Climate Musicals Bloom as Hot Mess Leads Genre
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- Hot Mess, a musical by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote, frames the climate crisis as a toxic romance between Earth (a single woman "with a lot to give") and Humanity (a charismatic bad boy), and is currently running in London after a hit Edinburgh fringe run last summer.
- Coote and Godfrey spent six years developing the show and initially wrote it in a more serious register before pivoting for the fringe version: "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 those themes can be discovered more organically?'"
- Finlay Carroll, assistant producer of Hot Mess, has set up Pollinate, a production company dedicated to staging climate musicals, arguing the form is not incompatible with dark subject matter and citing Les Misérables as proof musicals can carry tragedy and trauma.
- Acid's Reign, a drag-cabaret musical co-written and directed by Luke Howarth at this year's Edinburgh fringe, stars Victoria Scone (RuPaul's Drag Race UK) and Gigi Zahir (a Chappell Roan support act), and is pitched as a deliberate counter to climate drama's "post-apocalyptic" resignation — "we've written the apocalypse many times but what we need to write instead is something that's an alternative."
- The article maps a broader trend, citing the RSC's The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (about a Malawian teenager building a wind turbine from a bicycle), Bryony Kimmings' Bog Witch, New York's Dear Everything (co-written by V, formerly Eve Ensler, and narrated by Jane Fonda), and the West End hit Hadestown, whose hell is "strewn with empty oil drums."
- Climate Spring founder Lucy Stone launched an inaugural Climate Theatre Prize this year for plays (excluding musicals), citing research that audiences' heart rates sync during live performance and arguing stories can collectively shift "what is socially acceptable, what is collectively taboo."
Why it matters: The article documents more than isolated fringe experiments: Pollinate is launching as a dedicated climate-musical production company and Climate Spring is institutionalising the adjacent climate-plays field with a new prize, suggesting the genre is acquiring the funding and pipeline infrastructure to outlast the current news cycle. That matters because, as Carroll puts it, the musicals are explicitly trying to stage "thriving and abundant" climate futures — a deliberate aesthetic rejection of the dystopian register that has dominated climate storytelling in theatre and film.
