Moffie, memory and music

As soundscape designer on the play Moffie, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder turns noise into emotion at the theatre

- Keith Bain

Currently driving Johannesburg theatre audiences wild, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is an upbeat, showstopper of a musical, designed to dazzle and wow and make you want to dance in your seat.

Gratifyingly, even if you've seen umpteen versions of what was the very first Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, this rendition is a head-spinning triumph much of its success and acclaim due to an explosive reimagining of the score, a feat of skill and daring that along with sublime choreography and phenomenal performances - has catapulted the production into a new dimension.

Much of that is down to the show’s musical supervisor, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, whose calling card might accurately read, “Overachiever.”

But a whizzbang, attention-grabbing, high-energy do-over of a well-known musical is only the tiny tip of Lingenfelder’s creative iceberg.

Within the field of sound and music, he is something of a Renaissance man, breezing easily between projects that are often worlds apart.

His name is found in the credits of numerous movies, TV shows, documentaries, musicals and even straight plays, too. Typically, he’s credited with composing, directing the music or designing the sound, but seldom does the job title adequately encapsulate the level of ingenuity he brings to the job.

He's equally at home playing the accordion as he is in the recording studio or at an electronic mixing desk twiddling the knobs that orchestrate the elaborate intermingling of sounds and music for live shows.

For his award-winning soundscape design of The Promise, a stage adaptation of the 2021 Booker Prizewinning novel by South African Damon Galgut, he designed and built several microphone-rigged instruments that produced auditory effects by amplifying and distorting sounds and voices captured live during performances.

Last year, apart from working on a lengthy sellout season of