The 2018 hit about a cleaner who dreams of becoming a star in Nashville will begin theatre run in Edinburgh

Wild Rose, the award-winning movie about a Glasgow country singer, is to be turned into a musical. Writer Nicole Taylor is adapting her 2018 screenplay and working with John Tiffany, the director of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The show will begin at the Royal Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh in March 2025, with further dates expected to be announced.

Taylor adapted the recent Netflix hit One Day, and her other small-screen credits include Three Girls, The Nest and The C Word. She said she always believed in the dramatic potential of Wild Rose: “I held on to the rights, even though as a first-time writer I had no negotiating position and I’d never written a word for theatre. I knew it would take theatrical form at some point.”

Co-writer with his brother of some of the great film musical songs including classics for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book

Richard Sherman, who has died aged 95, often said that he never realised his youthful ambition to write “the great American symphony”. However, with his brother, Robert Sherman, he co-wrote songs that provided the soundtrack for a generation’s childhood – upbeat numbers with a homespun philosophy typified by lines such as “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.

Those words were written for the brothers’ greatest triumph, the Oscar-winning Mary Poppins (1964), for which they created a score of staggering brilliance: haunting ballads, lilting lullabies, roistering marches, energetic dance numbers and knockabout vaudeville tunes. Half of the songs instantly became standards – not just the Oscar-winning Chim Chim Cher-ee but also A Spoonful of Sugar, Feed the Birds, Jolly Holiday and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Jazz hands and big ballads are out and ‘writing about real emotions’ is in, as a new wave of musicals exploring body issues, bullying and queer identity hits the capital’s biggest stages. What’s behind this taste for introspection?

A new breed of musical theatre is rising amid the jukebox singalongs and well-worn classics of the West End stage. It is the mental health musical, an all-singing, all-dancing genre bringing identity and personal crises to the fore. This means many new musicals are preceded by trigger warnings that the performance to come may feature suicidal teens and sexual assault such as in the case of Spring Awakening; bullying and queer identity in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie; high school violence in Heathers the Musical;, and even a bipolar mother undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in Next to Normal.

How did such dark, introspective material establish itself in the West End and why is it gaining such traction with audiences? Musicals are, after all, predicated on song and dance, not exactly conducive to explorations of difficult and intimate mental health issues, especially within the modern British tradition led by the big, balladic sounds of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh’s West End shows.

A year after the singer’s death, Katori Hall – whose musical is now also touring – says the show is like ‘one last concert’ for fans

She is still celebrated as the queen of rock’n’roll but, one year after Tina Turner’s death aged 83, the barnstorming singer’s legacy includes a “fierce transparency” about her trauma, said the writer of the bio-musical Tina.

Katori Hall met Turner many times at the star’s home while writing the book for the musical, which opened in 2018 and has become the longest-running show ever at the Aldwych theatre in London.

Cannes film festival
A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy

Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.

Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.