Theresa Smith
IT WAS Snow White at the Port Elizabeth Opera House and it left her floored. Though Candice van Litsenborgh cannot quite remember whether it was a play or a ballet (she was only five) she does remember being astounded that the world she had only imagined from being read the story was in front of her, on stage, for real.
“Afterwards I was like…” Van Litsenborgh’s jaw drops to her chest and her eyes open really wide, feigning her childhood amazement.
This magical experience led to a lifelong passion for anything presented on a stage, especially if it has music in it.
While she initially wanted to become a teacher, the PE-born Van Litsenborgh accompanied a friend to a UCT audition and was accepted into the drama course, specialising in musical theatre (this course only ran for five years).
She graduated a year before Phantom of the Opera was first performed in Cape Town and considers herself lucky to have been able to catch the growth of musical theatre in South Africa.
“I came in thinking there was not going to be much work in musical theatre, then Cats happened and Phantom and that sparked these huge shows happening and it being a viable business, not only in SA but internationally, because those shows tour,” she said.
Right now she is performing in the Sunset Boulevard ensemble at Theatre on the Bay, but in an ideal world she would be happy to perform in Sondheim plays for the rest of her life: “He doesn’t just write songs for the sake of writing songs, what he writes is a three-act play in every single song.
“There is such an emotional journey for all the characters and he tackles subjects that aren’t wishy-washy, that aren’t fluffy.
“Even though I’m not the hugest fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, when he does something like Sunset Boulevard it’s just such a beautiful musical story, that’s what I want to be doing, when characters are rich and full and tell stories that break your heart.”
For Hansel and Gretel the 34-year old plays both stepmother and witch and last year she impressed as the evil Ursula, octopus sea-witch character in The Little Mermaid.
“I’m starting to get a reputation,” she says with a throaty chuckle. “It’s sort of what I’ve fallen into.
I’m happy doing any theatre… and I’m actually quite sad not to be doing straight plays, but when a musical comes along you know you’re guaranteed work, for six months sometimes, so it’s hard not to turn that, and an international tour, down.”
Like last year’s The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel is presented by the Baxter Theatre Centre in association with Canal Walk, with both productions having first been presented at the mall. Since neither of the shows is of the audience-participation-is-a-must variety, Van Litsenborgh sees both venues as important to teaching children etiquette not only for how to behave in a theatre, but how to deal with presentations requiring concentration like schoolroom lessons, church services and any situation where you are the audience.
“Kids take their cue from their parents. You sometimes see parents sit there and they haul out the cellphone, clearly thinking ‘I’ve brought the kids here, I’ve done my duty’. But when you see parents engage, the children look to them and see ‘well that’s what I’m supposed to be doing’.
“It really helps them to understand ‘that is where my concentration needs to be’.”
She is very complimentary about working on kids’ productions with director Fred Abrahamse and designer Marcel Meyer, who also wrote the music and lyrics, citing the clarity with which they present the story as the reason children respond so well to the works.
”I think it’s so important that they’re doing shows like this, for the next generation, the kids who have to be the next audience and actors.”
Now, if only they didn’t feel the need to keep the line between dead and alive unblurred, so she could take a bow. That’s the problem playing the witch in fables, they always end up dead before the story ends. “I’m dead, evil has been conquered, she doesn’t get to come back and take a bow. So, clap for me when I die,” she laughs.
l Hansel and Gretel plays at the Baxter Flipside from December 6 to January 11 at 10am and noon from Mondays to Saturdays.