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Working class British dramas historically — and still — often fall into a box-ticking exercise of certain tropes and clichés. Musicals have certainly helped shift certain portrayals and representations, with stage adaptations of Billy Elliot, The Full Monty, Kinky Boots and, most recently, West End production Standing At The Sky’s Edge often elevating underrepresented perspectives and voices. While writer/director Janis Pugh’s North Wales-set jukebox musical Chuck Chuck Baby can, at times, fall into those tropes, it proves a welcome female-led addition to the canon.

Despite the oppressive nature, there’s a moving vulnerability juxtaposed with endearing humour at the heart of the central performances.

With a mix of gritty, melodramatic social realism, fairy tale and musical whimsy, Chuck Chuck Baby can, at times, be quite tonally jarring. But the heartfelt and moving performances from Louise Brealey and Annabel Scholey elevate the plucky proceedings, with a sweet and affecting sapphic...

“Love is not a victory march,” Leonard Cohen sang in one of the many verses of his signature song “Hallelujah” — and Nick Broomfield’s haunting documentary “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” which premiered on Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, is a lovely illustration of the twists and turns of a complicated relationship that produced some of the gifted songwriter’s most indelible songs.

The Marianne of the title is Marianne Ihlen, a young Norwegian woman who Cohen met in the early ’60s on the Greek isle of Hydra, where artists of all stripes washed up to enjoy an idyllic life where, says one friend of Marianne’s, “there was so much freedom that people went too far with it.”

Leonard was a poet and novelist, Marianne a young mother with a rocky marriage. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen; she didn’t agree,...