*****Boop!

Broadway welcomes a hot new hoofer, who just happens to be a nonagenarian

Jasmine Amy Rogers and Ainsley Melham in Boop! Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Pre-curtain, as my nine-year-old guest readied her nonelectronic paper notepad (children will listen, and also imitate), we discussed the audience demographic: predominantly female; average age, mid-teens.

Clearly the word is out that, however provocative the inspiration – a saucy, baby-voiced chanteuse who emanated from animator Max Fleischman’s pen in the still-roaring 1930s – Boop! is wholesome as all get-out, in the best sense.

As conceived by Bob Martin (responsible, most recently, for Prom), multi-Grammy-winning composer David Foster, and lyricist Susan Birkenhead (she scripted Working), this festive extravaganza addresses questions on every adolescent’s mind, regardless of era or gender. What is love, and where can I find it? Also, tangentially, Why am I even here?

Boop! opens with a joyous tap floorshow choreographed by director Jerry Mitchell – because why hold back? The teen years are all about impulsivity and curiosity. It’s the latter trait that prompts Betty (radiant, seemingly indefatigable Broadway newcomer Jasmine Amy Rogers) to leave behind her monochrome original habitat for a test ride into the future, via an umbrella gizmo invented by her toon relative, Grampy (Stephen DeRosa).

My one cavil is that the puttering inventor – sporting a cotton-ball tonsure wig designed, like Betty’s spiky do, by Sabana Majeed – is accorded a bit too much prominence. Two senior-romance segments, even when involving an ageless dish like Faith Prince, is one too many. As for Grampy’s dog, Pudgy (a petite marionette manipulated by Philip Huber), it’s easy enough to tune the little guy out.

It’s natural to prefer tagging along with innocent-abroad Betty as she lands smack in the middle of Comic Con at Javits (evocative set by David Rockwell). Though goggle-eyed at all the novelty, she fits right in, a star among stans (Gregg Barnes’s costumes are snazzy throughout). Betty has the good sense to fall for a normie, Dwayne (Australian actor Ainsley Melham, who sings like a borderless natural-born crooner). Dwayne’s solo, “She Knocks Me Out,” is a marvel of un-gussied-up authenticity, and the stuff of teen dreams, whatever one’s budding orientation. (Martin does manage to insert a sweet little same-sex romance into Betty’s origin story, at the outset when she’s the toast of 1930s Hollywood.)

Everything comes easily to this paragon, except a sense of her authentic self, and that will emerge as Betty becomes the unofficial mentor of a lonely, questing New York super-fan, Trisha (played by petite vocal phenom Angelica Hale, age 17). Separately and as a team, they each set out on an identity quest. Betty very nearly backtracks to her ‘30s persona as sexpot prey when a masher of a mayoral candidate (Erich Bergen, hilariously entitled and libidinous). hires her as window dressing.

In her two-dimensional, black-and-white life, Betty was forever fending off overtures of this ilk by bonking her assaulters on the head. The need does indeed rearise, but the crux of this show is Betty’s bond with shy, insecure Trisha.

At one turning point toward the end, the members of the corps pivot energetically in two-sided costumes, divided at the seams between Day-Glo hues and drab chiaroscuro. Who in their right mind would willingly choose a life of grayscale over vivid color? Not the young audiences lucky enough to absorb the uninsistent message slipped into this seductive treat of a show.

Broadway, to July 13