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Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Hats in the ring? Maybe. Hats on the stage? Definitely.
Or turn your eyes to Broadway, where 'Wicked' is still playing to full houses more than two decades after it premiered (and five months after an But as the hat-wearing Elphaba defiantly begins to dance by herself, making the hat her own, Galinda's mean-spiritedness transforms into something like empathy. She begins to dance with Elphaba. It's the beginning of an unlikely friendship that will ultimately take 'Wicked' to a deeper place — and that friendship became a key part of the reason the musical continues to resonate so profoundly with girls and women. Advertisement The history of the American theater abounds with memorable hats that have been used to swiftly establish character, time, and place. And, sometimes, authorial voice, as with Stephen Adly Guirgis's mordant comedy-drama 'The Mother------ with the Hat.' Advertisement Zero Mostel as Tevye sings to Golde, his wife, played by Thelma Lee in a scene from the musical "Fiddler on the Roof." New York Times Hats can also serve as a signifier of social status. Consider Tevye's cap in 'Fiddler on the Roof.' As careworn as he is, that hat embodies the countless mornings Tevye has spent delivering milk to the villagers of Anatevka. And the headscarves worn by the Jewish women in 'Fiddler,' including Tevye's wife, Golde, signal their attachment to custom and tradition — the very things that are under siege. Or look at the faded, flat-brimmed straw hat that 20-year-old Julie Andrews wore as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the opening scene at Covent Garden in 'My Fair Lady,' which premiered on Broadway in 1956. And, later, the staggering array of wide-brimmed hats worn by the women, including Eliza, in the Ascot racetrack scene. A hat can also punctuate key moments in a musical or play. Because we learn so much about the individual dancers in 'A Chorus Line,' we know what landing a role in a Broadway show will mean to them, professionally and personally. So we're moved by the big closing number, 'One,' when the dancers — those who got cast in the show and those who didn't — unite in synchronized movement, donning and doffing gold top hats to underscore what they did for love, to borrow a phrase. Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty Boop, in 'Boop! The Musical' at the Broadhurst Theater in Manhattan, March 10, 2025. SARA KRULWICH/NYT A hat can also serve as a visual motif that forges a connection across eras. When 'Boop! The Musical' premiered on Broadway earlier this month, featuring Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty Boop, Rogers wore a '30s-style top hat in one scene — the decade in which the animated cartoon flapper made her first appearance. Advertisement In September, Keanu Reeves will make his Broadway debut in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot.' He's slated to play Estragon, one of the bowler hat-wearing tramps trying to puzzle out the riddle of existence. (All four principal characters in 'Godot' wear hats.) The cast for this fall's revival will also include Alex Winter, Reeves's costar in the film 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,' as Vladimir. A revival of Kander and Ebb's 'Cabaret' opened a year ago on Broadway and is still running, with Eva Noblezada (Eurydice in 'Hadestown') playing Sally Bowles. Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret." Warner Brothers But no stage performer can hope to displace the memory of 'Cabaret,' the movie, was directed by Bob Fosse. As he began losing his hair at a relatively young age, Fosse had taken to wearing hats. Soon, fedoras and derbies — not just on the head but in the hands — became a core part of his signature style, as vital as hip rolls and jazz hands. When Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' was revived three years ago, the production simultaneously made history as the first 'Salesman' where all four Lomans were portrayed by Black actors, and connected with history. As in the 1949 premiere, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, the revival opened with the sight of Wendell Pierce, as Willy, the picture of weariness beneath his hat, a pair of valises on the floor before him after another unsuccessful sales trip. Advertisement At the end of the play, standing by Willy's grave after he died by suicide, his friend Charley says of a traveling salesman: ''He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.' Of course, sometimes a hat is just a hat, a way to heighten a scene and/or make a big stage personality even bigger. Consider the gigantic red feathered headdress — roughly the size of an aircraft carrier — that was worn by Bette Midler as Dolly Levi Gallagher when Dolly descended the stairs at the Harmonia Gardens in the 2017 revival of 'Hello, Dolly!' (Equally sizable were the hats worn by other Dollys: Carol Channing, who originated the role; Pearl Bailey; Bernadette Peters.) Jonathan Groff as King George III in "Hamilton." Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Disney+/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictu A piece of headgear can help an actor get a firmer fix on his character or shape their approach to a role — sometimes in unexpected ways, as happened with Jonathan Groff when he stepped into the role of King George in the 2015 Broadway premiere of 'Hamilton.' As the musical obliterated one attendance record after another, Groff's characterization of the malevolently amusing monarch became associated with the measured, careful glide with which the actor materialized onstage from the wings. 'The crown was so heavy at first,' Groff explained in a Advertisement And Sondheim? Fourteen years after 'Company,' when Broadway's greatest composer-lyricist sought to capture in song the arduous process of artistic creation, he chose to do so with a hat as his vehicle. In 'Finishing the Hat,' in 'Sunday in the Park with George,' his musical about the pointillist painter Georges Seurat, Sondheim gave the painter lines that captured the apartness and obsessive labor that making art requires, as well as its occasional satisfactions. 'There's a part of you always standing by/ Mapping out the sky/ Finishing a hat/ Starting on a hat/ Finishing a hat/ Look, I made a hat/ Where there never was a hat.' But Seurat — and Sondheim — knew what most artists know: There is ultimately no way to ever truly finish the hat. Don Aucoin can be reached at
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.
