Brown Sugar Baby

• Date: 30 April 20:15 - 22:25
• Location: Koninklijke Schouwburg (Grote Zaal)

The energetic Brown Sugar Baby takes you back to the turbulent latter days of the Dutch colony. An Indian jazz band gets ready for an important performance, but backstage everything goes wrong. A swinging and penetrating performance about political unrest, a hidden family history and jazz. Writer and director Eric de Vroedt gives an honest and impressive look at the Dutch East Indies of the 1930s. Including Hein van der Heijden, Esther Scheldwacht, Mariana Aparicio and Emma Buysse.

"In Brown Sugar Baby, the storylines are like the jazz band, multicolored yet cohesive."

- Trouw ★★★★

"A feast of a performance, intelligent and abrasive"

- De Groene Amsterdammer

"Emma Buysse and Esther Scheldwacht play phenomenally"

- de Volkskrant

Trigger warnings: this performance contains a storyline about sexual abuse | It uses stroboscopic lighting effects.

The story

1935, Hotel der Nederlanden in Batavia, Dutch East Indies. The Indian family band Brown's Sugar Babies is getting ready for the grand finale of the jazz competition. The ballroom is filling up, but backstage all sorts of things are going wrong. One of the singers has lost her voice. The drummer has to be replaced last minute. And the youngest sister of the family has been missing for days. Meanwhile, the hotel is teeming with the most shadowy characters. While the problems pile up at lightning speed, band leader Kurt does everything he can to save his show.

Turbulent Dutch East Indies
Brown Sugar Baby is a new play by Eric de Vroedt inspired by his grandfather's various jazz bands and a hidden family history. The story is set in the turbulent final days of the Dutch colony. A time when Indonesian nationalism was suppressed ever more harshly by the Dutch, but could hardly be ignored.

Eric de Vroedt: "All the debates now raging fiercely in the Netherlands were already fully alive in the colonial era. The gap between poverty and wealth, the fear of a tsunami of 'natives', conspiracy theories, polarization, war and terror. In the 1930s, the Dutch East Indies was a society adrift: in some places as jazzy and sexy as Berlin, in others a ruthless police state. The colony was far more exciting as well as oppressive than we tend to think."


Brown Sugar Baby accessible
The blind and visually impaired can listen to an audio introduction at home in preparation. In the foyer of the theaters is a tactile model of the set so you can get an idea of what it looks like. For people who are sensitive to stimuli, a preparation document is available. You can find the documents on this page.

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