Arts

“Boop! The Musical” borrows from “Barbie” and “The Wizard of Oz,” takes on #MeToo Baddies and Eric Adams, and brings a show-stopping rainbow of joy to Broadway.

So much attention is paid to Tony Awards-season Broadway shows that feature celebrities, or that derive from existing pop-culture properties, that one approaches a show like Boop! The Musical (Broadhurst Theatre, booking to Sept. 28), with a quizzical raise of the eyebrow.

The cartoon character of Betty Boop may be iconic—and she may have a diehard fan-base—but she is not big in the now. Not only that, the show features none of the name-recognition star-power of its award-vying neighbors. Jasmine Amy Rogers, in an impressively assured Broadway debut, is playing Betty.

Yet you will likely have more fun at Boop! than in many other theaters this spring; this is an old-fashioned stage-frolic filled show, with big songs and bigger dancing, including roof-raising numbers overseen by director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell, with the company tap-dancing and high-kicking in perfect rows of synchronized movement. If you desire sheer escapism—and I can’t imagine why, the world being just peachy right now—this show is for you. It goes on far too long (at least half an hour could be cut), but—just wait for the finale!—you even forgive it that.

The winning formula of Boop!, aka the “Boop-Oop-A-Doosical,” lies first in Bob Martin’s snappy-joke and pointed-remark laden book that doesn’t overdo selling Betty; he and Rogers do not make her simpering or silly, but instead craft a grounded case for her reason to be here and for you to be at a musical about her.

Alongside this, David Foster has written a raft of great songs (with lyrics by Susan Birkenhead), while Mitchell turns any opportunity for physical comedy and song-and-dance into a creative explosion of movement on stage.

It’s also a notably good-looking show. In a season saturated by on-stage screens and projections, Boop! has by far the most inventive use of them, taking the black-and-white color scheme of Betty’s old cartoons (which projections designer Finn Ross makes stunning use of throughout the show) and making this monochrome world a clever design component of the show in David Rockwell’s striking sets, Gregg Barnes’ costumes, Philip S. Rosenberg’s lighting, and Sabana Majeed’s hair and wig design.

The story has pronounced echoes of both Dorothy escaping Kansas in The Wizard of Oz and Margot Robbie’s Barbie movie odyssey to modern-day California. It is from her black-and-white cartoon world Betty wants to escape, fed up of being a “tiny tornado in spit curls” always in some man-produced peril until the last minute.

Who is Betty really, a reporter asks. “Whatever you want me to be,” Betty responds, depressingly, considering how her iconography melds with her lack of agency. Betty knows how others see her, and what is demanded of her as a constantly objectified female character; what, she comes to evaluate, can and should she want for herself and how can she express and insist on that?

A time machine designed by mad inventor Grampy (Stephen DeRosa) brings Betty to the New York of today, a black and white world no more; but one of riotous color. (Wait for the moment when the chorus is decked out in outfits half in color and half in black and white in a fabulous dance sequence bringing the clashing worlds of past and present together.)

When she lands at Comic Con, people assume Betty is just another attendee (“She’s like a photocopy of a picture of a person!” it is correctly observed).

Grampy and Pudgy the Dog (made very cute by puppet operator Phillip Huber and designed by the Huber Marionettes) head to the present day to find Betty, but instead find Grampy’s long-ago-love Valentina (Faith Prince)—inevitably old feelings are re-stirred.

After only knowing so much black and white, and in the goofy and off-kilter spirit of the show, Betty revels in this strange new world that is full of color. She makes a young friend (Angelica Hale as archetypal New York teen Trisha), meets a hot and decent guy (Ainsley Melham as love interest Dwayne), and somehow gets involved in NYC’s mayoral election, involving the contest’s lead candidate and show villain, the smarmy Raymond Demarest.

His portrayer, Erich Bergen, is so funny and plays the audience so well—tall and booming, he is a skilled pantomime baddie—that his big Act Two number, which should not be funny at all (he is attempting to sexually harass and manipulate Betty) is the barnstorming high-point of the whole show.

This part of the story is also acutely timely, with the ongoing saga in New York of incumbent mayor Eric Adams now deciding to run as an independent in the city’s very real upcoming election. Without becoming obvious and hectoring, the book makes some sharp points about today’s politics (“Dwayne told me about this guy from the Amazon who has 180 billion dollars!”), sexism, misogyny, #MeToo, and civic responsibility. Who wins the mayoral race? Well, between Raymond-the-toad and his much-put upon but infinitely more honest and committed assistant, Trisha’s aunt Carol (Anastacia McCleskey), who do ya think?

The world of today doesn’t really offer an escape from attention and judgments, Betty discovers when she finds out how iconic she has remained. But in the world she eventually chooses to occupy, the excellent Rogers shows how Betty—emboldened by the love and appreciation women have for her in the modern world—finds a sense of her own power, and an ability to insist upon what she wants. That turns out to be not just good for Betty herself, but the inspiration for one final zesty explosion of color and dance.