Kenny backs musical as heir to Six’s crown
Jewish Telegraph, July 2024
THEATRE producer Kenny Wax is hoping that lightning strikes twice.
South Manchester-born Kenny produced the multi-award winning international hit Six, about the six wives of Henry VIII.
And he has linked up again with Six creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss for their second show Why Am I So Single?, which opens in the West End next month.
Such has been the buzz around their new show, that all three major theatre chains offered Kenny a West End theatre in which to stage it.
Nimax won the battle and will host Why Am I So Single? at the Garrick Theatre from August 27.
“There was an agreement when we first produced Six that we would also get a first option on the second show,” Kenny told me.
“So we waited probably a year or two, and they told us they had an idea.
“And then you have the wonderful privilege with two very bright, brilliant young artists to go to our other co-producer’s apartment in Clerkenwell, where he has a grand piano, and they played us some of the songs.
“We were just knocked out. They were just so funny, so clever . . . totally proved that Six wasn’t a one-hit wonder.”
Kenny, who was president of the Society of London Theatre for six years, added: “The big question that we asked, because the show is about friendship, and particularly two friends, it sounded like quite a small musical.
“Because, as they were singing it through, they were playing the two parts, and their friend on the keyboard was playing the third part of the best friend, and that kind of seemed to be the show.
“But as it evolved, and probably what they had in their mind from the beginning, is the fact that this two-hander musical has quite a big ensemble of dancers.”
The two principal characters are musical theatre writers, writing a show.
“It’s about friendship and finding why they’re single,” said Kenny, the son of Valerie and Robert Wax. “But the background to it is that they’re writing a big, fancy West End musical that they’ve been commissioned to present.
“So it’s kind of quite self-referential because, obviously, Toby and Lucy are best friends and are writing a West End musical.
“So it’s partly about their story without it being specifically about their personal lives. And then the ensemble do this tremendous set of dance sequences, and play some quite unusual parts.
“It’s just really clever, really original.”
Kenny first became involved with Toby, who is Jewish, and Lucy thanks to his friend George Stiles, who wrote the adaptation of Mary Poppins for Disney and Cameron Macintosh.
“George went to school with Toby’s father,” he said. “They were in a band together. So over the last few years, George has kind of been mentoring Toby.
“George saw Six as a favour to Toby and his dad a few years ago, and the next day he texted me and said, ‘Kenny, you’ve got to get across and see this show. I think it’s really special. It’s really modern. It’s really unusual’.
“There were only two nights I could go. It was on at 11pm in Cambridge. I took my daughter Jemima to meet Toby and Lucy.
“We brought in another producer who’d seen Six in Edinburgh at the festival a couple of months earlier, and we’ve had the most phenomenal journey.”
Father-of-three Kenny, who is married to Daniella, said the success of Six didn’t catch them out as it was a gradual thing.
“The first production that we did went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then toured the UK,” he explained, “and then came back into the Arts Theatre, a little theatre in London.
“Even then we weren’t selling out. We knew we had something special, but we lost probably £250,000 in that first six or nine months involvement.
“But we kept it in the right theatre. We got some North American engagement, we opened in Chicago a year later. And that led to Broadway, and it just kind of got bigger and bigger.
“But it didn’t happen overnight. It did take two or three years. Now Six is in the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End, on a UK tour, on Broadway, touring North America. about to open for a second year tour in Australia, we’ve done Korea, we’ve been to Switzerland, Italy, Germany, we’ve been three or four years on a Norwegian cruise line with two productions.
“It has been an incredible journey. Then in the next year we’ve got Philippines, Hong, Kong, Singapore, Japan, China and then Europe again. So it’s become something quite extraordinary, which we could have never expected.”
Last August, Kenny hired the Lilian Baylis Studio in London, part of the Saddler’s Wells complex, to stage Why Am I So Single? workshops.
“Normally, when you do a workshop, it’s quite a closed environment, maybe on the last day you invite friends, family, a few industry people, maybe some theatre owners, but we wanted to make it a bit bigger than that,” Kenny told me.
“We wanted more opinions. So after the rehearsal, we put the show on for a week in the 200-seat theatre, and we probably ended up giving away half of the tickets to family friends, colleagues, industry people, theatre owners. But we actually sold probably 700 or 800 tickets.
“But that week of performances really proved the concept, and we got all three main theatre chains offering us West End theatres for the show. It’s really unusual. It’s hard to get shows into the West End unless you own a theatre, and I don’t own a theatre.”
Kenny has a good eye for a hit. His previous productions have included Top Hat, which won three Olivier Awards in 2013, as well as nine stage shows with Mischief, the team behind The Play That Goes Wrong.
Kenny’s production of Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The World — which includes a tribute to Anne Frank — opened at The Other Palace last week.
Toby and Lucy use many different genres of music in Six — and they continue this in Why Am I So Single?
“Each of the Six queens have their own kind of style of song,” Kenny said, “and then in the middle you have Haus of Holbein, which is a different thing. You bookend it with Ex-Wives and Six, and then the Megamix.”
For the new show, “because they’re writing about the process of writing musical theatre. you’ve got some very conventional musical theatre. You’ve got a kind of disco track; you’ve got a kind of bluesy jazzy number; you’ve got a kind of Jerry Herman song; you’ve got a kind of Kander and Ebb-like Broadway number; you’ve got something very contemporary.
“Obviously, it’s got more character development, and it’s got a very emotional story, but people will leave the theatre feeling like they want to hug somebody, they want to call a best friend, they probably want to tell somebody to come and see it, because I think it’s that good, but it does have a kind of different journey to the Six journey.”
The former William Hulme’s Grammar School pupil added: “They write the show, we produce the show, but there is a kind of blurring. It’s personal to them so they want to be involved.
“Six came to us almost fully written. Maybe five per cent of it changed from when we got it. We just provided a beautiful commercial production to what they had, which was literally their friends in their own clothes singing songs that their friends had written.”
When I spoke to Kenny, he had just returned from rehearsals.
He told me: “We’ve probably got 60 people in the rehearsal room with stage managers and props-makers and costume, and they’re all going for costume fittings, and I’ve got a huge team of designers and creatives.
“And in Guildford, I’ve got people building the set. People painting it and spraying it. So it’s a big operation.
“Toby and Lucy don’t really get involved with that, but how we sell the show, how the show is perceived, they’re very much involved with.
“I’m in my mid-50s. When my friends came to the workshop a year ago, all in their mid-50s, sometimes older, they absolutely loved it, but I think what they loved possibly in the way that Six does, you also enjoy kind of watching your kids enjoying it.
“We think word of mouth is going to be amazing. We’re relying on it.
“If a show doesn’t have word of mouth, then you can kind of forget it really, and Six very much built on its word of mouth, having had that initial nine month period when it was quite hard to get people in. But over that period of time people talk, people listen to the songs
“We’re hoping to release some of the songs from Why Am I So Single? in the next few weeks, just ahead of the West End opening, and that will hopefully get a big amount of streaming and people being excited about the show in advance.”
Kenny, who was barmitzvah at Queen’s Road Synagogue, Didsbury, said that if you have a hit in the West End “then you’ve got producers from all over the world knocking on your door.
“I’ve got about 35 staff now, which is quite big for a West End theatre production office, and I’ve got about five of them just working on the Six international side and then I’ve got another four or five working on Six in the West End and UK tour.”
He explained that staging Six on the UK cost between £350,000 to £700,000 — but in New York it cost £5 million to stage.
Kenny added that The Play That Goes Wrong cost £250,000 to stage in the West End. It’s Broadway transfer cost £4 million.
“The risk is crazy, but then the rewards are great, too.”
Whyamisosingle.com
