Tobias Turley and Danielle Steers in Hot Mess, © Mark Senior
The Fringe is brimming with shows about romance and dating, but I doubt you’ll have seen one like this before. For one thing, the protagonist of Hot Mess, a new musical by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote, has been single for 750 million years, and her most recent relationship was with a T-Rex.
She is Earth, and Hot Mess charts the story of her relationship with her new beau, Humanity, though you can call him Hu. It’s a terrifically fun idea, executed with energy and pace, and it works thanks to Coote’s script, which is packed full of witty one-liners (“I’m not picky, I’m just naturally selective”) and sharp dialogue. Maybe some of the metaphors could have been worked out a little more thoroughly, but it plays its games very successfully, and it’s great fun tracing Earth and Hu’s relationship as he overcomes her initial scepticism and they join forces to master agriculture, the Industrial Revolution and the space age. In short, the whole span of human development and its impact on the planet.
Danielle Steers and Tobias Turley in Hot Mess, © Mark Senior
It’s a testament to the writing that it doesn’t get weighed down with its own sense of purpose, and it keeps a light touch throughout, even if some of the climate change politics is a bit predictable. It works so well on stage because the two cast members bring huge energy and investment to the material. As Earth, Danielle Steers conveys all the pitfalls of dating with sassy individualistic energy. Tobias Turley’s Hu keeps up the focus and vitality as he gets to know Earth, and then starts to wonder what life would be like without her, or beyond her. She develops from independence to love and then to post-relationship sass, while he goes from geek to pioneer, before ending with a tinge of regret. They’re helped by Godfrey’s songs, too, which have an 80s power ballad vibe to them, and the singers deliver them with punch.
I can’t think of many other shows that amalgamate the dating game with the tale of human evolution, and it’s surely for crazy experiments like this that the Fringe exists. Hu’s affair with the Moon brings their relationship to a crisis, and there’s a mischievous futuristic coda that ends the show on a cleverly anarchic note of fun. As musicals go, this is high concept, but it’s high energy and high success, too.