EXCLUSIVE: John Tiffany, who won Tony and Olivier awards for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, will direct the world premiere of new stage musical Wild Rose, based on the 2018 Nicole Taylor film.
A workshop is being arranged for early 2023 and it’s hoped that a production of Wild Rose will open in Scotland in 2024, with the possibility of it transferring to London’s West End and Broadway. Tiffany will direct the premiere and all future iterations.
Directed by Tom Harper, the original film won BAFTA Scotland garlands for Best Feature and Best Actress for Jessie Buckley, who starred in breakout role as mother of two Rose-Lynn, who dreams of performing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville after being released from prison.
The story follows Rose-Lynn’s relationships with her two children and her mother Marion, played by Julie Walters in the film, and the friendship that develops between Rose-Lynn and Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), a wealthy local rose house she cleans.
Tiffany, an avid fan of country music and an expert on Glasgow’s country scene, told Deadline that immediately after he was approached by the stage show’s producers,Patrick Daly of Caledonia Productions and Faye Ward, who produced the 2018 film, ”I was saying yes.”
”My agent was like, ’Finally, there’s something that’s appealing to you.’ It’s such a brilliant story.”
Tiffany, a Tony winner for his direction of the musical Once and a nominee for the play Let the Right One In, which are both based on films, told us that he has been working closely with writer Taylor on the adaptation of her story. He noted that even though she hadn’t written directly for theater before, “She’s proving to be an incredibly natural writer for the stage.”
The process began with Taylor’s Wild Rose shooting script. Tiffany said that he had found shooting scripts useful for dialogue in his previous film-to-theater adaptations.
“You’ve got to distil the film, and the screenplay and the story of the film down to its DNA, and rebuild it in a theatrical structure,” he said. “One of the joys of doing the show is that it’s about a singer and so it’s inherently theatrical and performative, and therefore having a singer on stage is actually the DNA of the story.”
Tiffany was born in Yorkshire, England but as he studied in Glasgow, and directed plays Black Watch and Macbeth at the National Theatre of Scotland, he’s regarded as an honorary Scotsman.
He said that he would “just love Rose-Lynn, in the theater version, to be Scottish.” Irish-born Buckley and and British-born Walters will not be appearing in the stage play but been informed about the the show. “I’d be run out of Scotland if I didn’t cast Scottish,” said Tiffany.
Daly, who produces film and TV, also oversees U.S. theater projects for Eon Productions, said that he pursued Ward and Taylor for the stage rights to Wild Rose all the way to the Grand Ole Opry and New York premieres for the film “and eventually they relented.”
He added that the show “just has all the right notes for me. The bonus is that Nicole said that the minute she wrote the film she knew that she would do it on stage.”
Song choices are being decided, though the song ‘Glasgow (No Place Like Home)’, written for the film by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith and Kate York, is a shoe-in.
Tiffany chuckled and said: “You can’t touch country music without at least referencing Dolly Parton, can you? I’ve got no idea if they’re licensable. Dolly’s a good businesswoman herself.”
It’;’s a busy time for Taylor, who also wrote TV dramas Three Girls, which won a BAFTA for best mini-series, and The Nest. She is currently show-running the Netflix drama adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel One Day, which she has also adapted.