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Does Betty Boop Exist in Three Dimensions?
Boop! The Musical tries to get her out of her cel.
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. 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. 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.
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