Boop-Oop-a-Doop. ‘Boop! The Musical’ follows its cartoon heroine Betty into present day New York

NEW YORK — In 1917, a man named Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, a combination of projector and glass drawing board that allowed animators to trace over live-action film, one frame at a time. Fleischer’s machine was revolutionary.

Instead of stiff movement, cartoon characters in Fleischer Studios cartoons suddenly could swing and sway like Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong or Betty Boop, an affectionate caricature of a maybe-Jewish, certainly-New York, Jazz Age flapper with an outsized head, quizzical eyebrows, huge eyes, a four-inch waist, a low-cut bodice, a short skirt, a Gotham-tinged baby-voice emanating from the mouth of Mae Questel.

And a scat-like catchphrase that would riff down the decades: “Boop-Oop-a-Doop.”

That character (a kind of proto-Jessica Rabbit, only much kinder, sweeter and more playful) is pretty much all the actress Jasmine Amy Rogers knew about Betty Boop before she landed a prized gig playing her in a new show, “Boop! The Musical,” the latest in what’s now a long string of pre-Broadway musicals that auteur-director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell has first brought to life in Chicago, and rehearsed in New York at the iconic New 42nd Street Studios.

Mitchell’s built-in-Chicago oeuvre now includes the Gloria Estefan musical “On Your Feet!,” “Pretty Woman the Musical” and the huge hit “Kinky Boots.”

Rogers’ level of Boop awareness is pretty typical of Americans in general — the character is all. “Betty Boop is this graphic to which people attribute meaning,” says Bob Martin, the show’s book writer.

It quickly becomes clear to a regular visitor of a Mitchell-run rehearsal that the relative blankness of the Boop slate has offered an opportunity for Mitchell, Martin (“The Drowsy Chaperone”), lyricist Susan Birkenhead (”Jelly’s Last Jam”) and composer David Foster, a prolific Canadian songwriter who composed or co-composed “After the Love Has Gone,” “Forever,” “You’re the Inspiration” and a slew of hits for the likes of Kenny Loggins, Earth, Wind & Fire, Celine Dion and the band Chicago.

Despite his 16 Grammys and decades of work in Hollywood, Foster is working on his first Broadway musical. “Nobody ever asked me before,” he says.

Mitchell likes working with famous pop composers new to musical theater. He helped the Broadway neophyte Cyndi Lauper create a vivacious score for “Kinky Boots” in this same rehearsal room.

So Martin and Mitchell have together forged an entirely new story, one of several the project has tried over a pandemic-elongated workshop process. In essence, Betty Boop declares herself exhausted from all of her cartoon antics and with the help of a machine developed by Professor Grampy (Stephen DeRosa), a familiar comic figure from the Boop oeuvre, Betty leaves her black-and-white cartoon world and sneaks off into the modern world and New York City for a vacation. Love awaits her.

A hitherto elusive experience, if you are Betty Boop. “In all the cartoons,” Martin says, “she never had a boyfriend.”

That’s true. Betty was certainly a girl who wanted to have a very Gotham kind of fun, but always in a short-format kind of way. Unlike, say, the Tribune’s famed Annie Warbucks, whom readers followed on a lovable (if fractured) trajectory to bliss, dog ownership and Daddy Warbucks, Betty did not specialize in continuous narratives but distinct 10-minute stories with her stuck in the middle of a whole variety of circumstances.

There were some 90 Fleischer Studios “Betty Boop” cartoons released theatrically between 1930 and 1939, along with various later incarnations. The position of Betty’s hemline depended on whether the cartoon in question was released before or after the establishment of the notorious Production Code in 1934, but they almost all involved Betty being chased, but never caught, by a man.

In the typical, “Is My Palm Read?” (1933), a fortuneteller takes Betty to a tropical island where she appears in a grass version of her short skirt. In “The Hot Air Salesman” (1937), a more demure Betty is the only person in her neighborhood to be nice to a door-to-door huckster, Wiffle Piffle, who tries her front door, side door and back door, only to eventually be invited into her parlor, where he proves himself unworthy of such a woman.

“If you were a cartoon character from the 1930s, heading to the modern world and you didn’t want to get recognized, where would you go?” Mitchell asks, rhetorically, as his performers get ready to rehearse a big number.

His face breaks into a grin. (Mitchell loves his work).

“Comic Con.”

Yes, the show features a disguised Betty showing up among the cartoon superfans at the Javits Center, once the location of Hillary Clinton’s presumed victory rally in the 2016 presidential race, where the unbroken glass ceiling proved apt indeed.

But Betty, Mitchell’s rehearsal soon reveals, neither worries about that history nor restricts herself to the banks of the Hudson. Betty and her white cartoon dog (a marionette, his tongue acquires color in the modern world) also head to Times Square, where the tips-seeking, off-brand comic characters lurk in a rather more sinister way. One major dance number takes place on the red staircase by the TKTS booth in Duffy Square on the north side of Times Square, where Betty and her love interest, Dwayne (the Australian performer Ainsley Melham), live large in Technicolor New York anonymity, far from their black-and-white world. There’s a so-called B plot, too, a late-in-life romance between Professor Grampy and his modern-day belle Valentina, as played by the longtime Broadway star Faith Prince.

If this stranger-in-a-strange-land story, or the idea of a fictional piece of someone’s intellectual property now struggling with life in the real, modern-day world, puts you in mind of “Enchanted,” “Elf” and, most recently, “Barbie,” such comparisons are not being entirely discouraged.

“If you liked ‘Barbie,’ you’ll like ‘Boop!’” is both a pretty good explainer and positioning strategy for a commercial musical with an original plot and score.

“I want to make a family musical,” Mitchell says, emphasizing that Betty’s monochromatic vampishness is not his main focus here. “This show is saying that you are never full of color until your life is full of love.”

And, clearly, that’s not just a slogan for him. Since the pandemic, he says, he has decided he wants to focus entirely on shows about love.

So Betty’s voluptuousness is hardly the dominant gestalt but Boop has not lost her Oop-a-Doop: “Betty is unapologetically sexy,” Mitchell says, watching his actors out of one eye, “and that is one of the strengths of her character. She’s plenty sexy enough. All she is asking is to be allowed to be herself.”

The New York setting of the project has a certain symmetry with Betty’s creators: Max Fleischer and his brother Dave stayed in New York to make their animated movies while Disney, the studio’s chief early rival (”Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” even used that Fleischer rotoscope), became thoroughly Californian.

Disney went all fairy tales, Mickey Mouse and princesses. The Fleischer Studios mostly stayed East Coast gritty, sexy, edgy and mostly adult.

Disney won in the end, of course, as Fleischer Studios went out of business even as Walt Disney built family theme parks for the newly wealthy suburbanites. But Mitchell and Martin clearly want “Boop!” to find some kind of sweet spot so it can appeal to families while also paying tribute to those classic Fleischer shorts.

In conversation in the rehearsal room, Prince, who now lives in California, waxes lyrical about how glad she is to be back in New York. “Honey,” she says, “when it’s in you, it’s in you. You are more yourself on stage than you are in real life. It’s like I’m coming home.”

Prince, famous for her fantastic Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” offers a bankable name to Broadway fans. But the star of the show will be Rogers, who worked with Mitchell on the “Mean Girls” tour and hails from Texas. She’s an unknown, at this level anyway, although the rehearsal reveals she has an intriguing take on the famous Betty Oop-a-Doop.

“I’m not trying to impersonate her,” she says. “I have my own vocal chords. I’m paying homage.”

The key to playing Betty, Rogers says, “is her love of people. She accepts everyone for who they are.” Indeed, that’s exactly what Betty does in every cartoon. And as Martin, the writer, points out, that might just explain why Betty still is a very recognizable cartoon figure, so to speak, especially among young people in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, but really across much of the globe.

Graphic awareness has its advantages and that kind of appeal would indeed call for a relatively simple story, employing the ability of live theater to switch from a simple, analog, black-and-white world to today’s Times Square, now basically a giant collection of outdoor projections that can be replicated on the stage.

Mitchell, history suggests, is adept at making the affordable musical, meaning a size of show that does not cost $1.1 million each week to run, a rare asset in an industry where running costs have been ballooning out of control over the last year or so, causing several still-popular musicals to close prematurely, returning nothing to their investors. As produced by Bill Haber, “Boop!” is a big musical with a budget in the now-typical range of $20 million, but a lean one that Mitchell expects to get leaner as he works through changes in Chicago.

“Boop!” also has taken a long time to come together, which is not unusual in the post-pandemic Broadway era; both Andrew Lippa and Jason Robert Brown were at one point attached to the project as was writer David Lindsay-Abaire. Foster, who is working with lyric writer Birkenhead, says he has composed and already discarded some 30 different songs. “I tried to steal as much from the 1930s cartoons as I could,” he says, “but my ear is just not very attuned to that sound and I try to stay in my wheelhouse and not apologize for that.”

That’s one heck of a successful wheelhouse, of course. And Foster (who is married to “Smash” star Katharine McPhee) says he’s ready to come to Chicago, sit in his hotel room, huddle with Birkenhead and maybe crank out a new hit for Betty, should the project, Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Boop so demand.

“I wanted to write music that really transcends any particular time period, but I am excited to learn what does and does not work,” Foster says. “I know Broadway can be very particular.”

So can Betty Boop, a woman who has never been in love.

Well. Not until the show’s first preview performance on at the colorful CIBC Theatre in Chicago.

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“Boop! The Musical” runs Nov. 19 to Dec. 24 at CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St.; 800-775-2000 and www.broadwayinchicago.com.

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