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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.
New York Times
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Surprising History of Betty Boop
Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. 'Boop! The Musical,' like the 'Barbie' and 'Elf' films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people). Betty's journey to the stage has been an unusual one. The original character didn't have much of a back story, which has made her an appealing blank slate for storytellers. But her image — and Betty, at her core, is a remarkably long-lived illustration — has managed to straddle media and merchandise, surviving court battles and changing mores. 'Her popularity goes on and on,' said Peter Benjaminson, author of 'The Life and Times of Betty Boop.' 'The musical is the latest in a series of incarnations.' Film Debut The animated cartoon character, who did not yet have a name, made her first appearance in 1930 in hybrid form — part poodle, part human — in 'Dizzy Dishes,' which was one of a series of animated shorts, called Talkartoons, produced by Fleischer Studios. All of the characters in the film — a slapstick comedy set in an incompetent restaurant — were animals with human attributes. The secondary character that became Betty Boop was a jazz singer who already had many of the elements that came to define her — a curvaceous body and flirty looks, with big eyes and an oversized head, and a high-pitched, babyish voice. Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as 'full of joy' and 'unapologetically herself.' 'She is sexy, but I don't think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,' she continued. 'I would say it's the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.' Jazz Age Inspirations Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation. In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the 'baby vamp' style of the Betty Boop character, including the 'boop-oop-a-doop' phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost. Fleischer Studios argues that Betty had many influences, but was not based on a particular woman. 'She's from the Jazz Age, and all the animators lived in Manhattan, so she was influenced by that culture,' said Mark Fleischer, the chief executive of Fleischer Studios, and the grandson of a company founder. Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. 'Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can't really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,' she said. Pre-Code: Sexy, Sassy, Single By the early 1930s, Betty had shed her canine features and become fully human, or as fully human as an animated character could be. Most notable — her floppy ears became hoop earrings. Some aspects of her became formalized over time, according to Frank Caruso, the creative director of Fleischer Studios. She has 16 spit curls — eight on each side of her oversized head. Her eyes float low, leaving space on the forehead for expressive lashes and brows. 'If you can recognize a character in silhouette, you've done your job,' Caruso said, 'and Betty is immediately recognizable.' She was decidedly sexy — and perpetually single. 'She's actually surprisingly virginal — she doesn't have romantic relationships, she's just pretty and confident and full of life, and not embarrassed about her own sexuality,' said Bob Martin, the musical's book writer. 'She's continually being chased by men — she doesn't have a conventional relationship, but she's always chased and objectified.' Post-Code: Buttoned-Up Betty The arrival of the Hays Code — content guidelines for movies that started in the mid-1930s — had a big influence on Betty. Her dresses got longer, her blouses covered her cleavage, and she had more sedate jobs or was a homemaker. 'Gone was the garter, the short skirt, the décolletage that made her so unique,' Heather Hendershot wrote in the Journal of Design History. 'In its place was a more fully clothed Betty, a character stripped of her charm.' The series of animated shorts ended in 1939. A World of Merch Since the demise of the animated shorts, Betty has appeared in comic books, television shows, films and video games. But the platform that has sustained her for decades — and made her globally recognizable — is merchandise. 'The miracle of Betty Boop is that she achieved iconic status without any entertainment behind her — she developed a very robust life through licensing,' Fleischer said. It started with collectibles — dolls and magnets and so on — but before long there were housewares and games and toys and, most successfully, clothing. And it's not just T-shirts — Betty has had couture collaborations with designers including Zac Posen and Marc Jacobs. Paramount Pictures has owned the copyrights to the Betty Boop cartoons, and some are entering the public domain as those expire. But the character is still owned by Fleischer Studios, and is protected by copyright and trademark laws. Mark Fleischer said the company controls the rights to adapt the character for stage or screen, and also, he wrote in an email, 'exclusive rights to allow others to display the Betty Boop name and/or image on their products (e.g., clothing, coffee cups, etc.) is not only protected by copyright, it is also protected by the enormous body of U.S. and international trademarks that Fleischer Studios has acquired in the Betty Boop name and image.' Evolving With the Times Betty, who arrived just a decade after American women won the right to vote, was always working, and she often had jobs that were adventurous. 'Betty Boop did things that until then were unimaginable,' Fleischer said, 'like being a racecar driver, owning a diner; she was a pilot, she ran for president, and she was an early animal activist.' In her merch era, her life has been audacious in different ways. 'We were always keeping her in step with what was going on,' said Caruso, who has been Fleischer's creative director for 38 years. 'In the '90s she got a little grungy, or hip-hop. We started doing this Biker Betty, which is one of our most popular iterations. And people love Zombie Betty. We've done everything under the sun.' Caruso said there are always people proposing new ways to use the Betty Boop image, including, he said, on tombstones. Grieving families, he said, periodically approach the company for permission to use the image on headstones; the company often says yes. As society evolved, Betty became more socially conscious. In recent years, Betty Boop merchandise has come with an empowering message — some uplifting bit of text included in the package. A 'Boop!' for Broadway 'Boop! The Musical' has been in development for more than two decades, and is a big-budget extravaganza, capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It had a production in Chicago in 2023; the Broadway run, at the Broadhurst Theater, began previews March 11 and opens April 5. The show, with music by David Foster and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, depicts Betty as a busy actress working in the black-and-white world of short films. But when she develops an identity crisis — she can play any number of characters, but isn't sure who she really is — she winds up traveling to the real world. In present-day New York, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery. 'I came up with this crazy idea that she exists in a black-and-white world where she has everything but love, and pitched a story that she comes to the real world, full of color, looking for something,' said the musical's director, Jerry Mitchell. 'Her world is never full of color until it's full of love.' Rogers, the actress playing Betty Boop, has two carefully positioned mic packs inside her wig to make her head look bigger and rounder than it is. Betty's heels have become second nature to her, as has the slightly squeaky voice. The hardest thing to master, she said, is the phrase 'Boop-oop-a-doop,' because it's so closely identified with the character, and it's built into both the start and the finish of the musical. 'I feel like saying that is the most nerve-racking,' Rogers said. 'It's funny — I talk in the voice the whole show, but just the way it sits in the voice, and with the notes it's arranged on, sometimes I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, please let this come out the way it's supposed to!' But it has so far!'
