Christmas came early to Bradford in the form of Bill Kenwright’s production of Scrooge starring Tommy Steele.

The hugely prolific Leslie Bricusse (who wrote the lyrics, the book and the music for this production) brought out the humour and used it to counterbalance the story’s sentimentality and bleakness. Bricusse wrote such memorable tunes as What Kind of Fool Am I? Talk to the Animals and Goldfinger.

And here in Scrooge, by the time Thank You Very Much wound up the show it had stuck in the memory and folks went out humming it.

Combine all this with the magic of the visual illusions and you get a deliciously spooky musical, much lighter on the pathos and packed full of humour.

Paul Kieve the illusionist gave us a cast who magically appeared and disappeared. He gave us smokey atmosphere and magic mirrors. And furniture appearing and disappearing as if by magic. Smoke and mirrors are the wondrous stuff of illusions. And if I tell you that Paul Kieve was also closely involved in creating in the magical effects in many of the Harry Potter movies, then you’ll know that the Scrooge magic is pretty special.

Scrooge the musical is certainly magical in every sense of the word. It invokes the supernatural. And uses it to control the story's events. The cast is also truly magical with Tommy Steele belying his 73 years to give us a memorably performance as the miserly main character who after visits from the four ghosts, changes his attitude completely and in the last ten minutes of the production becomes a benevolent benefactor to the Cratchit family and his nephew Harry. Steele has been performing now for over 53 years and is probably the master of British musicals with such productions as Half a Sixpence, Singing in the Rain, Finian’s Rainbow and Doctor Dolittle under his belt. He was extremely well supported by Geoffrey Abbot as Bob Cratchit, Craig Whitely as Harry and a familiar figure of Barry Howard (Barry out of Hi Di Hi) as Jacob Marley.

Some slick choreography, excellent costumes and as I said earlier brilliant special effects makes this a night to remember.

My only complaint was that the orchestra was, on occasions, too loud for the solo performers in some of their songs.