Lucy Moss

Lucy Amelia Nancy Moss, born on 13 January 1994 in Ealing, West London, is a British musical theatre composer, lyricist, playwright, writer, and director. She is best known for co-creating Six: The Musical alongside Toby Marlow, a project that earned her Tony Award and Drama Desk Award recognition and established her as a significant figure in contemporary musical theatre.

Moss grew up in Ealing with her mother Julie, a tax adviser, and her father Robert, a fund manager who died when Moss was 14. Her early interest in musical theatre and dance developed through a local ballet school. She attended St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, graduating in 2011, before spending two years at Laine Theatre Arts, during which she worked as a cage dancer at Cyberdog in Camden Market. She subsequently enrolled at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where her academic focus centered on feminist and revisionist history. During her first year there, she co-directed a Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club production of Road at the ADC Theatre, an event that led to her initial encounter with Toby Marlow, who was in the audience. In 2015, Moss served as assistant director for Ajax440, a student production about game addiction in which Marlow appeared, and that same year she performed as a dancer in a Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club production of Rent, which also featured Marlow and Zak Ghazi-Torbati in leading roles.

Moss and Marlow co-created Six during their final year at Cambridge, after the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society offered them a slot at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Marlow had conceived the idea of a pop concert centered on the wives of Henry VIII and invited Moss to collaborate. The two assembled the foundational elements of the show over ten nonconsecutive days spread across six months. Their songwriting process was fully collaborative — as Moss explained to Vogue, the two worked together in the same room rather than dividing responsibilities between lyrics and music. While Marlow had initially envisioned more straightforward pop songs, Moss proposed embedding historical references throughout, a decision she later described to The Stage as making the show both funnier and more narratively coherent. A BBC documentary series, Six Wives with Lucy Worsley, further shaped her perspective on the material, reinforcing for Moss the feminist angle she felt the project could explore. On their first day of writing, the pair watched Beyoncé's 2011 video album Live at Roseland: Elements of 4 as a reference for integrating storytelling into a concert format. Notably, despite Marlow's deep familiarity with Hamilton — the subject of his dissertation — Moss chose not to listen to any of its songs during the writing process to avoid its influence.

Moss choreographed the world premiere of Six, billed as SiX – Divorced. Beheaded. Live!, at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe. The production received immediate interest from producers, and following additional performances at Cambridge, Moss and Marlow secured financial backing from a team that included George Stiles, Kenny Wax, and Wendy and Andy Barnes. The show was subsequently redesigned, reorchestrated, and recast, with Moss transitioning into the role of co-director alongside Jamie Armitage, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille joining as choreographer. Moss has since served as co-director of Six on the West End, on Broadway, and across the UK and Ireland, North America, and Australia and New Zealand tours.

On 31 January 2020, The Stage reported that Moss had become the youngest female director of a Broadway musical at the age of 26, surpassing the record previously held by Elizabeth Swados, who was 27 when she directed Runaways in 1978. Six received five nominations at the 2019 Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical and Outstanding Achievement in Music for Moss, Marlow, Tom Curran, and Joe Beighton. In December 2019, readers of WhatsOnStage voted Six the Best New Musical of the Decade. In August 2019, Moss and Marlow signed a deal with Warner Chappell Music to expand the reach of the show's songs. By February 2020, the cast recording had surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music, making it the second most streamed musical theatre album after Hamilton. Moss was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical alongside Armitage. In 2022, she and Marlow won the Tony Award for Best Original Score Written for the Theatre, along with Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Lyrics and Outstanding Music.

A second collaboration with Marlow, developed together with Zak Ghazi-Torbati, was Hot Gay Time Machine. Moss co-wrote and directed the musical comedy cabaret show, which sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe in both 2017 and 2018 and won the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence in 2017. Between 2017 and 2021, the production had limited runs at The Other Palace Studio, Trafalgar Studios, and Soho Theatre.

In December 2020, while most theatres remained closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Moss directed Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, a pre-filmed virtual performance that premiered on New Year's Day 2021. The production raised a record two million dollars for The Actors Fund and sold 350,000 tickets. Producer Greg Nobile identified Moss as the first choice for director. The show incorporated the full Broadway cast of Six as an ensemble of "Rat Queens" and included several tributes to the musical. Moss described her vision for the production to The New York Times as resembling "a Zoom reading or an online concert that drank 20 Red Bulls and spit on the screen."

In March 2022, Moss was announced as director of a new production of Legally Blonde: The Musical at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London. The production ran from 13 May to 2 July 2022 and featured Courtney Bowman, a former Six cast member who had played Anne Boleyn on the West End, in a leading role.