Hot Mess and Acid’s Reign: the romcom and queer cabaret spotlighting climate crisis

‘Entertainment and serious topics are not mutually exclusive’ … Danielle Steers as Earth in Hot Mess. Photograph: Pamela Raith View image in fullscreen ‘Entertainment and serious topics are not mutually exclusive’ … Danielle Steers as Earth in Hot Mess. Photograph: Pamela Raith Hot Mess and Acid’s Reign: the romcom and queer cabaret spotlighting climate crisis A blooming new wave of musical theatre is exploring the plight of the planet with a playful and hopeful approach E arth is a single woman with a lot to give; Humanity is a charismatic bad boy who turns out to be an inveterate taker. Their toxic relationship is told in Hot Mess , a musical created by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote, which works both as an eccentric romcom with broad commercial appeal and a serious analogy for our abuse of the once fecund, now depleted planet. A hot ticket at the Edinburgh fringe last summer and now on in London, it is at the vanguard of a newly blooming genre of musicals about the environmental crisis. The RSC’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind uses exuberant song and dance for the true story of a teenager who builds a wind turbine from an old bicycle in drought-ridden Malawi. Bryony Kimmings’ Bog Witch is a one-woman show with music and standup about the plight of the planet, while in New York the folk-pop musical Dear Everything was a response to climate emergency co-written by V (formerly Eve Ensler) and narrated by Jane Fonda. Meanwhile, in the West End hit Hadestown , hell is strewn with empty oil drums. It is exciting that there are more writers tackling the topic, says Coote, who adds that concern about the climate “is so prevalent that it would be wild if artforms were not engaging with it, actually”. Significantly, these shows chime with the post-pandemic yearning for feelgood stories about pulling through together and being more responsible in relationship to the Earth. If that sounds worthy, Coote and Godfrey went through a six-year process to make sure their musical swerved any clunky polemic or leadenness of tone. “We are both passionate about the climate crisis and we had been talking about wanting to write something about this issue,” says Godfrey. “But how do you do that in a way that is entertaining and can give people the full musical theatre experience without being too doom-and-gloom or lecturing?” View image in fullscreen Toxic relationship … Morgan Gregory as Humanity and Danielle Steers as Earth in Hot Mess. Photograph: Pamela Raith Initially, the show was much more tonally serious but that changed in its early development phase. “If off the bat you are putting into people’s minds that this is about the climate crisis, you get the sense of audiences not fully leaning in because you’re sitting in too much of a cerebral place. So when we came to write the version for the [Edinburgh] fringe, one of our big notes to ourselves was: ‘How can we disarm an audience such that they’re engaging with the story emotionally and comedically so that all of