Semi-Soet (The Musical): Catchy, Charming, Joyful
Photo: Pierre Malan
My Afrikaans hasn't been tested since matric, when I scraped through the subject on memorised vocabulary lists and a fair amount of luck. It hasn't improved with age. So walking into The Teatro for a full-blown Afrikaans-language rom-com musical felt like showing up to an exam I'd last sat decades ago. I will confess, right up front, that I did not understand every word of Semi-Soet – The Musical. What I can also confess, just as readily, is that I did not stop smiling for two and a half hours.
That is, I think, the whole point of a show like this. Semi-Soet began life as the beloved 2012 film about Jaci van Jaarsveld, a self-confessed workaholic determined to save her floundering advertising agency by any means necessary, including hiring a fake fiancé to help her land a crucial wine contract. It is a premise built entirely out of screwball logic: mistaken identities, romantic misunderstandings, a plan that can only possibly go wrong in the most charming way. The stage version, reimagined by Johan Vorster and Jacomien de Wet after a sold-out debut season at AfriForum Teater in Pretoria last year, arrives at the Teatro having grown considerably in scale without losing an ounce of its warmth.
Semi-Soet doesn't want to unsettle you or leave you with anything to wrestle with on the drive home. It wants you laughing, humming, and maybe a little bit in love with the idea of love by the time the lights come up. In an era where so much new theatre reaches for weight and relevance, there was something genuinely refreshing about a production that commits, without apology, to pure old-fashioned joy.
Photo: Pierre Malan
A soundtrack that needs no subtitles
Whatever I missed in the finer points of dialogue, the music more than made up for it. Vorster and de Wet's score is catchy in the way that matters most for a musical like this: I could follow and even sing along to the hooks on the choruses, even where the verses moved a little too fast for my rusty Afrikaans to keep up. The new addition for this Joburg run, Marcelle Peach's "Rek Strek Baba," lands as a proper toe-tapper, and the production doesn't lean on its songs as filler between plot points but uses them to actually carry the emotional beats forward, which is not always a given in musicals adapted from film.
The design work matches the ambition of the music. The sets are genuinely lovely, shifting convincingly between the glossy advertising-world backdrop of Jaci's day job and the sun-soaked wine estate where much of the romantic chaos actually plays out, and the production has clearly used the move to a bigger stage to expand its visual scale rather than simply filling space for the sake of it. Nothing here feels padded. Everything feels considered.
Anel Alexander, reprising the role of Jaci that she originated in the film, and Bobby van Jaarsveld as JP anchor the show with the easy chemistry you'd expect from two performers who know exactly what kind of story they're telling. Van Jaarsveld in particular has the natural charisma this kind of leading-man role demands, and the pair carry the central romance with a lightness that never tips into saccharine.
Photo: Pierre Malan
Where the real fun lives
But if I'm honest, it was the supporting cast who stole the show for me. Zöricke Snyman and Phillip Schnetler, both Naledi-nominated for their work in the original production, as well as my personal favourite performance Revan Luus, bring a wonderful specificity to their characters, the kind of comic detail that turns a supporting role into the thing an audience remembers on the way out. Across the wider ensemble, there's a real sense of performers who have been given fun, quirky roles and have run with them, each finding a distinct eccentricity to hang onto. It is the kind of ensemble work that makes a musical feel properly alive rather than merely functional, and it's where Semi-Soet's comic engine really lives.
None of this would land as well as it does without a script and score that trust silliness to do serious work. There is nothing cynical about this production. It knows exactly what audiences want from an old-school romantic comedy and delivers it with genuine craft rather than going through the motions.
There is something quietly significant, too, about what this run represents. Semi-Soet marks the first Afrikaans musical to return to the Teatro stage in more than a decade, and on the night I attended, the house was full and the audience was audibly, joyfully with it from the opening number. Whatever language barrier I brought in with me, I was clearly in the minority, and even I couldn't have missed how completely the show had the room in the palm of its hand. There's something rather wonderful about watching a full house respond that way to a production performed entirely in Afrikaans, in one of Johannesburg's biggest commercial theatres. It felt like proof, if any more was needed, that there is a real and hungry audience for Afrikaans musical theatre on this scale.
I left the Teatro not having understood every line, but having felt every beat of it. Semi-Soet – The Musical is unashamedly, unapologetically fun, the kind of show that reminds you why people fell in love with musical theatre in the first place. It is, without question, one of the most purely enjoyable evenings I've had in a theatre this year, language barrier and all.
Semi-Soet – The Musical runs at The Teatro, Montecasino until the 27th of September 2026.