Jasmine Amy Rogers, the breakout star of Boop! The Musical, sits in a corner booth at Sardi’s, squinting. “Is that Idina Menzel ?” she asks, eyeing a caricature of the Wicked actress across the room. The restaurant’s drawings of Broadway legends tower over diners, Elaine Stritch, Bernadette Peters, and Phylicia Rashad among them.
Rogers is now in their company as a first-time Tony nominee this year for best actress in a musical, a new reality she describes as “very, very wild. It’s too grand, too exciting.”
Her performance as the vampy, spit-curled Betty Boop cartoon-come-to-life earned raves when the musical opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in April. This afternoon, she is a Jasmine-Betty hybrid: Fresh from a showcase for tour producers, she is still in her wide-eyed Boop! makeup, but otherwise giving actor off-duty in a tank top, jeans, and sneakers.
The exuberant, if occasionally puzzling, show—think Barbie movie meets The Wizard of Oz—is directed with great flair by Broadway vet Jerry Mitchell, who is also nominated for best choreography. With music by David Foster, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and book by Bob Martin, it follows Betty, who, in a fit of existential pique, decides to leave her animated world and find her true self in present-day New York. Love and self-discovery ensue.
At 26, Rogers is the youngest in her Tonys category by a couple of decades and is adjusting to the attention. “If I sit and think about the gravity of the situation too much, I start to spiral a little bit,” she says with a laugh. Her fellow nominees are Audra McDonald (Gypsy), Nicole Scherzinger (Sunset Boulevard), Megan Hilty, and Jennifer Simard (both Death Becomes Her).
McDonald sent her flowers and cupcakes when nominations were announced. “We DM back and forth, it’s been really nice,” Rogers says. It’s something of a full-circle moment, in fact, as Rogers remembers being awed watching McDonald’s 2016 Tony performance for Shuffle Along in high school: particularly the high kicks that the actress, who was six months pregnant at the time, pulled off. “I was like, wow, she’s insane for that. It was just incredible!” Other Tonys moments she loves include Jennifer Holiday’s iconic rendition of “And I Am Telling You” from Dreamgirls in 1982 and the cast of Hamilton doing “History Has Its Eyes on You” and “Yorktown,” also in 2016.
Growing up around Boston and then in Texas as a teenager, Rogers says she was an energetic kid who sang all the time. “I would sit in my room and sing along to Disney princess tracks. My mom was also a big fan of Wicked and Rent,” she says of her early influences. She describes her large, blended family, with step- and half-siblings, as “a lot of good chaos.”
In high school outside of Houston, she began taking theater more seriously; supporting roles as the mom in In the Heights and Candy, a friend of the lead in an obscure musical called Zombie Prom, made her realize this was something she could really do. Her senior year, she was a finalist in the 2017 Jimmy Awards, the national musical theater competition for high school students. A clip of her singing “Easy as Life” from the musical Aida at the ceremony that year hints at the intensity and vulnerability she now conjures as Betty Boop.
After a two-year stint at the Manhattan College of Music, she dropped out and quickly landed a role in a new musical, Becoming Nancy, directed by Jerry Mitchell that premiered in Atlanta in 2019. Following a tour as Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, she was brought in by Mitchell to audition for Betty in the Chicago try-out of Boop! in 2023. (She had played a different, supporting character in an earlier workshop of the show.)
She was not prepared for the tap-heavy choreography involved in that first audition. “It was horrifying!” A competitive dancer as a child, she stopped training when she moved to Texas at 11, but figured enough of the skill would come back for her to wing it; she was wrong. “It was soul-crushing, I went home and sobbed,” she recalls, the cringe still visible in her eyes. She did not get the part then.
Later that spring, she happened to be in a rehearsal space in Manhattan, helping a friend with another show, when she heard the Boop! music wafting down the hallway. Rogers did some digging and discovered the production still had not cast Betty. She describes pacing around midtown that day, contemplating what she should do before finally calling her agent. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what we need to do, but I need to get back in there.’ I’d never done anything like that before.” It worked, and for two weeks she crammed in as many tap classes at Broadway Dance Center as she could before her second chance at the role.
The rest is history, and the performance she delivers is a brilliant hat trick: a disarmingly human portrayal of a famously one-dimensional character. “The tricky part about her,” Rogers says of Betty, “is combining the larger-than-life energy of a cartoon with a real person.” Her standout 11 o’clock number, “Something to Shout About,” a towering David Foster Ballad, brings down the house.
Rogers describes herself as bubbly and larger-than-life, which made building Betty a natural process. “There is a lot of her that also belongs to Jasmine.”
And she relished recreating Betty’s signature hour-glass look with costume designer Gregg Barnes, who is also up for a Tony. “I’m in a corset the whole show; it’s great and terrible at the same time. But the shape it creates is so beautiful, I wouldn’t feel like her without it.” For Betty’s iconic bob and curls, Rogers and hair stylist Sabana Majeed looked to Dorothy Dandridge and other old Hollywood references to make it recognizable but elevated.
With the clock ticking toward Tonys night, Rogers is doing her best to pace herself. “I sleep a lot! And take my vitamins…C and Bromelain,” she says. She has a solid network of Broadway friends to get her through it, too: Samantha Williams, currently in Pirates! The Penzance Musical, and Joy Woods, another first-time Tony nominee, for Gypsy, whose theater is right next door. (“I just adore her,” Rogers says.)
Away from the theater, Rogers escapes with true-crime podcasts, like And That’s Why We Drink and My Favorite Murder, and relaxing with her dog, Martha May Whovier, a boxer. Her playlists lately rotate between Phoebe Bridgers, Aretha Franklin, and Dinah Washington.
Before she heads across the street to begin her pre-show warm-ups, her evening performance beckoning, Rogers is reflective. “I’m always fighting myself to be better, better, better,” she says, staring up at the illustrated pantheon of stars. “But finally I realized, yes, I’m supposed to be here. I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”
In portrait: styling, Eliza Yerry; hair, Amy Farid; makeup, Taylor Levitan.