An Acton NY Theater Review: Broadway’s Boop! The Musical
By Acton
The bits and bobs of Boop! that work are all straight out of the cartoon Betty Boopiverse. Unfortunately, she leaves it all behind for the (yawn) real world about ten minutes into Boop! The Musical (director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, book by Bob Martin). The show starts off in the black-and-white world of Betty Boop, star of the hippest of the old cartoon producers, Fleischer Studios. The opening number, in which she introduces herself as the world’s most versatile performer (don’t tell Norma Desmond across the street), whets our appetite with classic razzle-dazzle. The cartoon world looks good (scenic design David Rockwell, projection design Finn Ross), the music is fun (music David Foster, lyrics Susan Birkenhead), and Jasmine Amy Rogers is a fantastic Betty Boop.
Then the plot kicks in. Fresh off another perfect day of movie stardom, our heroine is thrown into a spin when a reporter wants to know: Who is the real Betty Boop? Her journey to self-actualization leads her home to Grampy (a funny Stephen DeRosa), one of several of the musical’s deep cut references to the original cartoons—his gimmick is that he’s an inventor, and he sneezes. Grampy reveals that there exists another, “real” world that may hold the answer, and he’s invented a machine that will zap her there.
Betty flips the switch, and is transported to Boop!’s corny version of present-day New York City (Grampy’s contraption is also a time machine, I guess). And not just anywhere in NYC, but the Javits Center during Comic-Con, as Disney-loving attendees mill around in costumes that come this close to violating multiple copyrights. It’s a destination so specific and ugly that I perked up. Could this be art? Alas, the show doesn’t really take a point of view on modern times, Betty’s world, or much else. Instead, we get a long-winded plot mostly about lackluster new characters, and the show drags between some inspired cartoony sequences.
At the Con, Betty meets and then moves in with Trisha (Angelica Hale), a smart, brassy, wise-beyond-her-years moppet with an unnecessarily complicated home life. Trisha wants to be the next Banksy. Her hot brother Dwayne (Ainsley Melham) plays trumpets nights, and they both live with their foster mother Carol (Anastacia McCluskey). Their parents are dead. Carol works as the campaign manager for former sanitation chief Raymond (Erich Bergen), who is now running for mayor and seems corrupt and worse, uncool. Got that? Then there’s Valentina (Faith Prince), an ex-NASA scientist who once fell in love with Grampy. What all this has to do with a Betty Boop musical, I have no idea.
Even if I wish the story had more of the surreal, jazzy vibe of Betty’s cartoon adventures, Jasmine Amy Rogers does the character proud. She somehow really does look like the sexy-cute cartoon flapper with the huge head (the subtle wig and hair design by Sabana Majeed gives her a bit of cartoony width), and beams with Betty’s cheerfully suggestive innocence. She’s sweet and endearing, and has a great voice. The costume design by Gregg Barnes pays homage to her various looks through the years, including a big white fedora that I remembered from her Smooth Criminal era.
There are moments and ideas in Boop! that I really enjoyed, including the spectacular Act 2 opener “Where is Betty?,” in which black-and-white characters search for their star in a brightly colored city. Erich Bergen injects some much-needed comic energy as a lech in the comedy highlight “Take it to the Next Level,” and I loved how Betty used cartoon violence to solve a real-world problem. In an ingenious sequence that could be more magical with a little more polish, the audience is led in a follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-along number (“Why Look Around the Corner”). Pudgy the dog (puppetry by Phillip Huber) is cute.
But these moments are sporadic in a blandly “inspirational” story about boring characters learning the power of believing in themselves, and a pretty lame ode to The Big Apple (the show spends too much time in awe of Times Square, an area right outside the theater that most New Yorkers avoid like the plague). Betty doesn’t know who she is, and the show’s challenge is that it doesn’t really, either. Since her last cartoons hit theaters, she’s almost solely existed as a licensed image without a frame of reference, stamped on everything from mud flaps to tombstones. A figure who was once the star of some of the wildest and surreal animated cartoons ever made is relegated to a supporting character in her own musical.
Boop! The Musical reminded me of the “Barbie” movie, another story of a blank slate “icon” finding herself in our world, trying to find out who she is and what she represents to us. Both held the rules of their fantasy worlds lightly (which made more sense in “Barbie“, since kids make it up as they go along). But “Barbie” had emotional and ethical complexity, and good jokes. Boop! sidesteps any emotional complexity for a convoluted plot that has little to do with the charm of Betty Boop.
