Successful ‘Boopsie’s Homecoming’ to head overseas after local run

During the Christmas period and moving into the new year, several production houses offered up plays for audiences to savour. Opened on Boxing Day, Jambiz’s Boopsie’s Homecoming has been an instant hit. The initial reaction from theatregoers was positive, and word-of-mouth endorsement, as well as savvy advertising, has seen patrons fill the seats, laughing throughout the production.

Now, two weeks after opening night, they can let out a sigh of relief that this play will be a topic of conversation for some time to come, with a planned run all the way into March 2026. As Jambiz Founding Director Lenford Salmon puts it, there is an art to creating a dramedy of epic proportion, and Patrick Brown is the undisputed doyen of Caribbean drama. “It comes down to the writer. Though it may sound biased, Patrick (Brown) is by far certainly the most prolific writer we have in the Caribbean. What we do in Jamaica is not replicated anywhere else in the English-speaking Caribbean, and what we have done for the past 20 years is not replicated by any other theatrical company in Jamaica,” Salmon told The Gleaner. “That pretty much goes back to Patrick’s brilliance in terms of how he crafts his scripts. He understands the language of the people and transfers this to audience members who receive it with such eagerness and acceptance.”

Now enjoying its 27th year of operation, Jambiz has seen its fair share of growth over the years, emerging from its Centrestage cute-but-cramped space to now enjoying its new home at the Courtleigh Auditorium, which easily seats a little over 400 people. Boopsie’s Homecoming regularly plays seven shows weekly with double shows on Saturdays and Sundays to accommodate demand, which was hoped for, but as Salmon explained, in theatre, nothing is a certainty because Jamaican audiences can be fickle. “Audiences can be unforgiving. If it nuh suit them, them nah go come. What we take is an almighty big risk, because entertainment in Jamaica is horrendously expensive and you can get yourself in a serious financial bind if it goes wrong,” he said.

Salmon further added that from the days of plays at the Ward Theatre in its heyday, chief among them The National Pantomime, Jamaicans have a passion for plays and seeing live performances. Though theatre spaces have shrunk significantly over the past decade with the closing of Phoenix, The Barn, Centrestage, and The Pantry, the love for theatre among local audiences has not waned in the least. “There are people who come to plays who don’t go to movies as much, because you can watch a movie anytime on Netflix. You have to leave your home to watch a play, and the feedback is that they actually prefer a play because it is more real,” he said.

He also pointed to plays offering needed representation. “When you go back to the first time Jamaicans would have seen themselves on anything that looked like a television or movie screen, which would be The Hard They Come in the early 1970s, it was pandemonium in Cross Roads when it opened at the Carib Cinema, and that has not abated since,” he said, pointing to other productions such as popular series Oliver at Large and Royal Palm Estate. “Jamaican people love to see themselves represented on television and the big screen, so when they see it in a different space now, there is still that excitement,” said Salmon.

So, why did Boopsie’s Homecoming resonate with theatregoers? “In hindsight, once I saw the script, my own feeling was that this would definitely connect with Jamaicans. Listen, I can tell you that I lost money in Olint, too, so I knew it was going to bring back memories for some people. Patrick has this genius knack where he can take any situation and carry it on a comedic vehicle. Notwithstanding the adversity some people might have experienced, people were able to laugh at the situation and even at themselves,” he said.

Starring Glen Campbell, Courtney Wilson, Renae Williams, and David Crossgill, Boopsie’s Homecoming holds up a mirror for Jamaicans at home and in the diaspora to the perils of a well-packaged Ponzi scheme. With this in mind, Jambiz intends to take the discussion on the road and head overseas after their local run to South Florida and the East Coast of the United States, specifically the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

nicola.cunningham@gleanerjm.com