Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Who’s Betty Boop? Beyond the iconography you might have seen on a lunchbox or keychain, what do you really know? You can recognize her curls, her red flapper dress, and her pursed lips, plus maybe the rough contours of her personality: She’s a flirt, self-sufficient, spunky. You might remember that she has a dog or a kooky inventor grandfather (and if you’re an expert historian of the Fleischer animated shorts where she became a star, you know that she started out as a dog). But lore-wise, beyond that, there’s not much else most of us know about Betty. Years of merchandising have amplified the sense of her as a blank slate, a product-endorsing personality that can mean everything to everyone, a gal who’s had every job on the planet. Betty’s stuck in the kind of Xerox-copied omnipresence, everywhere but only in a shallow sense. That’s a predicament that would make for her great subject for a graduate-level semiotics seminar, though it’s awfully unsteady ground on which to build a musical.
Boop!, tapping its way to Broadway with the encouragement and oversight of Fleischer Studios, tries its best to turn Betty into a real human woman, literally. Following the currently popular “A Stranger Comes to Town” genre of story structure, Bob Martin’s book emulates the likes of Barbie and Elf (which Martin also adapted for the stage) and turns it into A Concept Comes to America. Betty’s introduced within her cartoon reality as a movie star who takes on any role her bosses at the studio ask her to, and things start out promising. As Betty, Jasmine Amy Rogers, a newcomer (and Jimmy Awards alumna), has the crackerjack energy of old-school hoofer, and she shows off her dancing ability in director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s kickline with a song called “A Little Versality,” one of many jazzy tunes by David Foster and Susan Birkenhead that clear the bar of entertaining without quite landing at memorable. Then, Betty starts to tire of her fame, of being everything to everyone at once, and wishes that she could go off and lead a normal life. Her Grampy, the inventor, soon reveals that it’s possible to skip across parallel universes with the help of a “trans-dimensional-tempus-locus-actuating-electro-ambulator,” a phrase repeated for comedy so often you may be able to recite it by memory at the end of the show, and soon, Betty finds herself transported to contemporary New York in the midst of Comic Con.
From there, Boop!’s premise may seem obvious: Betty’s going from a world where everyone’s obsessed with her to one where nobody cares much about her existence. For the next few scenes of Martin’s book, that’s the case. At Comic Con, a normie named Dwayne (Ansley Melham) with striking blue eyes—notable, because Betty’s seeing in color for the first time—shrugs her off as a weirdo cosplayer. Betty goes mostly unnoticed in the crowd, despite singing rapturously about how Pikachu is yellow, the Scarlet Witch is red, and Elle Woods from Legally Blonde is pink (Mitchell’s hat tip to himself), until Trisha (Angelica Hale), the one teenage girl in existence who happens to be a diehard Boop fan, gloms onto Betty, obsessed with the detail she put into her outfit, and invites her home. There, we discover a dysfunctional New York family of the kind that’d be familiar from any given late-’90s/early-2000s kids movie. Along with Trisha, there’s a father figure, Raymond, who’s running for mayor (Erich Bergen, testing whether it’s possible to build a performance entirely out of glowering); a mother figure. Carol, who’s his campaign manager (Anastasia McClesky); and, as it turns out, Dwayne, who serves as “kind of like half a dad plus half-brother. It’s complicated.” It is!
You might assume here that Betty will be getting her taste of obscurity in the big city—and then comes the twist. It turns out that in this New York, everyone except Dwayne is as obsessed with Betty Boop as Trisha is. Carol, for instance, used to have a Betty Boop lunchbox. Trisha points out that “she’s not just a drawing. She’s a symbol!” When, in the Act One finale, Betty joins Dwayne at a jazz club—and, in a La La Land touch, Dwayne, a white guy from the 2020s, sings a song to a flapper about how much he loves jazz—her identity is unmasked to rest of the world and Boop!-mania sweeps the town. For the rest of Boop!’s overstuffed second act, she’s wanted in two realities, both of which bear little resemblance to our own. In her New York, everyone, including news reporters, is desperate for a glimpse of Betty. And back home in her version of Hollywood, her cartoon friends—including the director-assistant duo of Ricky Schroeder and Colin Bradbury, who pull off some good vaudevillian bits, though I could live without the jokes about their being secretly gay—grow increasingly listless without their star.
These convolutions come across as brand management to the point of wish fulfillment; did a Fleischer Studios executive give the note that under no circumstances must the musical imply that Betty Boop is anything else than universally adored? Does that explain why, in the style of a Disney live-action film, the musical carefully updates Betty’s politics to ensure that she is a proud feminist who’s determined to influence New York’s mayoral election? Boop! approaches some of Betty Boop’s contradictions, but they never make it into the core of the thing. Casting a Black woman as Betty underlines the mainstream white American co-option of jazz forms—and makes you ponder those Fleischer cartoons’ kinship with minstrelry—but this is a musical where everyone describes Times Square as the beating heart of New York. It doesn’t have time to be Jelly’s Last Jam. Similarly, in one scene, Betty muses about how in most of her scenes she gets chased around by men before bopping them on the head with whatever heavy object is at hand. She’d really prefer not to be the object of a chase but maybe the one doing it. That gets transmuted into a rote kind of love story. Betty falls for Dwayne, and though Rogers and Melham never quite spark, by the end of the show, Rogers is belting a big 11-o’clock number about how she longs for “Something to Shout About.” That they never settled on a concrete noun is telling.
Unsteadiness in premise can be covered for by verve of execution, which Boop! does find here and there. Mitchell is more committed to choreography than many commercial Broadway directors, and here, he’s using Betty’s early-20th-century origins as a way to explore bodies-as-geometry à la Busby Berkeley. The second act opens with a chase sequence in which the ensemble flips around in costumes that are half color, half black-and-white.
If her character remains obscure, at least Rogers has the kind of charm and ease with physical comedy (she’s found a way of making her limbs hand-drawn and noodly) that makes you resort to old-fashioned forms of praise: a cutup, a laugh riot, a real pistol. In what resembles a Miss Adelaide mentorship program, Faith Prince is on hand to play a supporting character, a physicist who’s Grampy’s long-lost flame. Betty’s dog Pudgy is lovingly puppeteered with bits of string. There are plenty of charming details like those — yet, the thing adds up to less than the sum of its bits.
The lack of coherence in premise matches a lack of coherence aesthetically. Betty’s world is introduced with real decor, like a big grey bed and an amusingly goofy invention of Grampy’s, but the handmade quality falls by the wayside as most of the rest of David Rockwell’s sets are conjured via that old menace, the big flat LED screen. I could imagine a version of the musical where there’s a system to that choice—maybe our world is flat and computerized, while Betty’s seems extra-real because it has so many props. But the visible reasoning here is that of cost savings. The screens show up everywhere, in every reality, and they drain the energy from the stage. The same goes for Gregg Barnes’s costumes, which give Rogers a Boop-ish silhouette, but when they’re in color they’re generally bright and garish and made with flimsy materials. It’s too much, perhaps, to ask every cel-to-stage adaptation to spend as much time thinking through its internal logic as SpongeBob SquarePants did, but Boop! is so slapdash, you long for a more thought-out inquiry. We may not know Betty Boop deeply, but we can agree she has that certain “It” quality that has made her stick around for nearly a century, even if just on lunchboxes. I wish, after seeing this musical, I were closer to identifying why.
Boop! is at the Broadhurst Theatre.
