City actress pens three carols for Christmas
City actress and author Melanie Ash has created three carols for Christmas.
She gave the Charles Dickens’ classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ a modern twist when she created a new stage version of the seasonal tale, set in the north west in 2016.
Melanie, a former student of Ashton High School, whose many TV credits include appearances in “Casualty” and “Coronation Street” runs the Preston based Meladrama Acting School.
She was delighted to showcase the talents of her students, aged six to adult, in three separate shows at the St Mary’s Priory Club in Leyland.
Scrooge appeared as the penny pinching, fortune grabbing Chief Executive Officer of Marley & Scrooge Investment who had ruthlessly enjoyed accumulating millions in a series of deals which exploited the poor and vulnerable.
Melanie, who founded the school 11 years ago, said: “I love the story of ‘A Christmas Carol’. It’s a big story about redemption and being able to change. At the moment with a backdrop of what’s happening with refugees and all the cuts there’s a lot of unhappiness about some people getting richer and richer and the poor getting poorer and poorer. It just seemed a miss not to set it in modern times. There are so many parallels with Victorian Britain and what people are experiencing now.”
The school holds classes, which are for both able and disabled drama students, in Preston at Caritas Care on Tulketh Road, Ashton and at St Joseph’s RC High School and Sports College, Horwich.