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 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
You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.
Start your free 30 days