When Jasmine Amy Rogers learned that she had been nominated for a Chita Rivera Award, for outstanding dancer in a Broadway show, her first reaction was to laugh.
“Just because I felt a little bit like an impostor,” said Rogers, who plays the Jazz Age cartoon character Betty Boop in “Boop! The Musical.” “The dancing is always something that I was so fearful of.”
Indeed, the tap portion of the audition process had been, by her own admission, “really bad.” “I was so nervous that I just shut down,” Rogers recalled, just hours after the nomination was announced. “It was very embarrassing for me. I did a little bit of the tap number from the beginning and I just couldn’t pick up the pattern.”
It sounded “like somebody dropped a handful of silverware in the kitchen,” according to Jerry Mitchell, the musical’s choreographer and director. But, he added in a phone interview, “she went away, she worked on it, she came back and she was better.”
And she got the job. The dance award nomination came late last month. A Tony nomination for best leading actress in a musical followed shortly after that. In his review, the New York Times’s chief theater critic called Rogers “immensely likable,” adding that “she sings fabulously,” and “nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line.” Not bad for a Broadway debut.
In between sips from a chai latte at Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, Rogers, 26, could not quite seem to shake a sense of awe at the turns her career has taken in such a short time. The young actress, who had earlier indulged in some shopping (including a collage that featured a boxer that reminded her of her dog), often laughed in slight disbelief, and admitted to feeling a little out of step over the years: sometimes literally, in reference to her dancing, but also more generally, like when she was a finalist at the 2017 Jimmy Awards, which honor outstanding high school musical-theater performers in the country.
“I felt like a fish out of water a little bit because I was like, these kids know more than I do about musical theater and they’re so talented,” said Rogers, who represented her high school in the Houston area, where her family had moved in 2010. “For a long time, and even still now, I have this impostor syndrome kind of thing where I’m like, ‘Do I belong here?’”
Rogers grew up in Massachusetts, the kind of kid who would put on a purple wig her grandmother had given her and “sing to myself these sad songs, like ‘Reflection’ from ‘Mulan,’” she said.
She appeared in her first musical when she was 7, playing a member of Tiger Lily’s crew in a production of “Peter Pan” (“We were actually like a tribe of hippie Native Americans, which was nice”) in Milford. From her spot in the ensemble, she somehow managed to sing over Tiger Lily. “I just wanted to be as loud as possible, just singing and dancing my little heart out,” Rogers said, laughing.
After high school, she moved again, this time to New York, where she attended the Manhattan School of Music. She dropped out after two years, having reached what she called “a stagnant point.” It wasn’t long before Mitchell cast her as the best friend of the main character in “Becoming Nancy,” a new musical he was choreographing and directing at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta in 2019.
Old habits resurfaced during that run, she said. “There were a lot of moments where I was pushing myself a little too hard and the older cast members were like, ‘You don’t need to do this, you don’t need to prove anything — you already have the role.’” Yet while Rogers could occasionally give in to her insecurities, she had a clear need to get out there and make herself heard.
The next big gig after “Becoming Nancy,” was the “Mean Girls” tour, where she played Gretchen Wieners. Then Mitchell came calling again, in 2023, for the Chicago production of “Boop!”
“I knew from having worked with her in Atlanta that she is a money player,” he said. “From my experience with people like Norbert Leo Butz and Marissa Jaret Winokur, Laura Bell Bundy, Annaleigh Ashford — all the people I consider stars that I’ve had the opportunity to work with at a very young age — she’s one of those people who never steps onstage without being absolutely certain of every move she’s going to make.”
While “Boop!” was being retooled between its Chicago run and the Broadway transfer, Rogers had an experience that would prove transformational: The director Kent Gash cast her as Anita, a sultry singer and Jelly Roll Morton’s lover, in his 2024 revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Anita is, as Gash put it, “a sort of bucket-list role for Black actresses in the musical theater.” (Tonya Pinkins won a Tony for playing her in the 1992 Broadway production.) He had seen footage of Rogers doing “Boop!” in Chicago and arranged for a virtual meeting. “About 30 seconds into the conversation, I thought, ‘She’s it,’” Gash said in a phone interview. “She was talking like someone far beyond her years. I thought, she may be a little on the young side for it, but there’s complexity in that soul.”
Betty has her allure, but Anita was a different kind of sultry, and it proved to be another learning curve for Rogers.
“Anita is a sexy kind of woman, and she’s very confident and cool,” Rogers said. “And I just kind of felt like, How do I not come across as this weird little girl who’s so awkward and strange? I had to work with an intimacy coordinator — not just on the intimacy of the show but on being. I think it’s carried on to Betty, because she’s a lot of things, but one of those things is she’s sexy, and suave and cool,” she continued. “I had to reframe the way I looked at myself completely, and it was really hard.”
Widening the scope, Rogers said there was also the thrill of simply being in “Jelly’s Last Jam.”
“It was my first time being in an all-Black cast, which was so exciting, and our creative team was all Black as well, and it was very liberating,” she said.
Being a part of “Jelly’s Last Jam” likely helped strengthen Rogers’s performance of Betty, making it simultaneously more personal and more universal. “What I love about being playing Betty is I am Black and I’m playing her, and there’s a lot of pride in that,” Rogers said. “But a lot of people come and watch the show, but they’re not thinking about the fact that I’m Black. And I think that’s really nice and exciting and refreshing.”
Her performance connects with theatergoers because Rogers takes them along on Betty’s evolution from a denizen of a two-dimensional black-and-white world to a full-fledged human in the strange land of 21st-century New York City.
“She was able to go even deeper the second time around and really flesh out this character,” Ainsley Melham, who plays Dwayne, a jazz musician and Betty’s love interest, said over the phone. “Breathe into all of Betty’s dynamic, cartoonish qualities but also bring it down and ground it in reality.”
Now, Rogers can maybe let herself enjoy the ride. “Kent Gash came to see the show the other day, and it made me so happy,” she said. “It was just so special. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness — I’m an actress.’”
It hasn’t been that long since that messy tap audition, but these days, Rogers has definitely picked up the pattern.
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