“In November, it will be 10 years since we met, did you know that?,” laugh Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of Six and now the brand new West End musical Why Am I So Single? “Look how haggard we are!”
We’re in a side room at the West End’s Garrick Theatre, ahead of a rehearsal of Why Am I So Single?. Just five minutes away, the pair’s debut show Six, the Tony-award winning feminist retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s wives, has occupied a plum spot at the Strand’s Vaudeville Theatre since 2021.
That musical, which Moss and Marlow wrote during their undergraduate degrees at Cambridge University, began its life at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, and has since exploded onto Broadway, embarked on a North American tour, and landed further productions in Australia, Canada, and South Korea. In 2019 it was nominated for five Olivier awards and won two Tonys in 2022.
It’s an extraordinary feat for such a young creative team (Marlow is 29, Moss is 30). When Six transferred to New York, it made Moss the youngest female director of a Broadway musical at 26. “We never anticipated Six being this thing people saw as so important,” Moss says. “It was such a shock to us.”
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Two years on from Six’s genesis, Moss and Marlow were on a writer’s retreat in Connecticut, suffering a severe case of second-show syndrome and wondering how to follow-up on the immense success they had found so early.
“It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we have to do this again, and everyone wants us to do it immediately’,” Moss says. “There was this pressure to write something really grand.”
Struggling to come up with new ideas, the pair instead started to catch up and gossip about their love lives – and that sparked the inspiration for their latest project.
“It was us asking, ‘What would us and our friends want to see?’, rather than this aspirational thing to follow up on Six,” Moss says. “A lot of that pressure from the success of SIX made us go in the opposite direction, and has fed into how the show exists today.”
Where Six tackles the issue of the patriarchy, Why Am I So Single? turns inward. Following two terminally-single best friends Oliver (Jo Foster) and Nancy (Leesa Tully) – yes, it is a tongue-in-cheek Dickens pastiche – the show sees the actors dance, laugh and cry their way through a night of analysing the pitfalls of modern dating.
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“It’s about how maybe we'd all feel a bit better about our lives if platonic love was celebrated in the way that romantic love is,” Marlow says. “We’re not the first people to say, 'You're not single if you've got friends', but it's our way of talking about it.”
In a wink and a nod to the audience, the main characters also happen to be two musical theatre writers, who are putting off writing their next show by deciding to figure out why they're single. It's natural to wonder, then, how much of the show is based on Moss and Marlow’s lives.
“Obviously, lots of it is autobiographical,” Moss says. “But it’s also taken from our friends' lives, and made-up or exaggerated. I spent so much of my 20s feeling lonely in the crowd and lonely amongst friends. But then I was also slowly coming to that realisation that I’m single not because I’m deficient, but because I’m content.”
“Both characters have lots of both of us in,” Marlow adds. “It’s nice that we know what the real bits are, and no one else knows.”
The show’s 19 songs tackle all the zeitgeisty touchpoints of modern dating – there is Eight Dates, (which already has more than 150,000 Spotify streams) on flaky men, the punchy ensemble number See You Never on dating app red flags, and Men Are Trash (self-explanatory). The style is Six-adjacent – technicolour and extravagant, what Marlow describes as “a pastiche of something big and fancy from the world of musical theatre”.
In the years since Six, both Moss and Marlow have worked on independent projects – Moss directed Legally Blonde at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2022, as well as the viral Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, and Marlow has worked with artists such as Jinkx Monsoon and Courtney Act. But their alchemical directorial combination is really what fans have really been waiting for. So, what do the pair hope audiences take from Six’s much-anticipated follow-up?
“Um, some merch?”, Moss jokes. “No, we always say that we hope the second the curtain comes down, someone texts their best friend, or a friend they haven't spoken to in ages, to say ‘Oh my gosh, I love you so much’. And to feel reassured about all the love that they already have in their lives.
"Whether that's someone who's been married for 30 years or someone who feels incredibly single – we want them to feel validated.”
