#either is plausible

If they’re well into the tour, I go back to it all being deliberately staged, Drama and all. I’ve seen performers at an annual RenFest who seem to be improvising the weirdest stuff, but you see the same “improv” in different shows - the Six could do the same. But ofc that’s another layer of complexity… who ARE they under their stage personas, then???

Like, if you wanna go through the entire thought process that got me to this point, I was originally thinking about the whole “this contest was staged to make a point” twist aspect of the show (which is pretty explicit in the Broadway version at least--they 100% scripted the contest and the infighting and stuff) and how long they could reasonably keep that twist under wraps. I was wondering if this was a Hannah Montana Movie situation where the whole audience is just supposed to keep the secret?

But then I was like, OK, no. Assuming this music in the show is all diegetic, the audience 100% knows this is scripted/staged to at least a degree because you don’t just break into musical numbers in real life. And these songs are happening in real life. So the audience knows this competition is fake going in (even if they weren’t spoiled). What they potentially don’t know is what the fake competition is in service to. And also, and the end of the day, it doesn’t super matter if it’s a secret or not. Like, IRL I knew the twist going in and that didn’t change my enjoyment of the show.

Sidenote, this show is really weird to talk about because of the absolute lack of fourth wall effectively thrusting you into the narrative as soon as you step into the theater and forcing you to differentiate between the show and “the show”.   

Anyway, that got me thinking about just the show composition in general and yeah, they could have--and surely did--script most if not all of the bits in the show in universe. The line I specifically mention is the one that’s most likely a genuine out of character line imo. Because she gets the, “Thomas Crowmwell Among the Ministers” line earlier in the show which is a line you write for your bandmate who is a history nerd I think so it wouldn’t be crazy for that same person to miss her scripted line to answer a question about a topic she knew the answer to out of habit. Which leads directly into your question of who are they as people, separately from their stage personas.  And I’m not gonna get into the logistics of reincarnation/resurrection/mythic manifestation/etc because it is 1 AM and, either way, I’m not Moss or Marlow so I’d truly just be making up an answer if I came to one at all but assuming the Queens in-universe are some legitimate representation of the historical Queens and assuming they wrote the show for the reasons it seems they did--to reclaim their stories, I would guess that they are playing heightened versions of their actual selves (whatever “actual selves” means in this context). Because I feel like making a whole show where you’re like, “We’re going to finally tell the world who we are,” and then giving wildly inauthentic info would be weird (unless they had, I guess, painted themselves in an entirely positive light which I don’t think they do because they’re fighting the whole show). So I think the show from I Don’t Need Your Love to the end (and especially the song Six) are the best representations of who they are or at least who they want to be because midway through IDNYL is when they drop the act that the competition is real so it’s only like one level of acting, not two at that point (in the world of the show I mean). And I think, if put in this position, and asked to write an AU for your traumatic life, most people would be inclined to be sincere (even moreso than they would have been for their main songs which I think are def partially tongue in cheek except for HoS, IDNYL, and the last bit of AYWD).