think one of the things that is important is to find these new original voices.

“Probably one of the reasons I went after SIX is because I knew younger people had a new vocabulary that I didn’t know,” he adds. “But I knew if (the show) touched me, then it might be a good idea.”

However, like Rent, SIX also had a brush with tragedy. Hours before its Broadway premiere on March 12, 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered all New York City theaters to close due to the pandemic.

You probably remember what happened next: Normally bustling streets went empty. The Big Apple became a COVID-19 hot spot. Months of uncertainty followed.

SIX would have to wait a year and a half — until October 2021 — for its Broadway opening. But since then, it’s become a global sensation as much for its catchy songs as for its deeper message about diversity, personhood and individualization.

And the rest is history, or rather, her-story.