The first time Jasmine Amy Rogers tried out for Broadway's BOOP! The Musical, she blew the audition. The role of Betty Boop in the new musical calls for a true triple threat—someone who can act, sing, and (because Jerry Mitchell is directing it) tap dance like a dream. Even though Rogers tap danced when she was a child, when it came time for the dance call, she couldn’t land the steps. “I wanted to leave that dance call,” she recalls, grimacing. “I got home, and my agents called, and they were like, ‘Hey, it’s gonna go in a different direction.’ So that killed me. It crushed me. I was so sad.”
But as the old adage goes, if something is meant for you, it will come back. Months later, after Rogers finished up the Mean Girls national tour in 2023, she noticed BOOP! was still holding auditions. Rogers realized this was her chance to redeem herself. She told her agent to get her another audition. She furiously dove into preparation: taking tap classes, running scenes at home with her roommate, and practicing her own version of Betty Boop’s coquettish voice. But most of all, she learned how to silence that voice in her head, the one that originally told her to give up and leave.
“I had a work session with [BOOP! associate director] D.B. Bonds, and he told me that the team really loved me, but the one thing that was holding them back from saying yes was the fact that I was lacking confidence in myself,” Rogers explains. “And if I can’t believe in myself, how could they believe in me? He told me, ‘You need to go in there, and you need to own it. You need to own the character. You need to own yourself, and you need to just exist.’”
She took those words to heart. She went into that audition, showed what she was capable of, and (crucially) “I just was Jasmine.” Rogers landed Betty Boop, playing the character last year in BOOP!’s pre-Broadway tryout to universal acclaim, with the Chicago Tribune calling her “an absolute triple-threat star." She is now making her Broadway debut in BOOP!, running at the Broadhurst Theatre. The show opened April 5, and New York critics have been similarly rapturous about Rogers' performance.
Featuring an original story by Bob Martin and original songs by Grammy winner David Foster and Susan Birkenhead, BOOP! takes its name from the Fleischer Studios cartoon character. But instead of adapting an already-existing Betty Boop cartoon for the stage, this new show tells an original story, about a Betty who is transported from her black-and-white cartoon world to the real world (modern-day New York City to be exact)—and learns about love, human connection, and who she truly is.
But for someone who is entirely new to the Broadway stage, nay leading a musical, Rogers dominates it like a veteran. In the show's opening number, "A Little Versatility," Rogers is enchanting, embodying Betty's playful effervescence while maintaining an authoritative stage presence. Even when Rogers is surrounded by a bevy of dancers, you cannot take your eyes off of her. And when she is the center of a rotating tap line, she smoothly executes the tap-and-kick choreography then immediately resumes singing without being out of breath or breaking a sweat. When asked how she pulls it off, Rogers laughs, saying, "I'm not really sure, but somehow it's happening!"
Besides the dancing, another challenge for the 25-year-old actor was how to turn Betty Boop, a cartoon, into a real woman. How do you ground a figure who is so stylized? “I brought a lot of myself to her because I felt so connected to her,” says Rogers, whose real voice is much lower than the high-pitched, bubbly cadence she’s adopted for BOOP! “She wants everybody to feel loved and feel joy.” Crucially, in the show, Betty also helps the women that she meets in New York find their own voice, something Jones connects to as someone who was raised by her mom and grandmother. “She loves women so much, and I relate to that deeply. She just wants women to be able to do anything their hearts desire.”
While many audience members have not seen a Betty Boop cartoon, they still know her voice and her catch phrase. To Rogers, this musical is an opportunity to reintroduce the character. “Relating to the modern-day audience is the whole point,” explains Rogers. “This character reminds [audiences] of this carefree era that they had left behind…They can just come into the theatre and relax and just have a good time and focus on this fun, loving girl that we all have inside of us. And watch her go on the journey of a lifetime.”
It’s been a journey of a lifetime for Rogers as well. She was born in Boston and raised in Richmond, Texas. Her grandmother, who was a skilled tap dancer, taught Rogers how to dance at the age of two. As she grew up and enrolled in school, Rogers’ mother, who was a pharmacist, kept her two children busy with extracurriculars—everything from learning an instrument to singing in choir and playing sports. Rogers learned how to play the violin (“I was terrible at it”) and ran track (“I think I'm a little bit of a lazy girl at heart, and that was a little too much activity for me”). At home, the family watched classic musicals together, like West Side Story, and listened to cast albums in the car.
When she was seven years old, Rogers begged her mom to let her audition for a community theatre production of Peter Pan, because she loved to sing. “I remember I sang ‘Popular’ from Wicked for my audition, and all the other girls were like, ‘Oh, my mom wouldn't let me sing that song!’” recalls Rogers with a giggle. “I didn't know it was taboo at the time for a seven-year-old to sing something that's on Broadway currently.” Rogers was cast as one of the members of Tiger Lily’s tribe. “
In 2017, Rogers won the Tommy Tune Awards, which meant she received a trip to New York City to perform at the Jimmy Awards, where she was named a finalist and received a $2,500 scholarship. She had already been planning to attend the Manhattan School of Music for college, but the Jimmys solidified her decision to pursue performance. “Immediately, the next day after the Jimmy Awards, we were saying our goodbyes, and I got pulled out to audition for [Lynn] Ahrens and [Stephen] Flaherty's Once on This Island revival.” She ended up only spending two years at Manhattan School of Music, because she was auditioning so much and booking work while still in school, most crucially Becoming Nancy at the Alliance Theatre in Georgia (directed by BOOP!'s Jerry Mitchell).
Though it seems like Rogers burst onto Broadway like a supernova, for the young actor, she's been building to this moment—taking on supporting roles until she was ready to lead. At the same time, she has to still convince herself it's all actually happening. "I'm nervous all the time," she says, smiling shyly. "I'm constantly trying to reassure myself that what I'm doing is good and that I'm living in my purpose. But luckily, something I do know is that there's nothing else that I would rather be doing. And I have to convince myself that I've worked for this for a very long time."
But what has slowly been dawning on her is how much impact she’s having as a Black woman embodying Betty Boop. It’s fitting; jazz singer Esther Jones is considered one of the inspirations for Betty’s singing style.
“A lot of Black people, Black women, have identified with her over the years,” says Rogers. “And I’ve met some people on the street who are like, ‘It’s so exciting to see one of us get to do this.’ And that means everything to me. I don’t take that for granted at all. And it’s just another example of the fact that Black women, Black people in general, can take on any type of role—a role that is separate from our history and our suffering—and can take on our joy and our excitement. We can embody characters who weren’t necessarily Black. And Betty was just pen and ink. So, we can embody anything. It’s really, really special to get to do this.”
