PATRICK MARMION reviews The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry at Minerva Theatre, Chichester: A tearjerking musical trek...go armed with Kleenex

Daily Mail​

23-05-2025

Easy mistake to make. You pop out to post a letter in south Devon and wind up walking all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed by the Scottish border.
That of course is the set-up of Rachel Joyce's highly emotional 2012 best-seller which has now become a musical about Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage to make up with an old friend dying in a hospice 500 miles away.
Starring big huggable Mark Addy as the teetotal brewing rep who's devastatingly bereft, it takes time to, shall we say, 'find its feet' and spends a heart-warming first half massaging its plausibility.
But it does so with buckets of good cheer, sending Harold off with a big gospel number in a petrol station, before attracting an evangelical mob after his journey goes viral on Instagram. He even gets a shaggy dog puppet to go with his seeming shaggy dog story.
But the second half fairly knocked me out with a series of emotional roadside bombs. Nor will knowing they're coming protect you from their impact. Go armed with Kleenex.
With a rich seam of folk running through music and lyrics by Passenger (aka indie singer-songwriter Michael David Rosenberg), our hearts are stirred with barn dancing when Harold meets his wife (Jenna Russell) as a young man, but they're also broken as we learn the truth about their son (Jack Wolfe).
And it avoids mawkishness with robust wit, including a Slovakian doctor cursing her ex-husband: 'I'd no idea he was a father, when we left from Bratislava'.
Katy Rudd's production is prone to youth theatre excesses and outré flower-power choreography. But wearing its heart on its sleeve and keeping faith with Harold's bizarre mission is very much the point.
Russell as Harold's wife gets to censure him but also croon about her own bottled agonies with touching remorse. And where Addy's Harold looks like a leathery old rugby ball that's been kicked around a little too much, he too grows in stature as a character – step by step, song by song.
Shucked, by contrast, is a musical with little more than smutty jokes at its core, where it really needs a proper, pumping cardiovascular system.
A camp hit on Broadway, the remorselessly silly story about failure of the corn crop in Hicksville USA is non-stop gags. 'A grave mistake is burying grandma on a slope' is one of the best.
'A paper plane that doesn't fly is just stationery' is another. But writer Robert Horn is more interested in Carry On film sniggers.
The stand-out moment in Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally's music and lyrics is Somebody Will, gloriously sung by Ben Joyce as jilted farmer Beau. It's a rare moment fusing humour and pathos with originality and verve.
And as his inevitably named errant girlfriend Maizy, Sophie McShera is a pleasing cross between Ariana Grande and Dolly Parton, who falls for a devious 'corn doctor' podiatrist (Matthew Seadon-Young) who, in turn, owes money to the mob.
American director Jack O'Brien's production runs like a lusty threshing machine in a tilting barn, fringed by drooping maize stalks.
And Sarah O'Gleby's choreography, from the corn-tapping opener to the We Love Jesus hoedown, is inventive and energetic. The trouble is it's empty spectacle cheapened by a slew of facetious gags.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry runs until June 14.