I never thought I’d scream so loud for a cartoon character to disrobe onstage, but that is exactly the noise that escaped from my throat during Betty Boop’s Broadway debut. Since 1930, the inky coquette has been stamped upon many an upper thigh and ass cheek as an ironic feminist symbol. She’s been harangued by countless chauvinists, forced to bang repeated “slobbering men” over the head with anvilles on the silver screen. Parallel to shifting moral codes, she’s shimmied in and out of minidresses and body shapes over the years, volleying back and forth between curvy broad on a motorbike and domesticated martyr in the laundry room. But never has Betty Boop graced the Great White Way.
The crowd that showed up at the Broadhurst Theatre last Tuesday was as varied as the many lives of the animated flapper herself. You might not expect much fanfare for a cartoon past her prime, but there’s a nonsensical buzz surrounding the show, which originated in Chicago, and is directed by Tony-winning Jerry Mitchell of La Cage aux Folles and Legally Blonde The Musical. Soon-to-be astronaut Gayle King loves it. Apparently, so does Whoopi Goldberg, who sat in the orchestra on Tuesday night, along with Gigi Hadid and Nicole Scherzinger, who attended Boop!’s opening night. The line to enter the theater — populated mostly by Gen Xers in black puffers and Boomers in peacoats — snaked down West 44th Street, for a time blocking the entrance to Alicia Keys’s Tony-winning Hell’s Kitchen. I spotted parents with small squadrons of children in “I
