Scrooge The Musical Coming To York Grand!

The good news is that Pick Me Up Theatre, the local York troupe of hugely talented amateurs, are serving up a real pre-Christmas tonic - their version of Scrooge, the Musical.

Veteran entertainments’ writers used to quip you could always tell when Christmas was approaching because you’d get sent to your first Messiah even while the pantos were still being rehearsed. These days substitute Scrooge for Messiah, especially since the book its based on, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (‘the man who invented Christmas’), became a school set-text.

In truth the elevation of Scrooge from being a character in a novel to being one in his own right, a by-word for the tightest of fists, both eponym and synonym for the miser, began a fair time ago. It probably started, actually, at a tangent, when Lionel Bart, with his hit 1960 musical Oliver, filmed in 1968, showed what could be done with Dickens to make him palatable to the mass audience. The film became a classic, often shown at Christmas and the stage version always seemed to carry the flavour of a Christmas matinee no matter when it was performed.

After that writers began to look to quarry the same seam and Dickens’s novella of 1843 was an obvious candidate. The result was the 1970 musical film Scrooge starring Albert Finney, with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse.

This is probably the moment Scrooge first stepped out of Dickens’s pages, to have an independent existence although Sid James had pretty much made current the expressions Bah and Humbug, a year earlier, in a Christmas Carry On special,

The Scrooge floodgates of fame were open. Walter Matthau and Mel Blanc across the pond played characters referencing him - and George C. Scott portrayed him to great acclaim on screen in the mid-1980s.

Rowan Atkinson blackaddered him in 1998 and Michael Caine made a muppet of him a few years later. Just in case a new generation might not be familiar with him, even after the scores of portrayals in recent years, Christopher Plummer played him in 2017 in the hit movie The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film which one suspects is in the process of becoming a Christmas Day television fixture.

So everybody knows all about him and loves him. Yes, loves to hate him, the pantomime villain, in his nasty phase and rejoices in his conversion after being visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come. He’s somehow morphed into a figure of festive fun for all the family and as such will appear in Pick Me Up’s eagerly anticipated winter show - Scrooge: The Musical, based on the stage musical of 1992, which was an adaptation of the well-loved film.

Mark Hird , whose previous roles for the local company include Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady and Uncle Fester in The Addams Family, takes the title role. Rory Mulvihill (Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army and Captain Teri Dennis in Privates on Parade) is the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present, and Alan Park plays Scrooge’s long-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit..

​The show is directed by Robert Readman, choreography is by Iain Harvey, and the musical director is Sam Johnson.

Scrooge The Musical is at Grand Opera House York from November 26 to December 1. Matinees are on Saturday and Sunday.