You don’t often get the chance to go inside Anne Boleyn’s severed head. So I jumped at the chance to talk with Zan Berube, the actor who plays the beheaded second wife of King Henry III in the national touring production of “SIX” opening Tuesday at the Buell Theatre.

This is the one all the cool kids have been waiting for – the big-buzz musical phenomenon that turns the fated, forgotten (Boleyn excepted) Tudor queens into contemporary pop icons. Each takes to the microphone drawing stylistic “queenspiration” from pop queens of the day. We’re talking Adele, Lizzo, Beyoncé and others. Each cast member is encouraged to make the roles their own. Berube says she takes her “popspiration” (you can’t stop me) from Avril Levine and Miley Cyrus.

She calls “SIX” not a retelling but a reclaiming of the six wives of H8. (That’s what I’ll be calling Henry. The guy just seems like the prototype for hate crimes.)

“These are their stories from their point of view, instead of history’s gaze and the male perspective,” Berube said. “These women really come together to set the record straight.”

And did we mention it’s a game show – in a pop-rock concert setting?

“We’ll each explain to you our stories and our struggles with Henry through songs,” Berube said. “The fun twist is that we’re going to ask you to express which Queen you think had it the worst with Henry.” The nightly winner will be crowned leading lady of the girl group.

Wait, hold on. Not to be a contrarian but … how can the winner not be Anne Boleyn every night? I mean doesn’t a severed head trump all?

“I don’t know,” Berube said. “You’ve got to come listen to the other Queens’ stories. They put up a good fight, I must say.”

Because “SIX” will be new for just about everyone who comes to see the show in Denver from Dec. 5-24, I asked Berube to help me, in the spirit of that insistently capitalized title, to come up with six things we should know about “SIX.”

1. The Murderer’s Row

We have to start with the roster of wives, natch, since that’s kind of the whole point. Hang with me here (pun sort of intended):

1. H8 was 17 in 1509 when he wed Katherine of Aragon, who was demoted for the crime of bearing only a daughter, but divorce was barred by the Catholic Church. In 1533, H8 went rogue and established the Church of England just so he could pursue a male heir with …

2. Anne Boleyn. But again, no boys. H8 quickly lost interest and had Anne’s head chopped off on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason, and only days later married …

3. Jane Seymour, who did give birth to a male heir in 1537 but – doh! – died just a few weeks later. (But fear not, Jane came back to life from 1993-98 as “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”) H8, meanwhile, lived the bachelor life for two years before cleaving to  …

4. Anne of Cleves, sister of a German Duke. Joke was on H8, though. When Anne turned out to look nothing like her portrait (let’s call it her medieval dating-app photo), a furious H8 immediately divorced her “for being ugly” and then married …

5. Catherine Howard, who was way hotter than H8’s nasty and by-now way overweight self deserved. H8 went a little Othello cuckoo and had Catherine executed for “adultery” less than a year into their marriage. In 1543, hooked up for the final time with …

6. Catherine Parr, a smart and spirited widow who got the last laugh by outliving H8. This was no Camelot marriage, either – H8 had Catherine arrested for simply showing an interest in Protestantism. She managed to avoid the fate of her H8 sisters, but, sadly, she lived for only one more year herself. (Thank you, history.com!)

2. From Fringe to fringe

The upstart roots of “SIX” go back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, when creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss were 23-year-old students at the University of Cambridge. When Marlow was given a festival slot, she told Moss: “I have an idea for a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII – but, like, as a pop group. Do you want to write it with me?” The rest, as they say, is musical-theater herstory. In 2021, Moss became the youngest-ever female director of a Broadway musical (26).

“This show started as a school project, which I think is absolutely incredible,” Berube said. “At their young age, they created such a unique, truly beautifully written show. And from there it has changed and grown to the bigger scale that it is today.”

3. Spin the color wheel

Something to watch for is that each Queen has her own specific color palette and carries her own distinct, character-revealing tokens conceived by costume designer Gabriella Slade. “Gabriella wanted to keep the Tudor style, shape and form of the costumes, but use modern-day fabrics,” Berube said. “And the color palette is really fun because it gives homage to each Queen’s history.

“For example, Anne Boleyn is the Green Queen because ‘Greensleeves’ is a poem written about her (not, as some insist, by H8). Katherine of Aragon was seen as the most regal queen mother, so she’s the Gold Queen. Cleves is fiery, so she’s the Red Queen.”

4. Not giving away their shot

If some of this sounds a little like “Hamilton” (but without the audience-participation bit), well, – yes and no. “They are kind of similar,” Berube said. “‘Hamilton’ laid down a lot of these roots, and ‘SIX’ definitely takes a spin on them as well. If there are any history buffs out there, definitely listen closely to the lyrics for little innuendos or historical glimmers, because these songs are so beautifully written – and it will go by in a flash.”

The difference is that these songs are pure pop, not rap or spoken word like “Hamilton.” The score won the Tony Award for great lyrics like Anne Boleyn singing: “Why did I lose my head? Well, my sleeves may be green, but my lipstick’s red!” When the cast recording dropped for streaming, it surpassed 6 million hits in its first month.

5. In the Queens’ court

If you sit close to the stage, consider yourself warned: “The audience really is the seventh cast member,” Berube said. “The fourth wall is completely broken. If you are in the first four rows, I will be looking into your eyes, and I’ll be involving you. This is a party, and audience feedback is essential to the show. That’s why the show is different with every single audience.”

6. Man overboard

You will notice that there is no place for H8 in “SIX,” and that is by design. There’s not a man in sight. Not in the cast, in the band or on the creative team.

“Let’s just say there is something to be said that you never see Henry in the play,” Berube said. “He’s not necessarily needed to tell this story – and I will leave it at that.”

Not yet having seen the show myself, I asked Berube what I presume to be self-evident: That part of the show’s huge popularity is how it connects the systemic, historic silencing of women across the centuries to today – and blasts all that with a 90-minute surge of empowerment. She agreed that the show “busts the mold open” by bringing to light the stories of women, who, tellingly, are not at all as remembered as the man who married them all. But I found it interesting that the authors themselves say their show is a kind of time capsule – not of life in 2017, but of their own lives at the age of 23.

They started by writing a six-point (of course!) manifesto with goals for the show, like: “We aim to show that even 500 years later, there are still parallels to be found in the female experience. … without being too earnest or sincere.”

In retrospect, they say in a combined statement: “We definitely fell short of our aims in some ways. This manifesto feels like a relic of our own individual journeys discovering the discourse surrounding gender – a snapshot of a very specific moment in our lives in early 2017. Indeed, if we were to write this kind of document now, we’re sure the outcome would be considerably different.”

Different, yet surely just as six-sessful.