First comes Barbie, now Betty

You have won 16 Grammy Awards and you now want to write your first Broadway musical. Which source material do you choose? There are so many great novels, films, straight games and television shows to choose.

David Foster, the composer of successful songs such as “I Will Always Love You” and “The Power of Love”, chose a cartoon character born in the Great Depression. You may remember Betty Boop if you are really old. It is the curves of the 1930s which gave the little Boners boys before knowing what sex was.

“Boop!” is Foster’s new musical which opened on Monday at Broadhurst Theater. It is “BOOP -OP-A-DOP” for a show that needs a good poophy SPRITZ.

If you are too young to know Betty Boop, you will have seen films that tell this basic story much better. In “Barbie”, the Barbie and Ken dolls are transported in the real world where it becomes a feminist and it becomes a male Chauvin pig. In “Pleasantville”, a family “Father Knows Best” is transported to the real world when they discover sex. In “The Brady Bunch Movie”, the famous television family leaves the front door to be transported to the real world of violence and corruption.

When Betty Boop leaves her world of cartoons from the 1930s in “Boop!” She is transported (do not ask how) a comic book agreement in New York where she discovers … color. She also discovers some of the ugliest costumes, from Gregg Barnes, who have ever honored a Broadway scene. After singing “in color”, Betty makes friends and falls in love immediately from a man (Ainsley Melham, being strangely distant) not in the dragsters of the comic strip. Betty gets her path in the future, as well as the real world, as if she had just bathed in Vaseline. There is no conflict. She spreads her joy to a city that seems to be well without her.

Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead Load “Boop!” With so many hymns, they seem to audition for a new “I Love NY” advertising campaign. Regarding Foster’s tunes, you will leave the Broadhurst buzzing them, because you have all heard them, whether it is the Gospel or the anemic jazz of Caterwailing or the omnipresent female power ballad.

One wonders if a person involved in this musical has ever watched a cartoon of Betty Boop. The words of Birkenhead describe the newly sterilized character on stage: “She is strong, she is intelligent, open, her heart” … and later, “she has a cum, she has the spine, she is a saint.”

Sorry, Betty Boop was a hot number. Where is the part for it to be a great secular? This is why all these beetles of Basse-Cur pursued it around the hay. No less an entity than Hays’ office censored Betty Boop in 1935, making him a much wiser and less sexy character. “Boop!” clearly drawn his orders from a right -wing censor in the depression era.

Playing Betty, Jasmine Amy Rogers is not given much to do other than Squeal. There is a reason for her new blandness, and it is because Betty, like Barbie before her, is now a feminist. Like the winding and tireless book by Bob Martin manages to make obvious, the cartoon character is known for having struck other cartoons from cartoons over the head with all kinds of deadly objects. No problem. These are caricatures.

On stage, that’s another story. One of the intrigules of musical comedy implies a breath that presents itself to the mayor of New York. This politician man makes a brief appearance in Act 1, but obtains much more stage time when Betty joins his campaign in Act 2. Distributing her usual joy, she gives the guy a lot of good press. Playing this Flee, Erich Bergen alone turns “Boop!” In something that deserves to be watched after almost two hours of total boredom. Because he steals his show, Betty hits him over her head with an office lamp. He eliminated the cold and never recovers, only to be taken off on the stage in an office chair.

Is it feminism? When a man regrets a woman in unconsciousness, even on stage, he goes to prison. In “Boop!,” It is he who finds himself in an orange jump costume for the call to curtain.

Jerry Mitchell directs and Choregle. I thought that the song “in color, fixed at the comic strip agreement and populated by Marvel type icons, was the worst musical number of this theater season. But no, which comes just before entering when Betty visits Times Square to meet other cartoon icons.

It is difficult to say what is more embarrassing: Disney people are outfits in the street or the Broadhurst choir in costumes that seem just as shabby and maladorant. Pooph, someone?