Stage Hit ‘Wild Rose’ Based Jessie Buckley Movie To Open Off-Broadway

EXCLUSIVE: John Tiffany (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Black Watch) the Tony- and Olivier Award-winning director, has revealed to Deadline that his stage adaptation of the 2018 feature Wild Rose — a movie that helped propel recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley’s early career — is to make its U.S. premiere Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop for its fall-winter season.

The film version, written by BAFTA Award-winning screenwriter Nicole Taylor (Three Girls, One Day) and directed by Tom Harper (Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man), is a story about the fascinatingly complex Rose-Lynn, a Glaswegian mother of two and a country music obsessive born with a voice to die for who, upon release from jail, hopes to pursue her dream of traveling to Nashville to perform at the Grand Ole Opry.

Taylor’s adapting her script for the stage production.

The show originated last year at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, where it was a hit. The film is particularly beloved in Scotland, where it won BAFTA Scotland’s Best Feature Film Award and Best Actress trophy for Buckley. 

You can’t keep your eyes off of Rose-Lynn, which is exactly what Taylor found when she created her.

“As soon as the character of Rose-Lynn came to me – fully formed, chatting away and singing — I have imagined her both for stage and screen. A volcano of a girl who can only communicate through singing country – of course it’s a musical!” the writer declares.

“All I ever want to do when I’m writing is turn a character inside out, but it took time to understand how to do that on the stage,” she adds. “So much in the film of Wild Rose is played off tiny shifts in expression; the dialogue is spare. When I started adapting this for the stage, how I missed closeups! But I have loved learning a whole new theatrical language and finding other ways to get inside a character’s head.”

Tiffany suggests that Wild Rose “feels like it’s about someone who wants to be American who is in love with the whole world of Nashville, and it’s a really kind of positive story for Americans.” That’s why he and the show’s producers decided to approach NYTW artistic director Patricia McGregor to see if she fancied programming it at the Off-Broadway institution where Tiffany launched the musical Once before it transferred to Broadway, where it was garlanded with glittering hardware.

He reports that McGregor agreed immediately. “She said: ‘Yes, we love this!’“ he notes.

“New York loves those hard-graft stories about people from the wrong side of the tracks, you know, with ambition and struggles. It’s going to sit there beautifully, I think,” Tiffany adds.

Rose-Lynn is a woman who pops the moment you set eyes on her. Her determination to make it her way, her troubles be damned, is palpable. “It’s so brilliant to see a really messy woman onstage because we are messy. Yes, we’re mothers, but we’re messy,” Tiffany says. “And it’s a massive complication — the fact that she’s got two kids — and yet it opens with her coming out of jail. She’s been in jail for a year, and her first ambition is that she wants to go to Nashville, and her mother and the kids are like, ‘Hello? Remember us?’ And she knows all of that, and that’s the struggle. But I think it’s so truthful and messy about what her kind of experience is.”

RELATED: ‘Wild Rose’ Review: A Star Is Born As Jessie Buckley Shines In Winning Country Musical

There’s something about the show that seems in tune with America — not just the U.S. but here in the UK and Europe — where everyday folk are trying to work out where they fit in. “America’s struggling, and this is sort of uplifting in a strange way, isn’t it? Also, with those songs, each song tells a story in itself, don’t they, I think?” he adds.

And those numbers include Dolly Parton’s “Baby I’m Burnin’,” Lynn Anderson’s “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden” and the rousing “Glasgow (No Place Like Home),” which was written for the film by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith and Kate York. Tiffany is considering replacing one or two other songs with other numbers.

Both Tiffany and Taylor have been buoyed by Buckley’s support for the musical, even though she is not involved in the stage production of Wild Rose. Tiffany says the actress, who won her Academy Award for Hamnet, visited the show in Edinburgh “the night after opening night, so I was still there. And oh my God, she’s like a child. She was sat two seats away from me, but she just kept grabbing my knee. And she’s been so supportive of the whole project,” he exclaims.

Taylor was equally ecstatic about Buckley. “Jessie is the greatest; not just in the part of Rose-Lynn but in everything she brought to the making of that film just as her own human self. The experience of going through it with her was just indelible, and she taught me so much about that character. She has been so supportive of the adaptation,” she says.

The company for NYTW will be a predominantly “stateside cast,” says Tiffany, but casting is not yet finalized. “I’m in the middle of all that at the moment,” he adds.

It’s essentially “a new production in New York,” says Tiffany. “And it’s going to be interesting because it had real whistles and bells in the Lyceum and there was automation and the kitchen island went below the stage and came back up and stuff. And of course, we can’t do any of that at New York Theatre Workshop, which I think is really, really exciting. We have to find new ways. And I think it’s going to become an even more analog, more acoustic production.”

He and close collaborator choreographer Steven Hoggett are eager to get at it. “We love these challenges,” he says. “So it’s going to feel very downtown. It’s going to feel very Lower East Side, I think, in terms of its aesthetic. … It’s great when an audience discovers shows there as they did with Once, and they’re not coming out wearing a big fur coat and a tiara. But actually there’s something a bit grubby and messy about it, and I’m really excited about that. I mean, I loved the version we made of the Lyceum, don’t get me wrong. And it was really exciting to have a cast of that many Scottish women onstage singing and twirling, but I’m also really excited about this. And we’ll also get Nashville musicians we’ll be able to work with, which will be really exciting,” he reveals.

The experience of bringing Wild Rose from screen to stage has been a revelation for Taylor. “Ha – I’m obsessed!” she says. “I feel like musical theatre is the new country music in my life; I’m never out of the theatre, always on a skive at a matinee, just sitting there trying to figure out how to do it for if there’s a next time, which I hope there will be. I used to sing my kids to sleep with Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Mary Chapin Carpenter. Now it’s a medley of Fun Home, A Strange Loop, Why Am I So Single?”

Rehearsals for Wild Rose start October 12, though no dates have been confirmed for the NYTW run. Producers include Caledonia Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions and executive producers Faye Ward of Fable Pictures and Playful Productions.

Obviously, there are ambitions for Broadway and the West End, but Tiffany bats such thoughts aside. “We’re working towards putting it on at New York Theatre Workshop, and then we’ll see.”