Betty Boop, the baby-voiced Jazz Age flapper from black-and-white Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s, is not the most obvious piece of ancient IP to become the center of a new Broadway musical. While the character has retained a kind of cult fandom, she’s been well outside the pop culture mainstream for decades. And yet this plucky working gal whose onscreen jobs included lion tamer, race car driver, judge, and presidential candidate springs to full and glorious life in Boop!, which opened Monday at the Broadhurst Theatre.
Broadway newbie Jasmine Amy Rogers delivers a star-making turn as the title character, combining sexiness, innocence, and old-fashioned showmanship in a short-skirted package that convincingly suggests a two-dimensional cartoon brought to three-dimensional technicolor life. Bob Martin’s book follows a similar trajectory, as we open in a black-and-white movie-studio landscape (cunningingly designed by David Rockwell, with matching costumes by Gregg Barnes and lighting by Philip S. Rosenberg) where Boop is the center of her world.
But our heroine, yearning for an “ordinary day” after years as a celebrity, decides to try out one of her Grampy’s (Stephen DeRosa) Rube Goldberg-like inventions and transport herself to the “real world” of 2025 New York City. Conveniently she lands in the full-color world of New York ComicCon where a woman dressed as Betty Boop is not entirely out of place. She even encounters an orphaned teenager, Trisha (Angelica Hale, a vocal dynamo and youngest ever America’s Got Talent runner-up), who’s an improbable Boop superfan — and also meets a jazz-playing love interest, Dwayne (a sparkly-eyed Ainsley Melham), whom Trisha describes as “kind of like half a dad plus half brother.” No, I have no clue what that means either.
Rogers’s Betty navigates modern urban life with a wide-eyed wonder for all the ways the world has changed since the 1930s as well as a savviness about the stubborn stickiness of obstacles like handsy men whom she’s accustomed to having chase her around desks (and whom she’s accustomed to dispatching with a heavy object clonked onto the head).
She’s also the perky center of many of director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s ebullient production numbers, which are a visual and musical delight that incorporate everything from tap to soft shoe to kick lines. The show-stopping highlight is the second act opener “Where Is Betty?” in which the residents of both timelines conduct a search for our heroine — in costumes that appear either monochromatic or full-color depending on which way the performer is facing.
In another number, a lushly lit Dwayne croons downstage center flanked by Betty’s old-time director (Aubie Merrylees) and the director’s loyal assistant (Ricky Schroeder), who are lit to appear stuck in black and white. There’s a good deal of stage craft on display in Boop! which extends to Finn Ross’s projections, Sabana Majeed’s hair and wig design, Michael Clifton’s make-up, and illusions by Skylar Fox. Plus, puppeteer Phillip Huber deserves a special pat on the head as Betty’s dog, Pudgy, whose expressiveness sometimes leads him to upstage his human co-stars.
The score, by David Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead, is a mixed bag. The high points are the splashy group numbers, like the first act finale “Where I Wanna Be,” where Betty takes center stage at a jazz club and fulfills the promise enumerated in the script direction: “Betty ends big. The crowd goes wild.” But other numbers, particularly ballads like Betty’s 11 o’clock solo, have a generic quality that’s further undermined by Birkenhead’s squishy word-salad lyrics. “I want something to make me someone I never was,” Betty belts out nonsensically, “something to shout about, whatever it does.” (Birkenhead achieves a punchier wit in uptempo numbers like the show’s high-octane opener, where Betty declares, “You can save the world in trousers or a skirt, a little versatility never hurt.”)
The show is further undercut by Martin’s overstuffed book, which introduces (and mostly wastes) enough secondary characters to fill a whole other show. In addition to Trisha and Dwayne, we meet Trisha’s aunt/guardian (Anastacia McCleskey) and her skeevy, waste-removal-obsessed boss (Erich Bergen), who’s running for mayor of New York City for some reason. When Grampy follows Betty into 2025 in his time-traveling contraption, he meets up with an old love interest, played by the delightful Faith Prince in a sadly underdeveloped role. And then there are multiple jump cuts back to the black-and-white world that Betty abandoned — where her director and co-stars “have no reason to be” in the absence of the star who keeps them all employed.
It’s a lot. Too much, in fact — because following all those plot threads also keeps Rogers’s Boop offstage for long stretches, particularly in the slackly paced second act. But when Rogers returns, with a raised eyebrow and a tilt of her bobble-sized head, all’s forgiven. Whether in trousers or a skirt, she show’s enough versatility to cement her status as a major new Broadway talent. And she proves that even after nearly a century, Betty Boop still deserves a place in the spotlight. ★★★★☆
BOOP
Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 28 for $58 to $256
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