Southwark Playhouse Elephant – until 8 November 2025
Reviewed by Emily Smith
5*****
Hot Mess is a brand-new musical that explores the relationship between Earth (Danielle Steers) and Humanity (Tobias Turley) in a laugh-out-loud rom-com style. This may sound like a complicated concept to turn into a musical, but writers Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote (who also wrote 42 Balloons) make it look easy!
I cannot praise the talent of the two cast members enough! Danielle Steers and Tobias Turley are a powerhouse pair who deliver beautiful duets and laugh out loud moments throughout. Danielle’s range and power are unrivalled, and her immense talent amazes me every time I see her perform; she is truly out of this world! Tobias, well-known for winning ITV’s Mamma Mia! I Have A Dream, gives a stellar performance that showcases his star potential. Both have excellent diction, allowing the audience to hear all of the individual lyrics and appreciate the nuanced jokes.
Ellie Coote has crafted a hilarious script full of witty dialogue that manages to cover scientific concepts with surprising ease. For example, she cleverly draws parallels between unexpected topics like mining for coal and sex, and man’s mission to the moon and cheating. She also engineers a great break-up scene, using Humanity’s constant desire for more as a metaphor for emotional distance and lack of effort in the relationship. It was thought-provoking without being entirely doom and gloom.
Jack Godfrey’s upbeat, catchy, and powerful songs are hard to get out of your head. Stylistically similar to other great shows like SIX and Why Am I So Single?, they are songs you’ll want to listen to again and again! Luckily there are three songs (so far) available on Spotify for those who want a taster before seeing the show, or to re-listen after. I wait, with bated breath, for a full cast recording that I hope is to follow! I also commend Jack for incorporating phrases such as ‘single celled organism’ and ‘apex predator’ into the lyrics!
The costumes, by Shankho Chaudhuri, reflected the characters (Earth and Humanity) cleverly through colour choices such as blue and green tones for Earth, whilst retaining a charming simplicity. This is, of course, except for the space suit at the end! Shankho’s set design is also simple yet effective; appearing to only be a few sets of shelves, the cast make use of all the nooks and crannies they created, adding levels and dimension. I also loved the small details in the set design, such as the reimagined names of well-known novels with Wheat, Pray, Love, and 50 Shades of Clay being notable favourites.
The lighting and sound design, by Ryan Joseph Stafford and Paul Gatehouse respectively, really added to the performance by enhancing the atmosphere, seamlessly shifting from intense emotions such as anger and sadness to the lighter feelings of happiness and love. There are also two moments where handheld mics appear so that Earth and Humanity can deliver an upbeat rap about scientific advancements (amazing), which was unexpected yet hilarious.
The show premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year (2025), opening to rave reviews, and is now playing at Southwark Playhouse Elephant for a limited run. It was created at Birmingham Hippodrome’s New Musical Theatre Department, the first in-house department dedicated to developing and producing musicals in the UK.
The show is 65 minutes long, with no interval, and it’s the perfect length to capture the orbit of a relationship from dating to break-up.
Writers Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote have written an absolute smash hit of a show that is a masterclass in performance from start to finish by Danielle Steers and Tobias Turley. Covering a range of scientific concepts throughout, in a cool and accessible way, this show is cleverly brilliant and so much fun. Never have I fallen in love with a show so quickly or deeply! To quote Earth “If I had a jaw, it would be on the floor” (and I do have a jaw – and it was indeed on the floor!).