A Christmas Carol the Musical at the Lowry – review

This Christmas, Manchester’s small but mighty musical powerhouse, Hope Mill, has been gifted a larger space. Far from being out of their depth, the Lowry’s Quays theatre allows their characteristic immaculate ensembles, brimming spectacle and outsize musical firepower to swell into an expansive, sumptuous delight.

In an even more remarkable feat, it doesn’t come at the expense of the story. That remains about definitive cynic Scrooge’s redemptive journey to benevolence, at the hands of three spirits. At times, the musical form even enhances the narrative. Here, Scrooge isn’t just innately irritable but appears actively resisting a world where song and joy are inescapable, filling the air. What better way for Scrooge to express seething contempt for festivities than by telling a singing boy to “shut up”? Curt replies such as “No, thank you” interrupt and shut down songs.

The most significant intervention of Mike Ockrent and Lynn Ahrens’ book in Dickens’ story is making Scrooge a woman (Madame Evelina). It adds another layer to the character’s antagonism: a woman seen outnumbered in the gentlemen’s stock exchange. The book could afford to do more with this, along with more obviously tying in society’s historic suspicion towards single women.

Claire Moore’s shrill voice is a sharp counterpoint to the cast’s rich harmonies; it’s as if she’s driving an icicle through the merry warmth, freezing it over. The simple rhymes of her lyrics – “If the poor have to eat, let them beg upon the street” – nicely suggest an economy of language as much as pragmatism over sentimentality. She’s a woman who deals with sums and balances, precision not excess.

But Moore makes her genuinely pitiful, too. A diminutive figure, shuffling across the stage, we get a sense of a lonely woman harangued by people’s pleas for money, unable to walk to her home without being accosted. The show also doesn’t skim over her lost relationship, so there’s heartbreak and bitter regret.

Andrew Exeter’s design, which recalls the suspended tiles of Rob Howell’s set for Matilda, features a canopy of contracts and deeds – tiny tombstones of debtors hanging over Scrooge. Even her tablecloths are made of these papers and their ink bleeds across the walls in Alessandro Uragallo’s projections.

There’s further inventiveness in “Link by Link” where Barry Keenan’s Beetlejuice-like Marley stalks Scrooge with hair like frozen candyfloss. Skeletons jump out with extendable arms, singing the words of the chorus like they’re hoisting heavy chains.

The Ghost of Christmas Past wears a holographic dress like a scrunch of iridescent cellophane. But her two successors come perilously close to toppling the tone. Although the Ghost of Christmas Present is supposed to be a gregarious character, a London Palladium panto dame feels too diverting. And after an initial sinister presence, hobbling like a raven, the Ghost of Christmas Future starts vaulting over coffins, accompanied by a gang of equally gymnastic black-clad monks.

The show is adorned, like baubles, with huge numbers and George Lyons’ sparkling choreography for the Fezziwig ball and glittering Palladium dancers. Occasionally Scrooge gets sidelined to the periphery. And her breathless final song makes the sudden transition to altruism a little hasty. But there’s a nice moment where she’s instinctively taken aback by the price of the turkey, and has to force out “keep the change”.

If a Hope Mill festive musical of this ravishing quality becomes as much of a Christmas tradition as the story they’ve chosen this time, I can’t see anyone saying “humbug” to that.