As Six the Musical tours the UK this year, venues across the land will struggle to match the sheer joy in the air at Eden Court last night. Inverness – name-checked several times by the high-energy cast – will long remember this pulsating and provocative show. It is, to be frank, no wonder Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow’s musical has won 35 major international awards, including a Tony and spawning a Gold Disc-winning album. Pivoting dynamically between rock ballads, techno, rap, funk, and stomping show tune material, the cast challenges our preconceptions in a witty, assertive cavalcade of female empowerment writ large.

The show’s genius is to turn our familiar historical narrative on its head and show how Henry VIII is largely known because of his six wives, rather than the other way round. So the (sad) tales of those six women – ‘Divorced, Beheaded, and Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived’ – here become celebrations of them and their individual identities. Two Catherines, one Katherine, a Jane, an Anne and an Anna come marvellously and spellbindingly to life in an unstoppable barrage of song and dance. This is less a musical and more a pop concert, as each of the women tells their story in turn. A Herstory not a History.

Awash with cascades of confetti and a myriad of lighting effects adding to their impact, the six performers dazzle and amaze with pitch-perfect singing and beautifully synchronised choreography. Occasionally lyrics can be lost in the powerful soundscape as the six strong voices and the all-female band – the ‘Ladies-in-Waiting’ – immerse the packed audience in a clever retelling of these 16th-century lives. The shift of focus from the clearly powerful but unappealing Henry VIII to these women literally pulls back the curtain on what actually happened (even if this was hardly the place for a detailed exploration of the realities).

So the women begin the show competing to see who was ‘Queen of the Castle’, which of them had to deal with the greatest challenges. Striding one by one to the front, the gorgeously-costumed women rock brilliant combinations of raunchy outfits – boots, doublets, bodices, fishnet tights and impressively Tudor necklines, each distinctive hue shimmering in the dancing lights and their own fluent moves. The stories are tragic: being treated like diplomatic assets to be hauled from their homes at, in some cases, a very young age, enduring miscarriages, Henry’s numerous mistresses, being beheaded after giving birth to a daughter instead of the desired son, and more. A series of showstopping numbers, like ‘Haus of Holbein’, Don’t Lose Ur Head’, ‘Heart of Stone’, ‘All You Wanna Do’, ‘Six’, dramatize the women’s biographies superbly, fittingly giving full-throated vent to their passion, anger, pride, defiance and eventually, mutual bonding and sisterhood.

And the Dissolution of the Monasteries hardly comes up. The performers are sassy, glamorous, raunchy, and their voices complement one another superbly. The band is tight and drives the evening’s unstoppable train of entertainment. Hard to single out performers from an excellent cast, but undoubtedly Lizzie Emery as Katherine Howard and Erin Summerhayes as Jane Seymour brought shedloads of pizzazz. Hugely recommended.