BOOP! THE MUSICAL
Book by Bob Martin
Music by David Foster
Lyrics by Susan Birkenhead
Directed and Choreographed by Jerry Mitchell
Based on Characters Created by Max Fleischer
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I’m a little spoiled and unavoidably biased where considering a musical drawn (pun intended) from the Max Fleischer Betty Boop cartoon shorts of the 1930s is concerned. The bias comes from a cassette I was given many years ago, decades; can’t remember from whom. But it’s a demo of songs from an unproduced Betty Boop musical.
And the songs were by composer-lyricist Clark Gesner. Who worked on, and apparently completed a draft of, the musical between 1981 and 1984. And I just listened to it again, for the first time in many years. Motivated to do so for obvious reasons.
Let’s discount, as we must, the truly abusive “wreckovations” foist upon his classic small musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in its 1999 revival—made without Gesner’s complicity. And let’s go back to the original score, unadulterated, undoctored, as originally written and performed—accurately preserved on the 1966 concept album, the 1967 off-Broadway original cast album, and the 1973 TV Cast Album. (They’re all on YouTube, and some interesting extra info on this is footnoted below). What you’ll hear is a piece of remarkable subtlety. It bounces briskly through a number of easily identifiable musical forms, from energetic to contemplative, yet what heartwarms the totality is a gentleness of spirit and a light, gossamer touch. Gesner not only understood the characters in the world of Peanuts, he inhabited them.
Not the first time he’d pulled that off, either. Far less well known, from 1962, there’s a children’s album on the Peter Pan label called Captain Kangaroo’s Treasure House (aka A Musical Visit to…etc). Featuring all the originals, this LP presented a day with the Captain (creator Bob Keeshan), Mr. Greenjeeans (Lumpy Brannum), Mr. Moose and Grandfather Clock (both Cosmo Alligretti). Speaking as an unabashed aficionado who has heard all the Captain’s albums, not all of them as a child—and oh, there were quite a few more than you might think—Gesner was the only one of Keeshan’s record songsmiths who truly captured the show’s childhood-affirming personality, and wrote to the very soul of those characters, even amazingly, silent Bunny Rabbit.
And on the cassette demo of his Betty Boop musical…there he was again, very much in his element, representing Betty and her cohorts in theirs. Absent the script for reference, the demo reflects a work-in-progress that can only ever represent potential. But he sure had the verbal wit, the Max Fleischer tone, the attitude and the musical vocabulary of a 1930s Boop toon properly filtered for a mid-80s theatrical treatment.
And one other thing all three projects had in common. Gesner embraced a paradox: that while each would sustain interest for a long stretch of time, they were too delicate for narrative attenuation; the natural form of storytelling in each universe was short form. Thus the overarching structure wasn’t defined by a single story, but rather the little stories (and songs within them) that would occur within a contained space of time. Charlie Brown gives us two days (one per act) in the life of the title character and his Peanuts companions. Treasure House was a day with the Captain and his friends. Of Betty Boop, all that exists “in the wild” (if indeed it does) is the demo of songs dubbed for me; the complete script is in Gesner’s papers at Princeton University. But we can extrapolate that a similar approach was taken. Because its full title was The Adventures [plural] of Betty Boop, and this is what he said about it in a short interview: “I’m trying mainly to catch the flavor of the cartoons and keep the fantasy. There’s a lot of anthropomorphizing with puppets, some manipulated by hand or strings, some with people inside.”
You wouldn’t be wrong to categorize Gesner’s structuring in all three as revue-writing, of a sort; but what allows it to cross the divide into full-on “musical bookwriting” is the cumulative effect of our experiencing the given set of two-dimensional characters as completely rounded, because each little song and sketch—or perhaps playlet, in the case of Betty Boop—has added yet another color and another facet to a subtly expanding tapestry; and the individual facets of single objective and/or emotion are points of universal identification.
In short (and at length), Clark Gesner was a fellow who could add dimension to whimsy. But you never caught him laboring at it. He had the knack of quiet funny; getting a laugh out of attitude or something implicit that he knew he could trust the audience to get, because the getting would be in the context, which he could provide with brilliant economy. He had the ability to grasp style and tease out truth; to hear a vocalized sound and perceive its spoken language, to watch a sight gag and identify the human vulnerability it conveyed. He harbored an instinct and affinity for replicating the kinds of wonder-worlds inhabited by the likes of the Captain and Charlie Brown. And Betty Boop. Because the child in him had identified what a child of any age sought in them first: the cocooning comfort of recognition. And through that, he achieved the rest.
Which brings us to Boop! The Musical, which just opened at the Broadhurst.
Here’s why you may cotton to it:
The cast is hugely talented. The choreography is sprightly and tappy. There are cool pre-show, entr’acte and mid show projection effects making affectionate and amusing use of iconic Max Fleischer character designs and movement cycles. The songs are attractive enough to earn their keep as mood enhancers. And if you’re into oldschool romcom that dutifully hits all the familiar marks it sets up, the added element of nostalgic fantasy may keep you in a state of happy anticipation. And it has enough dancy-tappy bounce that young children may be too distracted to notice when the narrative energy is just treading water.
Here’s why you may not, or not as much as you’d hope:
The show starts with the “animated” Betty Boop (agreeably charming Jasmine Amy Rogers), in her black-and-white Max Fleischer-design universe, before the animated camera, shooting her newest short subject. But she’s not finding her lot as satisfying as it used to be. For all the career-roles she’s stepped into onscreen, she doesn’t know who she really is as a person. Fortunately, her eccentric Grandpappy (appropriately cartoony Stephen DeRosa) is an inventor, and just at the right moment, she learns about the invention by which he was once able to project himself into “the real world.” Meaning the world of three-dimensional human beings. Though of course he cautions against her using it, and of course she does—whereupon it zooms her into contemporary, present-day, 2025 New York City. She emerges at a ComicCon, full of fans costumed as favorite characters, where she is dazzled by something new to her: color. And she’ll be well on her way to adventure when she meets the young man for whom she will fall, and vice versa, an aspiring jazz trumpetist (feelgood-sensitive leading man Ainsley Melham), and his teenage sister (sprightily supportive Angela Hale), who immediately tells our heroine that she’s “the best Betty Boop I’ve ever seen.”
We’ll stop there. Because in a nutshell, that set-up encompasses where the creative team have not truly fulfilled the assignment of celebrating the character and her world, despite some trappings that insist otherwise. To wit:
Right after we meet her in her world, she wants out of it. Believing her “real self” will be found in “the real world”! Why is this narratively imperative?
The creative team would, I imagine, argue, as their version of Betty does, that she doesn’t have a rounded personality (pun possibly intended), just a kewpie-doll attitude projected into whatever profession—baseball player, racing driver, lion tamer, head chef—the script calls for. That therefore she’s something of a cipher.
But she isn’t really. Huckleberry Hound had as many professions and no one ever accused him of being merely a vessel. Because he, like the animated Betty, had a strong, reactive, resourceful persona.
But let’s move on.
Though hardly an original concept, animated characters entering a 3D universe has historically earned its keep in the service of actual plot. The idea of a toon world juxtaposed against the real one was perhaps most famously popularized in the murder mystery, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—based on a novel by Gary K. Wolf—although there the worlds existed alongside one another in the same dimension and fueling all the action was not only the clash of extreme personalities and cultures but relative laws of physics. In Kenneth Lonergan’s screenplay for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (less commercially successful, but it has its charms), moose and squirrel follow Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader into the dimensional world (all having become three-dimensional in the process), to thwart a dastardly scheme for world domination. Here, too, additional physical dimension only amplifies well-known bold personalities.
But then there are those other treatments. Like the novels Krazy Kat by Jay Cantor and Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, which only use the characters as we know them (and not that for long) as a springboard toward making them respectively human (achieving “roundness”) and mortal (subject to maturity, aging and related issues). Existential bait-and-switch drivel.
Boop!, thankfully, doesn’t go quite that far. But her crisis is existential. She believes—per librettist Bob Martin—that she has only been a symbol with a persona, and that her real-world adventure will give her the definition of third dimension. Story-wise, this lacks urgency because she’s not after anything tangible, only psychological fulfillment. And it lacks suspense because there’s no deadline; she can take her time finding it (and does). More than that…it’s a completely false quest. She enters the real world jazzed at the notion that no one will know who she is, which will allow her true self to take shape. Unfortunately, she’s transported to the aforementioned ComiCon in a world where Betty Boop is a well-known popular culture character. Though various story contrivances, there will really be only three things she can do: find the man of her dreams (which she does almost instantly; the rest is romcom mechanics)…claim that feminine brass ring: agency…and become an inspiration to the people she has come to care about along the way (and most of New York City). But having being pro-active right from the start, not to mention a beloved icon of versatility and self-determination, she entered the scene with agency fully developed. Oh, sure, in the second act, she’s given a quick comic scene in which to demonstrate her ability to wrest control of a situation with a quick physical slapstick action; but, as established near the top of the show and referenced thereafter in dialogue, it’s an action previously taken by her in toon after toon; taking it in the real world (where it shouldn’t be as physically harmless, yet is) just renders it the end variation of a running gag. No new agency there. (Oh, and her real-world profession—after having been tennis player, journalist, judge, boxer, pilot, you-name-it—is assistant to an image-obsessed male mayoral candidate. Which rates only a thought balloon with a saw cutting a log under the wiggly letters Y-A-W-N!)
The lack of genuine character progression and the attenuation of Betty’s arc also renders the songs little more than easy-listening place markers, never advancing the story, always only expounding upon things we already know. Composer David Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead, though talented, can never transcend the generic because the storytelling offers them precious little ammunition to exploit toward transcendence.
On top of that, the so-called “real world” Betty now occupies turns out to be, by dint of its persistent day-glo design, and inhabitants’ increasingly muggy behavior, no less a cartoon than her origin universe. As with everything else in the narrative, there are rationalizations offered to explain why the difference of universe mandates the difference of existence, but the truth is: the world-building is haphazard, the rules that govern it don’t hold up to scrutiny, and that’s why the only difference is how hard the show works, under Jerry Mitchell’s keep-it-moving-to-keep-em-from-thinking direction and choreography, to sustain a length that a Betty Boop adventure seems unable to support. At least not when you remove her from her naturally adventure-filled toon universe.
Which brings us back to Clark Gesner. Not merely to mourn—or at least mourn the potential—of the Betty Boop musical that might have borne his imprimatur…but as an avatar of the possible. There are any number of ways to exploit a given story or property. But if it’s iconic, and if your goal is to go at the task truthfully, you must never abandon the qualities that make the thing attractive—and iconic—to begin with. Boop! the musical isn’t at all a cynical offender. I believe its authors and director have genuine affection for Betty and meant to treat her well. But affection and affinity are as different as the toon world and the real world. And that’s all, folks.