Hot Mess and Acid’s Reign put climate crisis center stage

Hot Mess, a musical by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote, casts Earth as a generous single woman and Humanity as a charismatic bad boy who takes too much. Part romcom and part ecological allegory, the show moved from a hit run at the Edinburgh fringe to a London production and forms part of a growing wave of climate-focused musicals that includes the RSC’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Bryony Kimmings’ Bog Witch, V and Jane Fonda’s Dear Everything in New York, and the West End hit Hadestown.

Coote says the climate is so prevalent that it would be strange for art not to engage with it, and she and Godfrey spent six years shaping the piece to avoid heavy-handed polemic.

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