A new musical built around Nigella Lawson has arrived at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in London, where How to Make a Mess is now running through 28 June. The show puts Lawson in a spangly kitchen cupboard and uses her to push Anna, a grieving daughter who has shut out her father, toward food, memory and a better ending.
People are likely searching for it now because the production is on stage in London at the moment, and because the premise is striking enough to sound like a joke until it is seen in action. In this version, Emily Rose Simons has written a two-hander that sends Natasha Karp’s Anna into the aftermath of her estranged mother’s death, while Tanya Truman appears as Nigella Lawson, the creamy-voiced domestic goddess who emerges from the cupboard with instructions, innuendo and reassurance.
That setup gives the musical an immediate hook, and it is also where much of its appeal lies. Anna snaps, “What are you doing to my fridge?” and the show leans into the comedy of a woman who would rather not cook, not feel and not answer the father who walked out when she was a child. The production tries to make Lawson the force that gets her moving again, helping her process grief, reconnect with that father and learn to cook, while a song called Nothing Like My Mother gives the story its emotional frame.
It is a promising idea, and parts of it land. The songs are said to have a big Broadway heart, even if the melodies are not strong enough to stay in the head after the curtain comes down. The show also has a neat visual gimmick in the cupboard entrance, and it finds some of its funniest moments in the collision between Lawson’s polished kitchen mystique and Anna’s resistance to anything edible.
But the rough edges are hard to miss. The script spends too long on Anna’s backstory, her emotional repression and her lack of interest in food, and the transformation it wants from her can feel too sudden to persuade. There is also surprisingly little cooking on stage beyond a bit of mayonnaise whisking, which leaves a musical about appetite and domestic repair a little short of the thing it keeps promising. Even the culinary elements of Anna’s Jewish heritage are folded in only at the end, when they might have given the story more texture earlier on.
That leaves How to Make a Mess as a show that is genuinely funny and clearly built with affection, but not yet fully cooked itself. The limited London run at Upstairs at the Gatehouse gives it a chance to find its audience, though the central question is less whether the premise works than whether the emotional payoff will feel earned for viewers who have already spent most of the evening waiting for Anna to become the person the plot needs her to be.
