The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry — a pitch-perfect musical version
★★★★★In 2012 Rachel Joyce achieved unexpected literary success with her miraculously ordinary, defiantly down-to-earth novel about a man who goes out to post a letter and ends up walking the length of England. This humane, wryly funny musical is the latest art form to celebrate the fictional Harold Fry — a retired man who measures out his life in lawnmowing sessions until a message from a dying former colleague inspires an odyssey from Devon to Berwick.
Mark Addy plays Harold just two years after a film of the book, starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, opened to mixed reviews. Why risk a musical then, sceptics might ask. Yet this assured, pitch-perfect production — with a ravishing indie-folk score by Passenger — quickly dispels any
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The Secretglasto team have gathered and posted information about secret sets for more than a decade, and interest in their tips has gone "a bit crazy" in recent - who doesn't want to give his full name - says they have built up a network of reliable sources. "We've got loads of contacts at different stages and record labels and whatever else. And people trust us to be sensible with the information," he says."And the bands themselves don't want empty secret sets do they? So we have had occasions where they have come to us."The six people who work on the account aren't music industry insiders themselves. Another team member, JB, says they sometimes approach acts directly to seek confirmation. Hype machine "Now that we've been around for 10 years and have a decent bit of clout, we will contact some of the artists via their inboxes, and quite often they're happy to confirm."Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they block us. But generally we're able to piece all that together fairly quickly."He adds: "By the time the gates open, there aren't many things we don't know."In the past couple of years, some acts have begun harnessing the buzz about secret sets for PR purposes for their album or tour, Ad believes."It used to just be friends of the festival, whereas now people are like, 'If we do the secret set we're going to get loads of hype and media attention'." Ad was among the lucky few to see Lady Gaga play an after-hours set in Club Dada following her main appearance as her career was taking off in 2009."She did three or four hits and then disappeared," he recalls."Because the phone signal was so bad, you couldn't ring or text your mate to let them know. So only the people who happened to be there got to experience it, which was a few hundred."I'm surprised she hasn't come back. Yet."That was one of the more exclusive secret sets in Glastonbury history. 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