More thoughts on SIX, including how to fix it

So if you think about SIX at all seriously you have to ask yourself if these women know they're dead and if they know themselves to be in some kind of afterlife, and if they know that the conditions of this afterlife require them to enact the same zero-sum competition in front of a new audience every night, and if that makes the audience the literal denizens of Hell or whether we're more like fellow patients in Purgatory.

(I mean, this is also what Larry asked after I played him the cast album. We did the first track, and he said "Pause," and I did, and then he said "First question, do they know they're dead?" and we went on from there.)

But what I didn't realize until I saw the piano-conductor score for the first time last night at SIX auditions was that Parr breaks the cycle by choosing to sing a different song.

Which, okay, this implies that the performance of SIX you are currently watching is the one performance where something changes, where they don't just pick a winner and fall back into stasis and do the whole thing again the next day, and how do you play that on stage so that an audience understands it?

(And if they don't understand it, does it matter? Can it be enough that the show's a banger, as the kids used to say?)