When director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell and composer David Foster recruited Jasmine Amy Rogers for a workshop of Boop! The Musical back in 2019, the then-fledgling performer was cast in a supporting role. But even at that time, Rogers imagined herself playing the title part, Betty Boop, a cartoon character from nearly a century ago brought to real life in the present day.
“It just seemed like something that was up my alley,” Rogers remembers. “I’ve always been a girl who wants to be larger than life, and I thought, ‘I can do that — I need to do that.’ It felt personal to me, like something in the air was calling me to it, like the universe was lining up.”
The universe was clearly on to something, because six years later, Rogers is delivering what many critics and fans are calling the breakout performance of the 2024–2025 season. The role of Betty has already earned Rogers, now 26, the Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding lead performer in a musical and a Theatre World Award for Broadway debut performance.
Rogers is also a contender for Drama Desk and Tony Awards. For the latter trophy, other nominees in the field of leading actress in a musical include Broadway stalwarts Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard for Death Becomes Her, and Audra McDonald, who holds the records for both most Tonys and most nominations as a performer, for a revival of Gypsy. The fifth contender, Sunset Boulevard’s Nicole Scherzinger, is also a Broadway newbie, but she’s previously enjoyed success both in pop music and on the London stage, where the production originated.
“Oh my gosh,” Rogers gushes, when the names are read to her. “These are women I have truly looked up to for so, so long. I’m just so honored to be on that list. I feel like a little kid, waving up at these big, shiny stars.”
Ironically, Rogers was turned down when she first auditioned for the role of Betty in 2023, while still in a touring production of Mean Girls. “I was so incredibly nervous, and I blew the dance call,” she remembers. Though her grandmother was a tap dancer, and she had studied years ago, Rogers was “afraid to try and pick it up again, so I procrastinated.”
When she finished the tour several months later, the part was still not cast, and Rogers called her agents to ask for another shot. “As soon as I got the OK, I was back in tap classes, relearning everything, so that I could pick it up. Because the thing about Jerry is, he doesn’t expect you to necessarily come in and be perfect; he expects you to show that you have the capability to learn and improve. Once I got back in, I was still fighting my anxiety, but I was eventually able to put that aside.”
Rogers’s performance in Boop! impresses not just because of her dancing and vocal skills — the latter extend from her bright, jazzy singing to an uncanny impersonation of Betty’s girlish speaking voice — but because of how adroitly she captures, in ways both hilarious and moving, the character’s sense of wonder in facing the modern, three-dimensional world, and her growing grit as she embraces flesh-and-blood womanhood.
“I always viewed Betty as so much more than a sex symbol,” Rogers notes. “She is sexy, but she’s also incredibly intelligent, incredibly driven — and loving, and caring, and humble. It was very clear to me that she’s the embodiment of everything that a woman is capable of, and the only right thing was to do her justice, to show every facet of her.”
Representation was also important to Rogers as a Black woman. During her research, she discovered that Esther Jones, a young Black entertainer in the 1920s and ’30s who was also billed as “Baby Esther” and “Little Esther,” had influenced Betty’s singing as an animated character. “That scat style that Betty Boop is known for — that boop-boop-a-doop — that’s a style that Esther helped popularize,” Rogers says. “So it was important to me that we give Esther credit where it’s due, because she was not given that credit in her day.”
Rogers adds, “It’s really amazing that I get to tell this story as a Black woman. I ran into a young girl who was working in a Sephora, and she told me I looked familiar, and we got into a conversation where it came up that I was playing Betty Boop, and she said, ‘I thought it was you, and I wanted to say that it’s so exciting to see one of us up there, doing this.’ That was so, so inspiring to me.”
Boop! has continued to produce such feedback, Rogers says. “I meet young Black women — young women in general, but especially young Black women, and older Black women too — who are just so excited to see themselves represented in this way, as this icon, this embodiment of ‘I’m every woman’ who happens to be Black.”
As the Tony Awards approach, Rogers is feeling both excited and reflective. “I’m proud of myself, because I’ve wanted this for so long,” she says. “I may be only 26, but I’ve been doing theater for almost 20 years, and it’s been the greatest love of life. And there have been moments where I thought, ‘Should I stop doing this? Can this not be a full-time career for me?’ This project has shown me that it can be, and the Tony nomination is like the cherry on top.”