THE FAMOUS Regent ghost, which has appeared off and on since the centre re-opened in its present form in 1983, will have company next week, when the award-winning Arena Theatre presents Scrooge, the musical version of Charles Dickens' celebrated festive fable, A Christmas Carol. With no fewer than four ghosts in the cast, the resident spectre might just get spooked - but more likely it will simply sit back, relax and enjoy the heart-warming show.

Scrooge the Musical is the brainchild of that brilliant writer-composer Leslie Bricusse. He originally wrote the music for the 1970 film, which starred Albert Finney as Scrooge with Alec Guinness, Edith Evans and Kenneth More as three of the ghosts. The film was a technical triumph and garnered several Oscar nominations, most notably for Best Song - Thank You Very Much, sung by Anton Rodgers. Scrooge was adapted for the stage and enjoyed a successful national tour and West End production in the mid '90s, with the late Anthony Newley so memorably making the role his own.

Dickens said that he had neither laughed nor cried so much as when he was writing A Christmas Carol, and it is not hard to see why. Scrooge is literature's most famous fictional skinflint. The "grasping old sinner" is a curmudgeonly old miser who has spent his life extracting his pound of flesh as a notorious moneylender. His cruelty is personified in his treatment of his loyal clerk, Bob Cratchit, who is underpaid and mistreated - but gradually Scrooge is converted, by a series of Christmas visions, from bitterness to kindness personified.

Tim Wallace-Abbott directs Arena's production, which stars John King as Scrooge, and Jonathan Spratt is musical director. Performances are from Wednesday to Saturday at 7.30pm, and there is a Saturday matinee at 2.30pm.