After a two-year stint on the Manhattan School of Music, she dropped out and rapidly landed a job in a brand new musical, Changing into Nancy, directed by Jerry Mitchell that premiered in Atlanta in 2019. Following a tour as Gretchen Wieners in Imply Ladies, she was introduced in by Mitchell to audition for Betty within the Chicago try-out of Boop! in 2023. (She had performed a unique, supporting character in an earlier workshop of the present.)
She was not ready for the tap-heavy choreography concerned in that first audition. “It was horrifying!” A aggressive dancer as a toddler, she stopped coaching when she moved to Texas at 11, however figured sufficient of the ability would come again for her to wing it; she was improper. “It was soul-crushing, I went residence and sobbed,” she remembers, the cringe nonetheless seen in her eyes. She didn’t get the half then.
Later that spring, she occurred to be in a rehearsal area in Manhattan, serving to a good friend with one other present, when she heard the Boop! music wafting down the hallway. Rogers did some digging and found the manufacturing nonetheless had not solid Betty. She describes pacing round midtown that day, considering what she ought to do earlier than lastly calling her agent. “I used to be like, ‘I don’t know what we have to do, however I must get again in there.’ I’d by no means completed something like that earlier than.” It labored, and for 2 weeks she crammed in as many faucet courses at Broadway Dance Heart as she might earlier than her second likelihood on the position.
The remaining is historical past, and the efficiency she delivers is an excellent hat trick: a disarmingly human portrayal of a famously one-dimensional character. “The tough half about her,” Rogers says of Betty, “is combining the larger-than-life vitality of a cartoon with an actual individual.” Her standout 11 o’clock quantity, “One thing to Shout About,” a towering David Foster Ballad, brings down the home.
Rogers describes herself as bubbly and larger-than-life, which made constructing Betty a pure course of. “There may be quite a lot of her that additionally belongs to Jasmine.”
And he or she relished recreating Betty’s signature hour-glass look with costume designer Gregg Barnes, who can be up for a Tony. “I’m in a corset the entire present; it’s nice and horrible on the identical time. However the form it creates is so stunning, I wouldn’t really feel like her with out it.” For Betty’s iconic bob and curls, Rogers and hair stylist Sabana Majeed seemed to Dorothy Dandridge and different previous Hollywood references to make it recognizable however elevated.
