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Unfortunately we cannot see Boop.

Because it closed on July 13th.

But I was fortunate enough to catch the Saturday matinee of closing weekend and figured I’d give my take since…I have a blog now (super trendy all the kids are doing it).

Not for nothing but I did work as theatre critic (freelance very fancy) for the better part of the decade I’ve lived in New York and even though it’s been a little over a year since I’ve had to use these muscles in a literal way… Let me tell you, I still never shut the fuck up about theatre I watch. And I’ve been watching Boop since its Chicago tryout where critics were raving about Jasmine Amy Rogers’s performance as the titular character, and little else.

I used to be an actor, I’ve done the Broadway beatdown of getting up at the ass crack of dawn to go stand outside Pearl Studios or godforbid the Urban Tiki themed Hell that is Ripley Grier Studios for a table of bored strangers that are only holding this call due to union requirements set forth by the AEA.

I know better than most how hard it is to book anything, much less Broadway (the epicenter of musical theatre). So in no universe would I ever want to celebrate a bunch of actors losing their jobs and having to start back at square 1 after spending several months, or in some cases years, bringing someone’s vision to life. However now that the dust is settled and just to keep it absolutely 100.

I did not like Boop. I know, controversial. But yeah. I did not like Boop very much. Largely for the same reasons pretty much every popular outlet has named in their own Betty Boop Beatdowns. So let’s get it over with lol.

For the record, despite this show’s shortcomings there is a lot to praise here, the cast is great, the set is great, the costumes are great, a lot of these songs are great! But these elements in an odd way make Boop’s failures all the more frustrating.

The first ten minutes of this show is awash in classic musical theatre production number Glamor. Classically dressed black and white tap dancers paying homage to the Zigfield Folliesesque tap numbers of the 90s genuinely evoking the same energetic buzz of something like 1936’s “Born to Dance”. Both Jasmine and the supporting cast bring to life this zany cartoon world with ease. “A Little Versatility” has been stuck in my head for over a week now. And when Betty is asked by a group of cartoon coded reporters who the “real Betty Boop is” and Betty can’t produce an answer I sat forward in my seat. I love a self-actualization narrative using a figure that’s engrained into our public iconography as a vehicle to explore socioeconomic issues affecting a specific community. That’s genuinely my shit. And I was excited to see how this musical was going to examine Betty Boop’s cultural legacy, this excitement was predictably short lived.

Betty is the central character of Toon Town where she spends her day shooting cartoons on a comical black and white cartoon set straight out of something you’d see in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (without the technicolor). At the start of the show she is in a bit of a slump and wondering if there is more to life than being filmed running away from men. Convinced her existential crisis is due to burn out from the repetitive nature of her shooting schedule as this universe’s essential character, she goes home to greet her grandpa (who I am hoping had a fan base that cared about his inclusion in this piece because he has way too much stage time), pops into his teleporter barber chair thing and transports herself to…a cartoon disneyfied version of our world. No really, the creative team’s interpretation of New York is more akin to something you’d encounter in Epcot than in reality. The moment Betty lands at Comic Con surrounded by technicolor cosplayers attending as recognizable IP that I assume Paramount had permission to use. I began asking myself…Why?

Why did Betty have to leave the Black and White world she’s from. Why is there a secondary love plot between Betty’s grandpa and a random Astrophysicist that I think was featured in the cartoon? Why is the path to self actualization in our world? What is she supposed to be learning in our world? Why is Iron Man here? Why are the teenage mutant ninja turtles here? What is going on?

And the biggest question for me was, who was this for? No genuinely I’m curious was there a surplus of Betty Boop fans begging for this iconic character to be brought to life on a Broadway stage. And why do they keep referring to her as an empowering feminist icon, I’ve only ever seen her on pinup posters and keychains.

I’m unsure why the creative team inserted this self-actualization meta-textual narrative into this musical because the show doesn’t seem to know either. In fact the creative team seems to be completely out of touch with WHO Betty is in the cultural zeitgeist. This issue becomes explicit when we meet Trisha a girl of unknown age (genuinely is she supposed to be in highschool or college you legit can’t tell) who is obsessed with Betty Boop and views her as a long heralded feminist icon. Which just….she’s not. Iconic sure. But Betty Boop is more closely affiliated with cultural figures like Jessica Rabbit or Marilyn Monroe, reclaimed in later generations of feminism but is more closely associated with a sex symbol to the general public. Despite the actual legacy of Betty Boop, in Boop, not only does Betty Boop have avid fans in the real world, they’re young girls who view her as a cultural icon. Trisha’s entire arch centers around wanting to be in an art program, and separating her fandom tier obsession with Betty Boop from the girl she really is.

This just makes no sense. I’ve worked with plenty of teenagers when I was a theatre educator, and none of them had a classic cartoon obsession. They were obsessed with repeating feminist pop discourse that they heard on Tik Tok. And I’m on Tik Tok no one is talking about Betty Boop the cartoon character that is in the age brackett they’ve placed Trisha in. Certainly not to the point of obsession as the writing here implies. And NO there really aren’t many ways to construe the 1930s iteration of this character as a girlboss icon in 2025. Mostly because Betty Boop hasn’t been in the cultural landscape in that way as a character. She’s completely reduced to iconography and nothing more in the modern age, and not because of sexism but because of the passage of time. She’s on keychains, notebooks, t-shirts, but the last on camera appearance she’s made was literally a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where she was a cocktail waitress, struggling to find work, because her cartoon is dated.

The writing never acknowledges the dated aspect of these cartoons and while it attempts to acknowledge the sexism of it all this it never actually confronts it in a satisfying way. Betty realizes that in every toon she’s made a man has chased her around a desk and she’s physically overcome him by bopping him on the head with a lamp, and expresses dissatisfaction with this. Now in the real world there would actually be a lot you could do with this, if this was the vein you wanted to take this story down. Betty, a figure from a cartoon world that played a hand in inadvertently normalizing a lot of pervy lecherous behaviors that in the real world are less funny and more terrifying. But because there is no juxtaposition between Toon Town and our world, when Betty does inevitably encounter sexual violence it’s treated the same way it is in a cartoon. Her assailant chases her around a desk singing a show tune that was met with laughs from the crowd, then gets bopped on the head with a lamp and hits the floor.

It’s not that a moment like this needed to be dark or push the envelope in a real way, but the fact that there’s no sense of danger makes the message fall flat. The woman seated next to me had fallen asleep during this part and was snoring so I doubt I was the only person checking their watch halfway through act 2 when everything really starts to go off the rails.

Making a clearer distinction between the cartoon world and the real world, while acknowledging that Betty is viewed as more of a sex symbol than feminist icon would have actually set up an interesting character arc for the titular character. Maybe seeing herself being literally objectified, then going home to Toon Town to rectify her image. You could even throw in some corny jokes about Hollywood’s obsession with rebooting and remaking beloved classics to rectify the antiquated gender norms of our parents generation. But no, Betty arrives in New York and she’s a powerful symbol for female empowerment and yes, is also sexy. This leaves little space for Betty to grow. Which might be why there’s a subplot where she joins a mayoral campaign, and why Grampy and his wife get so much stage time dedicated to…not looking for Betty.

The show as a whole is a scattered clusterfuck with a lot of ideas and no followthrough on any of them. Betty goes to NY, meets Trisha, falls in love with Trisha’s brother, gets drunk at a jazz club and then in act two hops onto a mayorial campaign, gets sexually harassed, has a love song, reunites with her grandpa now married to an astrophysicist, they go home but as she’s crossing over to her cartoon home of Toon Town she shouts out that she finally “knows what she wants”, and from what I could tell from this show’s 11 o’clock number…it’s love I’m assuming, because lyrically it’s even vaguer than that it’s just “something to shout about”.

I think the frustrating about shows like this is there often is a very obvious story, angle or narrative the creative team could have taken and they still somehow drop the ball. Especially in a project like this where the cast, costumes, set and at moments the score are all top notch. It’s a shame that those talents are wasted on what is ultimately an empty story that falls several leagues short of its full potential. What we’re left with here is a sea of ideas with commitments to none.