LONDON.- In January 2019, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of the musical Six, were on a writers retreat in Connecticut, wondering how to follow up their celebrated first show.
That month, Six in which Henry VIIIs wives tell their stories via pop songs was starting a major West End run, and a Broadway transfer was on the horizon. The show had already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a growing number of American fans were streaming the shows soundtrack. More and more, people wanted to know what the pair would do next.
During the Connecticut retreat, they struggled to come up with new ideas, Marlow recalled in a recent interview, and instead gossiped about their love lives. Then, they had a breakthrough: Maybe this is what we should write about, Marlow said.
On Wednesday, Marlow, 29, and Moss, 30, announced that their second musical, Why Am I So Single?, will open at the Garrick Theater in London on Aug. 27.
The show, which has a 12-person cast, follows two friends struggling to write a musical and asking each other why theyre chronically single. That idea may sound similar to the creators time in Connecticut, but Moss, laughing nervously, said it was definitely not a complete autobiography.
Marlow said that the musical, which includes songs inspired by Dua Lipa hits and numbers from Singin in the Rain, was about friendship and love and loneliness and everything that goes with it.
Six is still running on Broadway and the West End, and in 2022, it won the Tony Award for best original score. There are also multiple touring versions, including one on a cruise ship. Because of that success, anticipation for Why Am I So Single? has been building since a song the duo was working on appeared online a few years ago. Last fall, Marlow and Moss staged a brief run of an early version of the show in London.
During a recent 30-minute interview, the two friends discussed how Six changed them and the multiyear writing process behind Why Am I So Single? Here are edited extracts of that conversation.
Q: How are you feeling announcing your second show?
MOSS: Wildly oscillating between incredibly excited and extremely nervous and stressed. But thats good. Itd be weird if I was chill.
Q: The new show sounds so different from Six. Did you set out to distance yourselves from it?
MOSS: After Six, people would approach us, like, Why dont you do this other historical show? or How about this other feminist revisionist idea?
But the thing we were excited about with Six was its form, and our connection to it, rather than it being historical. Six was just an accident really us trying to write a show that showcased our university friends who were women and nonbinary people. The six wives was just what was out of copyright and what we could use as a hook to get people to come and see it.
Q: You wrote Six while still at college, at Cambridge University. How did the pressure of such an early success affect you?
MARLOW: It was a lot. It instilled this idea that because wed had this unexpected success very quickly, thered be something else delivered just as quickly. Soon, we were failing to write anything, probably because we were being debilitated a bit by that pressure.
MOSS: In 2019, we spent about four months trying to write another show wed been commissioned for, working in a freezing shed, 10 a.m. till 6 p.m., Monday to Saturday. It was a total disaster.
MARLOW: Looking back on that time, a lot of the stress was feeling, What if we dont manage to write something else? The relief that I felt when we put a full stop on our first draft of Why Am I So Single? was so amazing. It was this moment of Oh, my God, I dont care if everyone hates it. We can still do it!
Q: How did you cope with that pressure?
MOSS: Whats really nice is that we are in it together. I know lots of writers who face that pressure on their own. That can make them lose a bit of their sense of self. But I feel weve always had each other, thats been our saving grace.
Q: Did your friendship change during this time?
MARLOW: Weve done a lot of work on our relationship to carry on working together learning to trust and to be honest and give people the benefit of the doubt. So many of those things Ive learned, Ive applied to all the relationships and friendships in my life, and Im really grateful for that.
Q: Was the writing process for Why Am I So Single? different from Six?
MOSS: Six was us bashing out songs to this loose concept, whereas this has been many, many, many hours and days talking about structure and character, and plotting the show with sticky notes all over the walls. It felt very much more like constructing a musical in a traditional sense.
Q: What is your hope for this new show? Do you want it to become like Six, a juggernaut that is performed on cruise ships?
MARLOW: I definitely want to go on a cruise when its done! I dont know. I hope people like it.
MOSS: I hope single people and non-single people! watch it and then leave the theater feeling reassured and uplifted by the love that they have in their lives.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.