Watch Jerry Mitchell and Jasmine Amy Rogers Bring a Cartoon Heroine to Life in BOOP! The Musical

With her oversized head, flapper dress and tendency to attract unwanted male attention, Betty Boop first came to prominence in the 1930s. She was a kind of character that hadn’t been seen in cartoons to that point: a modern woman, as saucy as she was sweet.

Now Betty Boop is the heroine of a new musical. Opening this month at Chicago’s CIBC Theatre, BOOP! The Musical follows the cutesy character on a journey from a two-dimensional, black-and-white cartoon past to our colorful, three-dimensional present-day.

“There's one thing that's been missing in her life and she doesn't know what it is,” the director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell tells Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show. “She finds love and it fills her life with color.”

Jasmine Amy Rogers was unsuccessful in her first audition for the role of Betty. “It just wasn't in me,” she says. But when the role remained unclaimed, Rogers persisted. She soon won over the creative team with her determination. “I said, well, it's her role,” says Mitchell. “She came in and proved that it's hers.”

Rogers has since gotten to know and love Betty and her “boop-oop-a-doop” indomitability. “She’s this beautiful epitome of girl power and women power," says Rogers.

The musical features music by David Foster, who knows a thing or two about powerful women as the composer, arranger and producer of songs by Céline Dion, Whitney Houston and Barbra Streisand. He wrote and produced Chicago’s eternal hit “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” and produced and arranged Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

“Early on when I met David, he played me some stuff and I went, wow," Mitchell recalls. "He could write a show too. He may not know it, but he can write a show tune and a dance tune. I was inspired by that. I thought, I would like to create with this man.” (Susan Birkenhead wrote the lyrics for the show.)

Famously, in the original cartoons, Betty spoke in adorable, squeaky baby-talk tones. In a sense, BOOP! gives her a new, more commanding voice, along with some truly “massive” songs, says Mitchell. “She’s got a second act number that’s kind of heartbreaking.”

Betty’s story certainly has Rogers’ heart. “She's just a girl who's ready and willing to fight for all these things," she says, "and show other people that we can get them. I think she's really inspiring.”