After 2,178 Performances, Broadway's 'SIX' Sets January Closing Date

"SIX," the pop-concert reimagining of Henry VIII's six wives that became one of Broadway's most improbable long-running hits, will play its final performance at the Lena Horne Theatre on Jan. 3, 2027, producers announced Thursday. By closing night the musical will have played 2,178 performances over more than five years, a run that began in the depths of the pandemic shutdown and turned a Cambridge student project into a worldwide franchise.

The show, first reported by Broadway News, gave no reason for the closing beyond noting that it will end its run as the longest-running production ever to play the Lena Horne Theatre and the 40th longest-running show in Broadway history. Tickets for all remaining performances go on sale immediately.

The Numbers Behind a Five-Year Run

"SIX" is produced on Broadway by Kenny Wax, Wendy and Andy Barnes, George Stiles and Kevin McCollum. It played its first preview on Feb. 13, 2020, at what was then the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, only to have its official opening delayed nearly 18 months by the COVID-19 shutdown. When the curtain finally rose on Oct. 3, 2021, "SIX" became the first new musical to open on Broadway after theaters went dark, a distinction that made its opening night something of a citywide event before a single note of Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's Tudor-pop score was sung.

The show went on to earn eight Tony Award nominations, winning two: Best Original Score for Marlow and Moss, who became the first openly nonbinary composer-lyricist team to win the award, and Best Costume Design for Gabriella Slade. It has since collected 35 international theater awards, and its cast recording has been streamed roughly 5.5 billion times.

Box-office data tracked by Playbill put the show's lifetime Broadway gross at $236,547,537 as of Aug. 23, its highest single week at $1,659,004 (for the week ending Dec. 31, 2023) and its average capacity over the full run at 89.01 percent. That average has slipped in recent months: the week ending Aug. 23 brought in $463,637 at just under 60 percent capacity, down more than three points from the week before, with the average ticket price falling to $93.83 from a run-long average of $122.92 — the kind of late-run softening that precedes most closing announcements, even for hits.

A Post-Pandemic Fluke That Became an Institution

"SIX" began in 2017 as a Cambridge University student production for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where Marlow and Moss recast Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr as a girl-group competing for a microphone and a claim to the worst life story. The concept — 500 years of royal misery restaged as a pop concert, with a live all-female band and no intermission — proved unexpectedly exportable. A West End transfer followed, then productions in Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea and Japan, alongside U.S. and U.K. touring companies that are still selling tickets. A concert film, "SIX The Musical Live!," was released in 2024 and remains in circulation.

None of that international footprint changes with Thursday's news. The Broadway production's closing is a New York-specific event: the West End company continues in London, the North American tour resumes Oct. 25 at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, and productions are expected to continue running in the U.K. and Australia. A Spanish-language staging is set to open in Madrid this fall, and a touring production in China has been in planning. The brand, in other words, outlives its flagship address.

A Booming Industry, an Uneven House

The closing lands at a strange moment for Broadway as a whole. The 2025-2026 season, which ended in May, generated a record $1.91 billion in grosses and 14.6 million admissions — the highest attendance since the pre-pandemic peak — according to figures released by the Broadway League, the trade association representing producers, theater owners and general managers. Season-wide capacity across 74 productions averaged 90.8 percent.

"Audiences continue to have a deep passion for live theatre. Even in a challenging economic environment, Broadway remained notably on par with last season," Jason Laks, president of the Broadway League, said of the industry's overall performance.

That resilience has not been evenly distributed. Newer, starrier titles and holiday-season juggernauts have pulled ticket buyers away from shows in their fifth and sixth years, even ones with built-in fan bases and durable streaming numbers. The League's own box-office data, published weekly, shows that pattern playing out across the district: long-running titles increasingly rely on discounting and rush tickets to fill houses that once sold out on word of mouth alone. "SIX," despite a lifetime average capacity many productions would envy, was not immune.

The timing places "SIX" alongside a wave of veteran titles taking their final Broadway bows this year. "Moulin Rouge! The Musical," a 10-time Tony winner, plays its own last performance on Aug. 30 after 2,321 shows at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, making it the 36th-longest-running production in Broadway history. "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" and a revival of "Death of a Salesman" closed earlier this month, and "Ragtime" ended its run in mid-August. None of those closures were framed by their producers as a sign of distress, and none of the shows lost money over their runs; rather, they reflect a Broadway where record-setting season-wide grosses coexist with a shorter shelf life for individual titles, as newer productions and starrier revivals compete for a finite number of tourist and local ticket buyers each week.

Who Is Affected, and What Comes Next

The immediate effects fall on the Broadway company itself. The current cast — Khaila Wilcoxon as Catherine of Aragon, Chloe Tucker Caine as Anne Boleyn, Olivia Donalson as Anna of Cleves, Stephanie Jae Park as Catherine Parr, and original West End cast members Natalie Paris as Jane Seymour and Aimie Atkinson as Katherine Howard, all of whom joined or were promoted as recently as Aug. 17 — will finish their Broadway engagement in January, along with the show's musicians, stage crew and front-of-house staff. Producers have not said whether any company members will move to the national tour, which has its own separate cast.

Real estate on Broadway is scarce and closely watched, and no successor tenant for the Lena Horne Theatre has yet been named, leaving one of the district's mid-sized houses in play for the 2027 season. Fans have several months to catch the six queens before the reign ends: the production's final performance is scheduled for the evening of Jan. 3, with all previously announced performance dates through that closing now on sale.

For a musical that spent five years turning a niche of British musical theater history into an arena-level pop phenomenon, the closing marks less an ending than a handoff — from the theater that made "SIX" a Broadway institution to the touring stages, foreign productions and streaming numbers that will keep its queens singing long after the marquee at 256 West 47th Street goes dark.