When in 2013 Gilbert & Sullivan Society president Rose Cowpar decided to make her full debut as a director of a stage musical, her choice of production fell on the 1980 Broadway version of The Pirates of Penzance.
The show selection immediately posed a problem – you must have a first-rate young soprano available for the role of female lead Mabel, which is a very vocally taxing role indeed.
Cowpar needn’t have worried for to the auditions came the tall, lissome, then 24-year-old Liske Potgieter.
The young singer went on to win the best actress in a musical Showtime Award for the role but could hardly be regarded as a “discovery” as she’d had previous outings in musical theatre in important parts while still a pupil at Victoria Park High School.
VP has a strong tradition in musical theatre and when teacher and director Mariette van der Walt wanted to do West Side Story in 2007, she came across Potgieter. The grade 11 pupil sang the character of Maria beautifully.
Come the first half of 2008 and guest director Garth Tavares decided to do Barry Manilow’s Copacabana on invitation from the school. The show has a fabulous supporting female character in the second act – a fiery Latina femme fatale named Conchita Alvarez. Tavares cast Potgieter, who gave another brilliant portrayal.
Tavares took over as musical and vocal director for the 2009 Showtime Awards show called Passport to Teleland, and, knowing of creator Bob Eveleigh’s positive reviews of Potgieter in the two VP shows, he encouraged Eveleigh to cast her in the female lead.
Potgieter, who got married two years ago (she is now Liske Hemingway and the mother of a young child) is now back on the Showtime front as the special guest star in the 29th annual Woodlands Dairy Showtime revue, Those Were the Days.It will run at the Pemads Little Theatre from Sunday January 27 to Saturday February 2, including two Theatre Awards evenings.
Hemingway’s crystal-clear soprano will be heard in a four-song salute to Julie Andrews, in which she will be supported by revue dancers and the Charlo Singing Kids ensemble, as well as several other solo spots.Musical theatre hits such as Mame’s If He Walked into My Life Today, and How Are Things in Glocca Morra, the lovely ballad from the rather less familiar Broadway show Finian’s Rainbow, are included.
In the 10 years since she last appeared in Showtime, Hemingway has completed a B Mus with Honours, majoring in singing, at Nelson Mandela University, and taught singing at varsity (from her pre-graduation days), at VP and in her own studio.
She moved to Collegiate High as a singing teacher late in 2018, but has also grown greatly as producer and performer, having studied operatically under Lionel van Zyl, and been the programming, vocal direction and staging force behind the two G&S presentations of A Night at the Opera, a programme mixing operatic arias and Broadway standards, sung mainly by her singing pupils and herself, to excellent effect.
She has been involved in solo recitals and reached the semi-finals of the annual national Debut with Mimi Competition, run by retired SA opera diva Mimi Coertse.
Hemingway comes from a musical family (her mother is a professor of music) and her younger sister, Lara, who is also a singer, appeared in the Pirates female chorus and the first A Night at the Opera with her big sister.
What parts would she like to play in her future career?
“I’d love to do Christine in Phantom and even Maria in The Sound of Music – and, in opera, I’d love to sing The Queen of the Night but that would still be a long way down the road.”
Those Were the Days will run from January 27 but not all the shows are public shows. The Junior and Senior Awards evenings are on January 29 and February 1. Tickets for the awards evenings are R70, and seats for the other nights are R70 for adults and R50 for senior citizens, students and children. Booking opens on Tuesday; contact Phrosne Phillips on phrosne1@ gmail.com