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 approachEarth 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-rid