The Queens and the Ghost of Kalakuta 

oplus_131072

In its latest Lagos run at Terra Kulture, the Broadway-style musical Fela and the Kalakuta Queens flares to life as a ritual of sound and movement, where the city stands before the ghost of its most defiant prophet.

Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes

At last, the boisterous bombast of the play’s voice-over—stretched almost to the point of excess—runs its course. Now, the real business begins. From somewhere high up on stage right, mostly swallowed by darkness, hard-core Afrobeat throbs: raw, insistent, unapologetic. It spills into the theatre, gathering momentum, until it seizes the stage as the first figures emerge onto a floor drenched in purple light, sharply sculpted by overhead spotlights. Movements flare, collide and, before the audience can even catch its breath, resolve themselves into a tableau vivant charged with tension, rhythm and barely contained energy.

This, by the way, is the Saturday, January 10 matinée of Fela and the Kalakuta Queens, part of its latest festive-season run, which concludes the following day, Sunday, January 11, at Terra Kulture’s sleek, purpose-built theatre in the upmarket Victoria Island neighbourhood.

Stage right, a figure in ghostly white stands on an elevated platform, facing the audience with an unnerving stillness, as though frozen between invocation and judgement. Stage left, another figure—similarly clad, crowned with an exaggerated, fluffy headpiece—holds position atop a raised staircase, no less arresting. They do not move, yet they dominate the space, presiding over the action like sentinels. Between them, at centre foreground, dancers in dark hues crouch in a tight, forward-leaning circular formation, arms thrust outward, bodies coiled into a tense, kinetic sculpture that seems to inhale and exhale with the music.

The overall ambience of the roughly two-hour musical carries something of the spooky, almost fantastical. And this is one production Lagos theatre-goers never seem to see enough of—not because the city is short of spectacle (Lagos, after all, is a place where revelry, or at least an excuse for it, is never in short supply), but because this particular musical has mastered the art of returning without sliding into numbing predictability. Each revival feels less like a rerun and more like a fresh provocation, a subtle nudge at the city’s collective conscience.

Lagos recognises the story, recognises itself in it, and keeps turning up—some to witness the spectacle, others to revisit the heady years of the Kalakuta Republic and the Afrika Shrine. That is precisely why, performance after performance, the city’s theatre buffs find their way to Terra Kulture. Between December 26 and 30 last year; January 1 to 4; and January 10 to 11, Bolanle Austen-Peters Productions mounted a formidable run. Across 22 performances, virtually every seat was filled. More than 10,000 people filed through the doors, and in a city famously impatient with repetition, that level of turnout feels less like an achievement than a verdict.

What keeps drawing people back is not simply Fela Anikulapo-Kuti as icon, but Fela as unresolved question. Yes, the long-running, Broadway-styled production carries the relaxed authority of a show secure in its grip on the public imagination. Yet there is no air of cautious revivalism here, no sense of a legacy work wheeled out on the strength of nostalgia alone.

The production does not freeze Fela in reverence or reduce him to a catalogue of greatest hits. Instead, it opens with sound—unapologetic, sinewy, insistently live. Under the musical direction of Kehinde Oretimehin, the band functions as a character in its own right. Afrobeat here is not atmospheric garnish; it is the propulsive core of the evening, the argument itself, a force that refuses to be domesticated.

At the centre of this turbulence stands Laitan Adeniji as Fela. His is a performance that sidesteps both sainthood and caricature. Adeniji captures the swagger, the volatility, the almost dangerous charisma of a man capable of inspiring devotion simply by occupying space. This Fela is witty and cruel, generous and exhausting, visionary and petulant—sometimes within the same breath. He is less hero than weather system, and the production is wise enough to let the consequences of that intensity ripple outward rather than corralling them into tidy moral judgements.

But Fela does not exist in isolation. Around him, the women of the Kalakuta Republic—the Queens—claim the stage with equal authority. Osas Ighodaro, Yewande Osamein, Bunmi Olunloyo, Sharon Adaeze, Inna Erinze and Linda Nwanneka, among others, form a constellation of presence, each figure oscillating between individual magnetism and collective force. Under Justin Ezirim’s choreography, their movements are sharp, precise and at times violently fluid—a language of resistance and devotion written in muscle and gesture. They circle, sway and pivot; their torsos coil and snap in rhythmic sympathy with the band. Every glance, every tilt of the head carries the weight of history: loyalty and rebellion braided together beneath the myth of Fela the singular genius.

Costume designer Ituen Bassi, assisted by Juliana Dede, dresses the Queens in layered fabrics that speak simultaneously of Africa’s sartorial richness and the theatrical exaggeration required to hold their own against Adeniji’s formidable presence. White tunics, patterned skirts, bold headpieces and metallic accents evoke a Kalakuta that hovers between ritual and performance, lived reality and myth. Makeup by Adedayo Adesola and hair by Adeola Omomo sharpen these impressions further, giving each Queen a visual authority that cuts cleanly through the purple haze and overhead glare.

In the foreground, dancers coil and snap through formations that echo the pulsing Afrobeat beneath them. A red, mask-like projection throbs on the backdrop, an ominous witness and accomplice. With Moses Onyeama’s lighting and Daniel Aganoke’s projections, the stage feels less like a platform than a living organism—breathing, listening, demanding attention.

The Kalakuta Queens are not mere support for Fela; they are interlocutors, challengers and co-conspirators. Their dirge-like prayers rise like incantations, summoning him back into earth-life and delaying what feels like an already-scripted departure.

Bolanle Austen-Peters’ direction reveals a steady confidence in managing scale. She knows when to let the production swell—ensemble numbers bursting with sound and movement—and when to narrow the frame, allowing moments of intimacy or tension to register. Kalakuta emerges as a space of contradiction: sanctuary and pressure cooker, utopia and hierarchy, refuge and trap. Gender and power are negotiated nightly on stage, never fully resolved, never comfortably explained.

The political bite remains sharp. Fela’s “Yabis”—those improvised verbal assaults on authority—slice through the production with a satirical edge that provokes laughter and winces in equal measure. Corruption, military repression and the farce of post-independence governance are named without ceremony. The unsettling truth is how little translation these critiques require for a contemporary audience.

The supporting cast deepens this world with texture and irony. Performances oscillate between menace and absurdity, reminding us of the bureaucratic and coercive forces pressing against Kalakuta’s walls.

Technically, the production is assured without being ostentatious. Sound, lighting and projection work in concert, serving the story rather than competing with it.

By the time of the well-orchestrated curtain call, the sense is not merely of having witnessed a polished musical, but of having participated in a civic ritual. In an era when live theatre is often described as fragile, Fela and the Kalakuta Queens asserts itself as both culturally urgent and commercially viable. The sold-out houses are not accidents; they are evidence of a hunger that has not been fed elsewhere.