David Foster to Score Musical About Betty Boop

A new musical about Betty Boop will feature music by 15-time Grammy Award-winner David Foster, with a book by Sally Robinson and Oscar Williams. The show aims to debut on Broadway in the 2010-2011 season, at a Nederlander theater to be determined. Additional members of the creative team and a production schedule will be confirmed at a later date. Ostar Productions has signed on as producer.

One of the most iconic animated creations of the 20th century, Betty Boop was first introduced by artist Max Fleischer in the 1930s with her distinctive voice provided by Mae Questel. By 1932, Betty had taken the country by storm, eventually starring in more than 100 cartoons, 90 of which are included in the official “Betty Boop” series, which ended in 1939. Since then, she’s appeared in dozens of hit movies, television specials and commercials, and was the first cartoon character to be profiled by A&E’s Biography series.

A musical about Boop was first announced in 2003, to be written by composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and scribe David Lindsay-Abaire. Their never-seen version was supposedly aiming for a 2005 Broadway premiere. In the new version, the inimitable Boop joins her friends Bimbo and Koko to work her irresistible charm in reuniting her grandfather who has created the Greatest Invention of Mankind with the long-lost, true love of his life, while saving the Happy Heart Theater from the developer’s bulldozers.

Songwriter and producer David Foster has created hits for Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Josh Groban, Earth, Wind & Fire, Chicago, Andrea Bocelli and Michael Buble, to name a few. A Grammy nominee 45 times over, he’s also a three-time recipient of the Producer of the Year Grammy, as well as an Academy Award nominee. Betty Boop’s story will mark his Broadway debut.

Sally Robinson is best known as a writer in film and television, including Family for which she received the Humanitas Award with an episode starring Henry Fonda, directed by Joanne Woodward and HBO’s Emmy-nominated Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank, as well as the movies Medicine Man, starring Sean Connery, and Far Off Place.