By the second number, the stage at Die Centurion Teater held more people than seemed physically possible, stacked up across its platforms, all of them dancing and all of them somehow still singing. The audience had already stopped being an audience and become part of the room, grinning and clapping along as if they had been personally invited. I have rarely seen a company win over a house so quickly.
Hairspray has had a long and slightly unlikely life. It began as a 1988 film by John Waters about a Baltimore teenager with big hair and bigger ambitions, became a Broadway musical in 2002 and won eight Tony Awards in 2003, including Best Musical. Many people know it best through the 2007 film version but the songs were written to be heard live in a room full of people. Tracy Turnblad wants nothing more than to dance on the local television show, but her wish to be seen collides with a world that has already decided who belongs on screen and who does not. The musical carries that serious idea so lightly that you are laughing and tapping your feet long before you realise how much it is asking of you. This is the first professional staging in South Africa since 2007, and watching it here, in a country that knows exactly what it costs to take apart a rule about who belongs where, gives the story an extra weight.
Energy that fills the room
The first thing to say about this production is that the cast gave it everything. The pace barely drops. Singing and dancing arrive together, at speed, often with most of the company on stage at once, and the stamina required is remarkable. Holding a note steady while your lungs are still recovering from a routine is one of the hardest things this art form asks of a performer, and they did it again and again. The audience was theirs from the start, responding to every joke and every big finish with the kind of delight that only a live room can produce.
Three performances stood out for me. Carley Janse Van Vuuren leads the show as Tracy, in her professional musical theatre debut. Tracy has to be irrepressible without becoming exhausting, and she has to make her courage feel like a natural extension of her joy. That Carley holds the stage so comfortably at the centre of such a busy production is a real achievement.
Thiart Li, who is also known as the drag performer Shenay O’Brien, plays Edna Turnblad. The role has a proud tradition behind it, going back to Divine in the original film, and Edna’s journey from a woman who rarely leaves the house to one who steps out into the world is among the sweetest in the show. It gives the production some of its biggest laughs and some of its warmest moments, and Thiart plays both with generosity.
Klaus-Louis Jansen Van Vuuren is a smooth, charming Corny Collins, the television host who has the power to open a door and chooses to do so. Corny is easy to underestimate, because he spends so much of the evening being likeable, but the show needs him to be a reminder that people with a platform can decide what to do with it. This performance understood that.
A word on the stage itself. Die Centurion Teater is an intimate space, and a show this large could easily have felt cramped. The creative team answered that by building upwards. Three levels of platforms gave the production height as well as width, so that numbers could stack and layer, performers could look down on one another and the stage gained a sense of scale it simply would not have had on a single plane. It was a smart, practical solution, and it meant that even the busiest ensemble moments had room to breathe. Directors Tiaan Kirsten-Lubbe and Lian Sachse and their team clearly understand that a small stage is a puzzle worth solving.
The song that stayed
Everything I have described so far is the fun of Hairspray, and there is a lot of it. But the musical is at its best when it lets that fun fall quiet. “I Know Where I’ve Been” arrives when the mood turns from comedy to something far more solemn, and the show suddenly sounds like a hymn. It belongs to Motormouth Maybelle, played here by Gugu Dhlamini, and it is a song about the long road already travelled and the longer one still ahead. The melody rises in a way that makes you sit up, and the words ask something real of an audience that has spent the evening laughing.
It has long been one of my all-time favourite songs in musical theatre. Many will know it from Queen Latifah’s version in the 2007 film, but hearing it live, in a room full of people who had been clapping along only minutes before, settled the matter for good. I have been singing it for days since. A great ballad tells you what the musical was about all along.
That tonal shift is what separates Hairspray from a simple night of bright costumes and catchy tunes. The show is happy to be joyful, and it never lectures, but it trusts that you came with a heart as well as a pair of dancing feet. By the time the company launches into the finale and the whole stage is moving together, the argument has been made without anyone having to raise their voice. You cannot stop the beat, and after an evening like this you would not want to try.
I came away from this production grinning, humming and quietly grateful that a musical about the right to be seen has found its way back to a South African stage. It is warm, it is fast, it is funny and it is performed with real commitment by a company that clearly loves the material. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I suspect you will too, especially if you bring someone who has never seen it before and get to watch them discover why this story has lasted.
Hairspray runs at Die Centurion Teater until the 7th of November 2026.