New York – Ignore cynics and their interest in intimidating ironic innovation! With the tanking and the concern of the market all around, the affordable escape will soon have a moment of Boffo at the Broadway box office. Enter the Broadhurst theater a joyful, retro and family charmer for a discomble world. The production of singing and militia of director Jerry Mitchell of “Boop!” The musical ”is like swallowing a glass of sparkling blood after a difficult day, devil, after three months and counting of stress and conflicts.
What should not love at Betty Boop, an international ambassador based in the United States? It’s a rhetorical question, friends. She cannot be dismissed.
Considerably improved by his Chicago – Mitchell test being a master of dark modernization – “Boop!” is now a small stellar showcase for her young ascending star, Jasmine Amy Rogers, who does not let a literal cartoon play a fully expanded, as sweet and vulnerable performance as it is determined and resolved.
Still in the middle of the twenty, Rogers may not yet be a match for the biggest Broadway divas. But she sings and dances the oversized head of her alter ego, completely comfortable with the lush and muscular score of David Foster and the funny lyrics of Susan Birkenhead. Most importantly, she perfectly understands what a character who spent the last century, almost hangs against a tremendous Disney competition means playing the last century.
She may have played Snow White before Rachel Zegler and showed her chops as lion tamer, but Betty Boop had to emerge from film Max Fleischer, not the theme parks of Uncle Walt. She had to remain relevant all these years through her own sex appeal, not decades of marketing campaigns. And in a way she remained around the Zeitgeist even if she mainly spent her time on the previous screen to flee aggressive men.
Skillfully ignoring the little question that she is a comic strip drawn online, Bob Martin, book writer of the show, takes up the idea that Betty had to become sick of these same points of Vampish’s intrigue, and forges a spectacle in which Mrs. Boop undergoes a sort of quarantine crisis and holiday cries.
Thus, she leaves her world in black and white via a revival machine manufactured by the Grampy Acaderal (Stephen Derosa) and ends in all places, in Javits Center in the middle of New York Comic Con, where she quickly sees that she enjoys a certain immortality. Apparently, the New Yorkers seen have no problem with a 100-year-old cartoon icon that comes to life before their eyes.
Thus, the adventures of New York of Betty then include the love fall of Dwayne (Ainsley Melham), acting as a substitution mother for the Spunky teenager Betty Fan Trisha (Angelica Hale, another delicious discovery of Mitchell) and perhaps even in the direction of New York of the bad candidate of the ascending mayor (Erich Bergen) by Trisha Carol (Anastacia McCleskey) for the mother of persuading. All in a working day, even if Grampy is distracted by his relationship with Valentina, another of Boop’s characters from the musical, now played in a cameo of the star of the veteran musical Faith Prince, a piece of casting which center this familiar show in the long -standing traditions of Broadway and therefore comforting.
Mitchell understood that this indicates Betty Boop on the marquee and he excited a heavy piece of the old chicago Caper plot in favor of giving as much stage time to Rogers as possible. Excellent choice. The public eats it, as they do Trisha de Hale and The Puppet pooch Gruugy, such as Wrangled by Phillip Huber. Like everyone, the dog begins in black and white, only so that its Schlerping language wins Technicolor.
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Jasmine Amy Rogers (like Betty Boop) and Ainsley Melham (Dwayne) in “Boop! The Musical” in Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater from New York. (Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
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Jasmine Amy Rogers (like Betty Boop) and Ainsley Melham (Dwayne) in “Boop! The Musical” in Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater from New York. (Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
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The Big Act 1 Closer is a stellary production number, “Where I Wanna Be”, a beautiful showcase for this dance show. With “Why Look Auth The Corner”, a Singalong that bouncing on the ball, it is the anchor of the partition of Foster, a series of populist, filmic and romantically orchestrated songs which has only one failure, the number of eleven hours, “something to cry”.
“WHERE I WANNA BE” is in fact an appropriate descriptor of the whole show: a medium -range confident musical with regard to size and spectacle, an unparalleled attraction and adapted to visitors and an old -fashioned romantic comedy. If he finds his planned international audience, the cameras will continue to dress on Betty. The show also works as a love letter to this devil’s playground called Times Square, where Betty finds characters who look like him but who have even bigger Noggins. They also work like their own executioners. She finds it strange. Like all of us all.
Obviously, some illogicalities must be overlooked here, but Rogers makes it easy. The move David Rockwell and the costume designer Gregg Barnes both had a lot of fun with the mission, but they also keep disciplined things. Establishments like this often fall on tracks when they reach too far, continue to break their own rules or let the spectacle steal humanity.
Here, Betty allows none of this.
So “Boop!” Built and communicates its own optimistic world, fully habit it and does not apologize to anyone. No “boop-oop-a-dop” is necessary.
Chris Jones is a tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagogne.com
At Broadhurst Theater, 235 W 44th St., New York; Boopthemusical.com
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