‘I'm Always Fighting Myself to Be Better, Better, Better': Boop! Star Jasmine Amy Rogers Looks Ahead to the Tonys

Vogue

01-06-2025

After a two-year stint at the Manhattan College of Music, she dropped out and quickly landed a role in a new musical, Becoming Nancy, directed by Jerry Mitchell that premiered in Atlanta in 2019. Following a tour as Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, she was brought in by Mitchell to audition for Betty in the Chicago try-out of Boop! in 2023. (She had played a different, supporting character in an earlier workshop of the show.)
She was not prepared for the tap-heavy choreography involved in that first audition. 'It was horrifying!' A competitive dancer as a child, she stopped training when she moved to Texas at 11, but figured enough of the skill would come back for her to wing it; she was wrong. 'It was soul-crushing, I went home and sobbed,' she recalls, the cringe still visible in her eyes. She did not get the part then.
Later that spring, she happened to be in a rehearsal space in Manhattan, helping a friend with another show, when she heard the Boop! music wafting down the hallway. Rogers did some digging and discovered the production still had not cast Betty. She describes pacing around midtown that day, contemplating what she should do before finally calling her agent. 'I was like, 'I don't know what we need to do, but I need to get back in there.' I'd never done anything like that before.' It worked, and for two weeks she crammed in as many tap classes at Broadway Dance Center as she could before her second chance at the role.
The rest is history, and the performance she delivers is a brilliant hat trick: a disarmingly human portrayal of a famously one-dimensional character. 'The tricky part about her,' Rogers says of Betty, 'is combining the larger-than-life energy of a cartoon with a real person.' Her standout 11 o'clock number, 'Something to Shout About,' a towering David Foster Ballad, brings down the house.
Rogers describes herself as bubbly and larger-than-life, which made building Betty a natural process. 'There is a lot of her that also belongs to Jasmine.'
And she relished recreating Betty's signature hour-glass look with costume designer Gregg Barnes, who is also up for a Tony. 'I'm in a corset the whole show; it's great and terrible at the same time. But the shape it creates is so beautiful, I wouldn't feel like her without it.' For Betty's iconic bob and curls, Rogers and hair stylist Sabana Majeed looked to Dorothy Dandridge and other old Hollywood references to make it recognizable but elevated.