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New York Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Broadway Musical About Betty Boop Is Fourth to Close Post-Tonys
'Boop! The Musical,' based on the iconic flapper from early animated shorts, announced on Wednesday that it would close July 13 after failing to find sufficient audience to defray its running costs on Broadway. The show is the fourth new musical to post a closing notice in the 17 days since the Tony Awards, following 'Smash,' 'Real Women Have Curves' and 'Dead Outlaw.' 'Boop!' had a disappointing Tonys season — it was not nominated for best musical, and its request to perform on the awards show was rebuffed. It was nominated for best lead actress (Jasmine Amy Rogers), best choreography (Jerry Mitchell) and best costume design (Gregg Barnes) but won no awards. The show's weekly grosses, consistently too low, ticked upward last week, but remain well below its running costs. During the week that ended June 22, 'Boop!' grossed $602,017, and 19 percent of the seats went unsold. The musical began previews March 11 and opened on April 5 at the Broadhurst Theater. At the time of its closing, it will have played 25 previews and 112 regular performances. Set primarily in New York City, the musical imagines that Betty Boop, an actress in films of the 1920s, time travels to present-day Manhattan seeking a greater sense of her self; in the city she finds friendship, love and clarity. The musical, led by the veteran producer Bill Haber, had been in development for more than a quarter century, with shifting creative teams, and had a pre-Broadway production in Chicago in 2023. The version that finally made it to Broadway has a book by Bob Martin, music by David Foster, and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead; it is directed as well as choreographed by Mitchell. Reviews were mostly positive. But in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green was unenthusiastic, praising Rogers's performance and other elements of the show, but questioning its rationale, saying that 'a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for' is 'disappointing,' and that 'one feels at all times the heavy hooves of a marketing imperative." 'Boop!' was capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show's development — has not been recouped.
Vogue
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘I'm Always Fighting Myself to Be Better, Better, Better': Boop! Star Jasmine Amy Rogers Looks Ahead to the Tonys
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.
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
To Play Betty Boop, Jasmine Amy Rogers Had to Transform
When Jasmine Amy Rogers learned that she had been nominated for a Chita Rivera Award, for outstanding dancer in a Broadway show, her first reaction was to laugh. 'Just because I felt a little bit like an impostor,' said Rogers, who plays the Jazz Age cartoon character Betty Boop in 'Boop! The Musical.' 'The dancing is always something that I was so fearful of.' Indeed, the tap portion of the audition process had been, by her own admission, 'really bad.' 'I was so nervous that I just shut down,' Rogers recalled, just hours after the nomination was announced. 'It was very embarrassing for me. I did a little bit of the tap number from the beginning and I just couldn't pick up the pattern.' It sounded 'like somebody dropped a handful of silverware in the kitchen,' according to Jerry Mitchell, the musical's choreographer and director. But, he added in a phone interview, 'she went away, she worked on it, she came back and she was better.' And she got the job. The dance award nomination came late last month. A Tony nomination for best leading actress in a musical followed shortly after that. In his review, the New York Times's chief theater critic called Rogers 'immensely likable,' adding that 'she sings fabulously,' and 'nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line.' Not bad for a Broadway debut. In between sips from a chai latte at Manhattan's Chelsea Market, Rogers, 26, could not quite seem to shake a sense of awe at the turns her career has taken in such a short time. The young actress, who had earlier indulged in some shopping (including a collage that featured a boxer that reminded her of her dog), often laughed in slight disbelief, and admitted to feeling a little out of step over the years: sometimes literally, in reference to her dancing, but also more generally, like when she was a finalist at the 2017 Jimmy Awards, which honor outstanding high school musical-theater performers in the country. 'I felt like a fish out of water a little bit because I was like, these kids know more than I do about musical theater and they're so talented,' said Rogers, who represented her high school in the Houston area, where her family had moved in 2010. 'For a long time, and even still now, I have this impostor syndrome kind of thing where I'm like, 'Do I belong here?'' Rogers grew up in Massachusetts, the kind of kid who would put on a purple wig her grandmother had given her and 'sing to myself these sad songs, like 'Reflection' from 'Mulan,'' she said. She appeared in her first musical when she was 7, playing a member of Tiger Lily's crew in a production of 'Peter Pan' ('We were actually like a tribe of hippie Native Americans, which was nice') in Milford. From her spot in the ensemble, she somehow managed to sing over Tiger Lily. 'I just wanted to be as loud as possible, just singing and dancing my little heart out,' Rogers said, laughing. After high school, she moved again, this time to New York, where she attended the Manhattan School of Music. She dropped out after two years, having reached what she called 'a stagnant point.' It wasn't long before Mitchell cast her as the best friend of the main character in 'Becoming Nancy,' a new musical he was choreographing and directing at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta in 2019. Old habits resurfaced during that run, she said. 'There were a lot of moments where I was pushing myself a little too hard and the older cast members were like, 'You don't need to do this, you don't need to prove anything — you already have the role.'' Yet while Rogers could occasionally give in to her insecurities, she had a clear need to get out there and make herself heard. The next big gig after 'Becoming Nancy,' was the 'Mean Girls' tour, where she played Gretchen Wieners. Then Mitchell came calling again, in 2023, for the Chicago production of 'Boop!' 'I knew from having worked with her in Atlanta that she is a money player,' he said. 'From my experience with people like Norbert Leo Butz and Marissa Jaret Winokur, Laura Bell Bundy, Annaleigh Ashford — all the people I consider stars that I've had the opportunity to work with at a very young age — she's one of those people who never steps onstage without being absolutely certain of every move she's going to make.' While 'Boop!' was being retooled between its Chicago run and the Broadway transfer, Rogers had an experience that would prove transformational: The director Kent Gash cast her as Anita, a sultry singer and Jelly Roll Morton's lover, in his 2024 revival of 'Jelly's Last Jam' at the Pasadena Playhouse. Anita is, as Gash put it, 'a sort of bucket-list role for Black actresses in the musical theater.' (Tonya Pinkins won a Tony for playing her in the 1992 Broadway production.) He had seen footage of Rogers doing 'Boop!' in Chicago and arranged for a virtual meeting. 'About 30 seconds into the conversation, I thought, 'She's it,'' Gash said in a phone interview. 'She was talking like someone far beyond her years. I thought, she may be a little on the young side for it, but there's complexity in that soul.' Betty has her allure, but Anita was a different kind of sultry, and it proved to be another learning curve for Rogers. 'Anita is a sexy kind of woman, and she's very confident and cool,' Rogers said. 'And I just kind of felt like, How do I not come across as this weird little girl who's so awkward and strange? I had to work with an intimacy coordinator — not just on the intimacy of the show but on being. I think it's carried on to Betty, because she's a lot of things, but one of those things is she's sexy, and suave and cool,' she continued. 'I had to reframe the way I looked at myself completely, and it was really hard.' Widening the scope, Rogers said there was also the thrill of simply being in 'Jelly's Last Jam.' 'It was my first time being in an all-Black cast, which was so exciting, and our creative team was all Black as well, and it was very liberating,' she said. Being a part of 'Jelly's Last Jam' likely helped strengthen Rogers's performance of Betty, making it simultaneously more personal and more universal. 'What I love about being playing Betty is I am Black and I'm playing her, and there's a lot of pride in that,' Rogers said. 'But a lot of people come and watch the show, but they're not thinking about the fact that I'm Black. And I think that's really nice and exciting and refreshing.' Her performance connects with theatergoers because Rogers takes them along on Betty's evolution from a denizen of a two-dimensional black-and-white world to a full-fledged human in the strange land of 21st-century New York City. 'She was able to go even deeper the second time around and really flesh out this character,' Ainsley Melham, who plays Dwayne, a jazz musician and Betty's love interest, said over the phone. 'Breathe into all of Betty's dynamic, cartoonish qualities but also bring it down and ground it in reality.' Now, Rogers can maybe let herself enjoy the ride. 'Kent Gash came to see the show the other day, and it made me so happy,' she said. 'It was just so special. I was like, 'Oh my goodness — I'm an actress.'' It hasn't been that long since that messy tap audition, but these days, Rogers has definitely picked up the pattern.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Boop! The Musical' Review: Betty Gets a Brand Extension
Some shows are 'what?' shows, leaving you baffled. Perhaps they involve roller-skating trains or shrouds of Turin. Others are 'how?' shows, as in: Dear God, how did that happen? But the most disappointing subgenre of musical, at least in terms of opportunity cost, is the 'why?' show: a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for. Its intentions are foggy and sometimes suspicious. 'Boop! The Musical' — now playing at the Broadhurst Theater, in a production directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell — is a 'why?' show par excellence. And excellence it has. As Betty, the flapper of early talkie cartoons, Jasmine Amy Rogers is immensely likable. She sings fabulously, sports a credible perma-smile, nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line. I can't imagine anyone making more of the exhausting opportunity, let alone in a Broadway debut. She is ably supported by other young talent in featured roles, luxury-cast veterans doing their damnedest and a hard-working ensemble selling Mitchell's insistent, imaginative, precision-drilled dances. When his pinwheel kick-lines hop in unison, not one foot among 26 is left on the floor. Or make that 27, because Pudgy, Betty's pug, a marionette with a lolling pink tongue operated by the puppeteer Phillip Huber, sometimes shakes a leg too. And wait, there's more: David Foster's music, in a jazzy brass-and-reeds Cy Coleman vein, pops nicely; the lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, are far better crafted than you dare hope these days. To the extent it is possible to enjoy the story's themes — the power of music, the way color comes into your life when you love — it is often because she encapsulates them so amusingly. I laughed out loud at her show-off rhyme of 'It girls' and 'spit curls.' But none of that explains or justifies the show's existence. Nor, despite enormous effort, can the book by Bob Martin. In building a case for a vintage piece of intellectual property — Betty was born as a half-dog in 1930 — Martin winds up replicating the kind of musical he roasted in 'The Drowsy Chaperone' (1998) and the delusional creatives he pierced in 'The Prom' (2016). That show's imaginary 'Eleanor! The Eleanor Roosevelt Musical,' is no less ludicrous than the real-life 'Boop! The Musical.' Granted, Broadway history has proved that ludicrousness is not in itself a deterrent to enjoyment. But laboriousness is, and it's only with the groaning of heavy machinery underneath it that 'Boop!' approaches the semblance of a lighthearted surface. The premise, though silly, is the least of it: Betty, a quasi-human cartoon in a black-and-white world, stars in animated Fleischer Studios shorts. (Max Fleischer created the character; the studio named for him made the movies.) Though reporters fawn over her as 'a singer, a dancer, an actress, a star beloved by millions,' she doesn't know who she really is. Yes, the musical rests on the identity crisis of a smudge of inked celluloid. A time-travel machine created by Grampy (Stephen DeRosa) provides the way out of the crisis, dumping Betty in current-day New York City. At the Javits Center during Comic Con, she adapts perhaps faster than we do to the bizarrely dressed and garishly colorful Oz-like new world. (Costumes by Gregg Barnes, lighting by Philip S. Rosenberg.) Also as in Oz, Betty acquires three companions: Trisha (Angelica Hale), a young Boop fanatic she meets at the convention; Dwayne (Ainsley Melham), a jazz musician who is maybe Trisha's cousin, but it's not very clear; and Carol (Anastacia McCleskey), a campaign manager who is maybe Dwayne's mother and definitely Trisha's guardian. Because wouldn't you know it, Trisha, like yet another piece of ancient IP, is an orphan. And then there's Valentina, an astrophysicist who, 40 years earlier, hooked up with Grampy when he visited the real world. The best thing to say about her is that she's played by Faith Prince, looking game, if understandably confused. In any case, Grampy and Valentina reunite when he returns to the real world to reclaim Betty, without whom the black-and-white world at home is fading. But will she go back with him, now that, with the help of her new friends, she is involved in a mayoral election, a sanitation scandal and a feminist quest to take charge of her identity? I wish the show had taken charge of its identity too. Instead, one feels at all times the heavy hooves of a marketing imperative. The brand discipline is punishing; in David Rockwell's scenic design, even the proscenium has spit curls. And poor Trisha, hasn't she lived through enough without being turned into a brand ambassador? 'Betty Boop has been famous everywhere for like a hundred years!' she says, as one does. 'Betty Boop is strong and smart and confident and capable.' She even gets a song, called 'Portrait of Betty,' that hymns Boop's praises as if she were, well, Eleanor Roosevelt: 'She is not afraid to fight / For all the people who cannot defend themselves.' In short, as a typically well turned Birkenhead lyric puts it: 'She has spunk, she has spine, she's a saint, bottom line.' And there it is. The bottom line. Betty Boop, if not the earliest cartoons she appears in, is still under copyright protection. No doubt the Fleischer heirs, with one eye on 'Barbie,' would like to exploit their biggest star before she goes bust. Fair enough; who wouldn't? But a merch grab — in the lobby a plushie Pudgy goes for $35 — is not the same as a musical. The answer to 'why?' should not come from mere marketeers.
