Weather Girl ★★★★★

Weather Girl was one of the breakout success stories of the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, garnering multiple honors, including a Scotsman Fringe First, the Popcorn Writing Award, and the Lustrum Award. But as is often the case with buzzy Edinburgh hits, the question soon becomes: how long will the heat last once the festival ends? Will it — like other Francesca Moody-produced smashes — become the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer and truly spark the cultural imagination? Or, once out of the rarefied festival environment, will it quietly fade into the overloaded memory banks of all who saw and (hopefully) enjoyed it?

Now that Weather Girl is being performed Off-Broadway at the gorgeous St. Ann’s Warehouse following a run at Soho Theatre in London, all while being developed as a Netflix series, it’s safe to predict that the show will not be disappearing anytime soon. Yet what’s most striking about it now is how prescient the piece has turned out to be.

First and foremost among Weather Girl’s many themes is the looming specter of climate change, specifically in California, where a careening-toward-disaster Stacey (Julia McDermott) appears nightly on the news to tell viewers what meteorological chaos to expect in the coming days as she self-medicates with Prosecco and meaningless sex with tech bros she loathes. During the course of Brian Watkins’ tight 70-minute play, as Stacey blunders her way through personal and ecological hellscapes, wildfires begin to erupt, decimating entire towns — a nightmarish situation that eerily prefigured the real fires that devastated Altadena, Pasadena, the Pacific Palisades, and areas of Malibu in January 2025, five months after Weather Girl premiered in Scotland.

Life imitates art. And though the last embers of those terrible January fires have now been extinguished, what remains is the play’s unmistakable cri de coeur, an appeal that demands to be taken seriously, especially in a political environment where the very idea of climate change is not merely ignored but actively mocked. Nero is fiddle-dee-diddling while Rome burns, and it ain’t a pretty tune. Or a pretty sight.

Lest this all sound like theatrical boiled broccoli — healthy but not exactly delicious — fear not: Weather Girl is no ponderous pedagogical slog. The play is wildly entertaining, directed with supreme clarity and confidence by Tyne Rafaeli and designed with immaculate precision by Isabella Byrd (set and lighting), Rachel Dainer-Best (costume), and Kieran Lucas (sound).

Watkins could not ask for a stronger creative team to bring his ambitious script to life, and at the center of this fiery storm is the wondrously vivid McDermott. Offstage and on, she and Watkins are partners, and their pairing here produces genuine stage alchemy. With her remarkable ability to almost imperceptibly shift between people, settings, and emotions, McDermott holds the audience rapt. She makes us care about Stacey and, by extension, ourselves.