Courtesy of Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman

The first film iterations of 1930 cartoon star Betty Boop enter the public domain in the United States in January 2026. So, the rights holders to Betty Boop are certainly cutting things down to the wire this season with the big Broadway debut of BOOP! The Musical at the Broadhurst Theatre.

BOOP! The Musical arrives in New York after a late 2023 tryout at Chicago’s CIBC Theatre. I caught BOOP! The Musical on my own dime during its Windy City preview period, so I was curious to see what changes had gone in for Broadway.

Now, the flapper-inspired Betty Boop is unquestionably one of the most enduring characters dreamed up by the creative animators of Fleischer Studios. Founded in New York in 1929 by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, their namesake studio also produced animated shorts starring Popeye the Sailor, Koko the Clown, and even Superman. Fleischer Studios also released the world’s second full-length animated feature in 1939 with Gulliver’s Travels, following Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

The big-hearted and big-headed Betty Boop was always industrious and arguably proto-femminist as she took on a number of careers in her animated shorts. With her distinctive Kewpie-doll voice by Mae Questel (Funny Girl, New York Stories), Betty Boop also sang a lot. She alternately worked as a global star entertainer (traveling from New York to Tokyo in 1935’s “A Language All My Own”) or just sang ditties while walking on her way to work (like in “Judge for a Day,” a 1935 short that ends with a push for Boop and other women to seek elected office).

So, the idea of a Betty Boop musical is not so unusual. In fact, it has been kicking around for decades with a number of playwrights and songwriters attached.

For example, composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years) sarcastically revealed in a 2009 blog post with two song demos that he and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Kimberly Akimbo) were once attached in 2002 to [show about cartoon character whose name is redacted on advice of counsel].

The writing team that ultimately realized BOOP! The Musical is certainly a starry one. Tony Award-winner Bob Martin (co-author and star of The Drowsy Chaperone) delivers a book that is full of zingers and laughs. And first-time Broadway composer and 16-time Grammy Award winning songwriter/arranger/producer David Foster (Earth Wind and Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone,” Chicago’s “Hard Habit to Break”) has teamed with veteran theater lyricist Susan Birkenhead (Jelly’s Last Jam, The Secret Life of Bees) on the peppy and catchy score to BOOP!

The production team for BOOP! The Musical also have an arsenal of previous Tony Awards, save for lighting designer Philip S. Rosenberg whose past London, Broadway and regional credits are nothing to sniff at.

There’s many production numbers in BOOP! The Musical that wow thanks to the savvy panache of veteranBroadway director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell (Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde). Mitchell is a consistent pro at staging exuberant musical numbers, from the tap-happy opener “A Little Versatility” that establishes the film-star charisma and multifaceted talents of Betty Boop, to the bright, happy-ending finale “The Color of Love.”

Courtesy of Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman

The designers David Rockwell (sets), Finn Ross (projections) and Gregg Barnes (costumes) all have a field day in depicting BOOP! The Musical’s two distinct worlds. There’s the black-and-white cartoon realm where Betty Boop reigns supreme, plus the real (if very idealized) world of New York where she gets transported to in 2025.

The new Broadway Act II opener “Where is Betty?” is particularly clever. Its conceit has the entire ensemble flipping between the musical’s two different worlds with just a back-to-front turn with costumes that are one half gray scale on one side and colorful neon on the other. (Something must have been in the creative ether, since this costuming trick is contemporaneously deployed in film director Spike Jonze’s nearly six-minute Apple AirPods ad starring Pedro Pascal.)

One can’t really fault any of the technical or staging dazzle on display in BOOP! The Musical. But you can question select elements of the script, score and even the whole enterprise of a show dedicated to a shapely cartoon sexpot whose height of film fame dates back to the Great Depression.

After all, I personally hadn’t given much thought to Betty Boop beyond her enjoyable has-been cameo in Touchstone Pictures and Amblin Entertainment’s 1988 blockbuster film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or her brief 1980s syndicated newspaper comic strip comeback alongside Felix the Cat. And like the disembodied head of Hello Kitty, Betty Boop has similarly adorned all kinds of fashion accessories targeted at young women for decades.

But the writing and creative team of BOOP! The Musical clearly did their homework in serving up a rethink on why Betty Boop should still remain relevant today. If you re-watch Betty Boop shorts on YouTube, you’ll see loads of progressive escapism through her unending optimism and gumption to succeed while navigating through financially scary times and an unending rogues gallery of leering men. So, one can certainly see contemporary parallels amid Betty Boop’s big Broadway reappearance.

BOOP! The Musical begins like a Fleischer Studios animated short with the title “Betty’s Day Off.” What follows is a fish-out-of-water scenario similar to the 2007 Disney film Enchanted.

Courtesy of Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman

Exhausted from a full day of non-union-regulated film work, Betty Boop (a star-making Broadway debut for the spunky Jasmine Amy Rogers) is also thrown into an existential crisis following a probing reporter’s question. So, Betty Boop makes a questionable decision to try out a time-traveling device cooked up by her Rube Goldberg inventor-type Grampy (a spacey Stephen DeRosa) for a well-deserved day off.

Luckily, Betty Boop is transported to the safest possible place in 2025 Manhattan: New York Comic Con at the Javits Convention Center. There, Boop marvels at experiencing all hues of the rainbow for the first time amid all the character cos-players in the fun production number “In Color.”

She also fatefully encounters two humans at Comic Con who initially assume that she’s the best Betty Boop cos-player they’ve ever seen. There’s the blue-eyed jazz-aficionado love interest Dwayne (a hunky Ansley Melham) who is the sort-of older brother to the orphaned Betty Boop super fan Trisha (America’s Got Talent alumna Angelica Hale).

Boop then gets pulled into the orbit of Trisha’s guardian, Carol Evans (Anastacia McCleskey), who is the campaign manager for the shady New York mayoral candidate Raymond Demarest (Erich Bergen of Madame Secretary and Jersey Boys fame). Once Boop’s true identity is revealed, the smarmy Demarest is eager to exploit her cartoon celebrity.

Meanwhile, folks back in the cartoon world like the film director Oscar Delacorte (Aubie Merrylees), his studio flunky Clarence (Ricky Schroeder) and Boop’s adorable dog Pudgy (ingenious Being John Malkovich puppeteer Phillip Huber) all start to panic about their star’s disappearance. So, Grampy seeks the help of his former human love interest, Valentina (underutilized Guys and Dolls Tony Award winner Faith Prince), to find Boop and bring her back home.

Courtesy of Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman

Now, I personally would have liked Martin’s sometimes meandering script to have more focus and elevated plot stakes with a ticking time constraint for Boop’s past cartoon world disappearance possibly affecting her future existence and legacy (think Back to the Future). I also felt that some musical numbers by Foster and Birkenhead (like the Times Square-set “My New York” and the rousing jazz club Act I closer “Where I Wanna Be”) played almost like ads for NYC Tourism + Conventions.

But for the most part, I happy to experience a much-improved BOOP! The Musical from its earlier Chicago tryout with several song replacements and revisions for Broadway. For example, Trisha’s song “Portrait of Betty,” a paean extolling the reasons for her worship of Betty Boop, seemed to have more specific examples of the cartoon star’s inspirational exploits from her animated shorts than before.

BOOP! The Musical is unquestionably packed with plenty of colorful glitz, glamour, and talent with an empowering message for folks to find their inner confidence to succeed and lead. Though you could cynically try to write it off as a last-gasp cash grab before just anyone can have their way with Betty Boop in the public domain, BOOP! The Musicalsmartly functions as an officially sanctioned summation and splashy reexamination of Betty Boop’s nearly century-long pop culture career.