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    Broadway Musical ‘Boop’ Set to Close Amid Weak Ticket Sales

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    ‘Boop! The Musical’ imagines the cartoon character leaving 1920s filmdom for 2020s New York City. Ticket sales were weak.“Boop! The Musical,” based on the iconic flapper from early animated shorts, announced on Wednesday that it would close July 13 after failing to find sufficient audience to defray its running costs on Broadway.The show is the fourth new musical to post a closing notice in the 17 days since the Tony Awards, following “Smash,” “Real Women Have Curves” and “Dead Outlaw.”“Boop!” had a disappointing Tonys season — it was not nominated for best musical, and its request to perform on the awards show was rebuffed. It was nominated for best lead actress (Jasmine Amy Rogers), best choreography (Jerry Mitchell) and best costume design (Gregg Barnes) but won no awards.The show’s weekly grosses, consistently too low, ticked upward last week, but remain well below its running costs. During the week that ended June 22, “Boop!” grossed $602,017, and 19 percent of the seats went unsold.The musical began previews March 11 and opened on April 5 at the Broadhurst Theater. At the time of its closing, it will have played 25 previews and 112 regular performances.Set primarily in New York City, the musical imagines that Betty Boop, an actress in films of the 1920s, time travels to present-day Manhattan seeking a greater sense of her self; in the city she finds friendship, love and clarity.The musical, led by the veteran producer Bill Haber, had been in development for more than a quarter century, with shifting creative teams, and had a pre-Broadway production in Chicago in 2023. The version that finally made it to Broadway has a book by Bob Martin, music by David Foster, and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead; it is directed as well as choreographed by Mitchell.Reviews were mostly positive. But in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green was unenthusiastic, praising Rogers’s performance and other elements of the show, but questioning its rationale, saying that “a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for” is “disappointing,” and that “one feels at all times the heavy hooves of a marketing imperative.”“Boop!” was capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show’s development — has not been recouped. More

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      Tony Awards 2025: 13 Great Songs of the Season

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      Our critic listened to the cast recordings of all the nominated musicals and picked one of his favorite tracks from each.Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’Thom Sesma crooning “Up to the Stars” as Thomas Noguchi, a.k.a. the “coroner to the stars,” in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThom Sesma as Thomas Noguchi (Audible and Yellow Sound Label)For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Songs like “With One Look” evoke the drama of Desmond’s contradictions.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond (The Other Songs)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      To Play Betty Boop, Jasmine Amy Rogers Had to Transform

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      When Jasmine Amy Rogers learned that she had been nominated for a Chita Rivera Award, for outstanding dancer in a Broadway show, her first reaction was to laugh.“Just because I felt a little bit like an impostor,” said Rogers, who plays the Jazz Age cartoon character Betty Boop in “Boop! The Musical.” “The dancing is always something that I was so fearful of.”Indeed, the tap portion of the audition process had been, by her own admission, “really bad.” “I was so nervous that I just shut down,” Rogers recalled, just hours after the nomination was announced. “It was very embarrassing for me. I did a little bit of the tap number from the beginning and I just couldn’t pick up the pattern.”It sounded “like somebody dropped a handful of silverware in the kitchen,” according to Jerry Mitchell, the musical’s choreographer and director. But, he added in a phone interview, “she went away, she worked on it, she came back and she was better.”And she got the job. The dance award nomination came late last month. A Tony nomination for best leading actress in a musical followed shortly after that. In his review, the New York Times’s chief theater critic called Rogers “immensely likable,” adding that “she sings fabulously,” and “nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line.” Not bad for a Broadway debut.Jasmine Amy Rogers, the star of “Boop! The Musical,” is a Tony nominee for best leading actress in a musical.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Boop! The Musical’ Review: Betty Gets a Broadway Brand Extension

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      The It girl with the spit curl looks great for 100, but her Broadway musical, which feels like one big merch grab, is boop-boop-a-don’t.Some shows are “what?” shows, leaving you baffled. Perhaps they involve roller-skating trains or shrouds of Turin.Others are “how?” shows, as in: Dear God, how did that happen?But the most disappointing subgenre of musical, at least in terms of opportunity cost, is the “why?” show: a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for. Its intentions are foggy and sometimes suspicious.“Boop! The Musical” — now playing at the Broadhurst Theater, in a production directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell — is a “why?” show par excellence.And excellence it has. As Betty, the flapper of early talkie cartoons, Jasmine Amy Rogers is immensely likable. She sings fabulously, sports a credible perma-smile, nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line. I can’t imagine anyone making more of the exhausting opportunity, let alone in a Broadway debut.She is ably supported by other young talent in featured roles, luxury-cast veterans doing their damnedest and a hard-working ensemble selling Mitchell’s insistent, imaginative, precision-drilled dances. When his pinwheel kick-lines hop in unison, not one foot among 26 is left on the floor.Or make that 27, because Pudgy, Betty’s pug, a marionette with a lolling pink tongue operated by the puppeteer Phillip Huber, sometimes shakes a leg too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Boop!’ Arrives on Broadway, With a Surprising 100-Year Back Story

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      Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people).Betty’s journey to the stage has been an unusual one. The original character didn’t have much of a back story, which has made her an appealing blank slate for storytellers. But her image — and Betty, at her core, is a remarkably long-lived illustration — has managed to straddle media and merchandise, surviving court battles and changing mores.“Her popularity goes on and on,” said Peter Benjaminson, author of “The Life and Times of Betty Boop.” “The musical is the latest in a series of incarnations.”Film DebutThe 1930 animated short “Dizzy Dishes.”Fleischer Studios, Inc.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More