Boom, Baby, Boom!

A Jazz Play.

Beatnik meets ethnic in Toronto, 1959. Clement Hambourg breaks ranks with his family, and starts the first jazz club in the city. The House of Hambourg on Yorkville is his pride and joy. One night, Austra Mednis clambers through the window, a runaway from her refugee past. Clem gives her safe haven in his beehive of “boptivity.” But bankruptcy is about to his them both like a bomb.

BOOM, BABY, BOOM! was first produced by Nic Gotham, Claire Hopkinson and Banuta Rubess at the Du Maurier World Stage Festival in 1988, with a jazz score by Nic Gotham.

As contemporary theatre audiences know, Banuta Rubess is one of the most inventive, articulate, expansive and “theatrical” of our playwrights. Her works, performed across Canada and in Europe, are on the cutting edge of contemporary concerns. Included in this collection are Boom, Baby, Boom!, Pope Joan, Head in a Bag/Stone Age, and Smoke Damage: A Story of the Witch Hunts, a play that is already a small classic in university drama studies.