Betty Boop Musical Aiming for Broadway Bow in 2010-2011 Season

By Andrew Gans
and Robert Simonson
November 6, 2008

A new musical based on the classic cartoon character Betty Boop will open in a Nederlander theatre to be announced during the 2010-2011 season.

Betty Boop will feature music by Canadian pop composer David Foster, who has penned tunes for Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand. The book will be written by Oscar Williams and Sally Robinson.

No director is currently attached to the project. Ostar Productions is producing.

Betty Boop, according to press notes, is described as such: "In the new musical, the inimitable Betty 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."

At one point Andrew Lippa and David Lindsay-Abaire were collaborating on a Betty Boop musical.

Betty Boop was one of the most enduring animated creations of the past century. The work of Max Fleisher and Fleisher Studios, she starred in a long series of cartoon shorts during the 1930s. Her name, spit-curl hair style and character were drawn from popular singer Helen Kane, the so-called "Boop Oop a Doop" girl.

A liberated but seemingly innocent flapper, Betty's eyes and head were big, and her cupid's bow mouth and black dress were small. Forever fending off the advances of lustful males and often found in an unlooked-for state of undress, her persona was perhaps the most sexual ever bestowed upon an animated character. Since a revival of her cartoons in the 1960s, Betty has lived on as an icon and made cameo appearances in films like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."