Book: Ellie Coote
Music and Lyrics: Jack Godfrey
Director: Ellie Coote
If you think dating is hard, try it as planet Earth. Spare a thought for her: home and life-giver to everything that has ever lived, and still no luck in love. After millennia of false starts, from single cells to fish and even the dinosaurs, just when she has given up hope, who should wander into her life but Humanity. Or rather Hugh Manity. The start is frosty, but something deep sparks between them, and against the odds, love begins to blossom.
Silly as it sounds, that delightfully quirky premise is the foundation of Hot Mess, a new musical by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote that reimagines our relationship with the planet as a full-blown rom-com. Earth (Danielle Steers) and Hugh (Morgan Gregory). chart the same course as any couple: the initial spark, the giddy business of discovering one another, and then the bumps in the road as one of them starts to want more than the other. Around that love story, the show hangs a potted history of humanity, from its first stirrings through hunter-gathering, farming, urbanisation and industrialisation to the journey into space, with Earth by turns charmed and bewildered by this strange new being, and Humanity forever hungry to explore wider and deeper than anything she has known before.
The bonkers conceit works wonderfully well, helped enormously by the fact that Coote and Godfrey have written something inventive, engaging and properly funny. Mapping humanity’s destructive relationship with the planet onto the arc of an ordinary romance is an inspired idea, and once you get past the urge to scoff, it makes far more sense than it has any right to. Godfrey’s songs are built on guitar-pop anthems that bring P!nk and McFly to mind, moving from fun and uplifting to melancholic to angry exactly as the scene demands, and carrying the story forward on punchy, insightful and very funny lyrics. “Things have started to heat up, and I don’t just mean the fires I’ve learned how to make,” runs one; “being a single cell is fine, but I’d rather have a partner with a skeleton,” another.
Steers and Gregory are a joy to watch, with an infectious chemistry that leaps off the stage. Both meet the singing and acting demands with ease, and their comic timing is pitched perfectly to the piece.
Underneath the gags sits a real message about climate change and humanity’s wilful destruction of its own home, and the cleverest thing Hot Mess does is refuse to thump you over the head with it. You could argue that playing it for laughs lets us off too lightly, that a subject this grave deserves to be handled more soberly. But that was never the brief. The show holds humanity’s folly up to the light with real clarity, then trusts you to draw the conclusion yourself rather than preaching it at you. It works.
What lingers is how much Hot Mess manages to pull off without ever seeming to strain for it. By the curtain, you have somehow walked through the entire sweep of human history, given a genuinely affecting love story, and handed a climate warning… and you have laughed almost the whole way through. At a moment when so much of the West End leans on borrowed IP and safe bets, here is a new British musical that is gloriously, stubbornly its own: original, big-hearted, and brave enough to be daft in the service of something that matters.
Runs until 6 Sept 2026
