Steele brings out the nice-guy in Scrooge

SCROOGE, Lowry, Salford (to January 7)
REAL royalty one week, stage royalty the next. Tommy Steele takes over the Lowry main stage from the Royal Variety crowd and offers a Quays Christmas whose pedigree is long-established.

Bill Kenwright’s production has been a Christmas staple for years, and Steele — 75 on Friday — has appeared in it half-a-dozen times since 2003.

The show remains a curiosity: composer/writer Leslie Bricusse had an incredible career in the Sixties and Seventies and this show, from 1970, typifies the best and worst of his output.

Bouncy but utterly forgettable tunes are full of chirpy Cockney sparrers warbling terrible cliches about times bein’ ’ard in Victorian London abound. The score is consistent, but Oliver it ain’t.

Having said that, the production itself is far from forgettable: beautifully lit, it carries a large cast, fine band, huge and detailed sets, crystal-clear sound and some fine magic tricks. It stands comparison with any traditional sub-Mackintosh production around.

Then again, things go a little awry on the story front. We are drawn into Scrooge’s past, present and future by less-than-spectral ghosts: the past is a sort of white fairy and the present a Brian Blessed size-alike in a multi-coloured coat with lit-up lapels. The future is spooky though: a 10ft high, faceless, Bergman-like death figure, cloaked and silent, appears from the gloom.

Which brings us to the star and his cast. The latter, Tiny Tim and all, breeze through the show like poverty can be fun, by jingo, while the problem with Steele is that whatever he plays, he remains Tommy Steele, and that 60-year career has little time for acting niceties.

While Dickens’ Scrooge is a miserable, misogynistic usurer with childhood issues, Steele’s Scrooge is always a nice guy trying to get out. A toothy grin is never far away; a sarcastic quip always delivered with mischief rather than nastiness. Scrooge’s epiphany on Christmas morning is a bit lost because Scrooge has shown signs of softening from the interval onwards.

But Steele is a legend, the show is big scale in every department, including sentiment, and why wouldn’t you go, if all you want is an entertaining night out?