(Center) Jasmine Amy Rogers (Betty Boop), Anthony Melham (Dwayne), (Far left) Erich Bergen (Raymond Demarest), Anastacia McCleskey (Carol Evans), Angelica Hale (Trisha), (Far right) Phillip Huber (Pudgy), Faith Prince (Valentina), Stephen DeRosa (Grampy)/Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

In the midst of preparations for the world premiere of “Boop! The Musical” at the CIBC Theatre, legendary Canadian songwriter, producer, arranger and pianist David Foster—the composer of “Boop!”—along with his wife, the singer Katharine McPhee, went to New York to be in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Riding a float together performing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” from their new Christmas album “Christmas Songs” at one end of the parade, the band Chicago was at the other end performing “You’re the Inspiration,” co-composed by Foster and Peter Cetera from 1984’s “Chicago 17.” Foster produced and arranged the album, which was the band’s bestselling album ever. Foster also co-wrote several of the songs.

“Do you know who that was singing in the parade?” Foster asks, back in Chicago, a few days before “Boop” opens. Fellow Canadian Neil Donell who had been the lead singer in Brass Transit, Canada’s biggest Chicago cover band. “I’ll be.” And three singers since co-composer Cetera, who originally sang it on the Foster-produced recording.

“Chicago was really pissed off at me when we made that album,” says Foster. “I do understand their frustration now. I didn’t then because I was a thirty-something young hothead producer and I thought I knew everything. And I had a vision for them; they just didn’t share my vision. So as successful as it was, it wasn’t their vision and I totally get why they were pissed off. Not Peter, because Peter and I ganged up on them. He’s retired now. He gave the world a lot of great music.

“In retrospect now, I was such a fan of the seventies stuff. That earlier stuff was their best stuff. It was their most inventive music and their most exciting stuff.”

Power ballads have been a Foster specialty across his five-decade career and also happen to be the bread of Broadway. How much of a jump was it for Foster to begin his journey to the Great White Way with “Boop!”?

David Foster/Photo: Gage Skidmore

“It was not a big jump for me,” admits Foster. “I have had a great and fulfilling Top 40 pop career but those careers do come to an end. Age is a factor and you just can’t connect anymore with ‘the kids,’ right?

“And people say ‘Why did you do Betty Boop?’ Well, nobody else asked me to do a Broadway play except the people from ‘Betty Boop’: Mark Fleischer who owns the rights to Betty Boop and Bill Haber the producer asked and nobody else had asked. I thought it sounded like a cool thing because I still believe I can write good music, I just can’t write a Top 40 hit anymore unless I back door into one like Kanye when he sampled one of my songs. Or Drake saying, ‘Hey, play a few chords for me.’ In general, it’s a music that I love still—I love Top 40—but I don’t know how to make it anymore. It was a natural, I thought, this is a good place for me to go. I can still be creative. I can still write sort of the way I’ve always written because you have to write good songs on Broadway, but you don’t necessarily have to write Top 40 songs. So I think it was not a big jump at all.

“Apparently, there had been a composer or two before me with ‘Boop!’ And for whatever reason, that didn’t work out. I think I was given a title or two to try and write a song to and I did, and they liked it. Actually, the very first song that I wrote all those years ago is still in the musical. It actually closes the musical so there’s that.”

Jasmine Amy Rogers (Betty Boop)/Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

When Foster played the eleven o’clock number of “Boop!” at a media preview last month with Jasmine Amy Rogers who plays Betty Boop, it sounded very much like—drumroll—a David Foster song. Which, of course, it was. Foster laughs.

“Yeah. By the way, I think she’s a star. I’ve seen the show like six times now and I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s just amazing. Every night the show is getting better as you would expect. And I’ve learned so much over the last decade of being involved in the show. They say you have to be prepared to throw your best song out. I’ve done that twice, at least in my own mind. And [director] Jerry Mitchell has a great vision for this show and he’s brilliant. And now in the crunch all of a sudden we’re adding new songs just in the last couple of days. The dialogue changes every day. Not drastically, but I’m amazed at these actors that they have the ability to change a line that night. It’s like, how do you not get confused? New lyrics in the songs. It’s all a flurry now and people told me it was going to be this way. I thought everything looks pretty good to me but those five-hundred tweaks over the course of a three or four-week period are making it even a much better show.

“What a project. I’m just amazed and I’m sort of hovering at thirty-thousand feet because I’m not in the trenches per se with all the daily changes they make. I’m just amazed at Jerry Mitchell’s brain. He has lived and breathed this show for the last six months. I mean, day and night. We were in yesterday rehearsing a new song, believe it or not, and he’s as though he came on the project a day earlier.”

Is there a similarity between working alone in a studio where you work to get perfection once over many takes versus the communal experience of a Broadway show where there are eight shows a week? You’re working in real time in front of people rather than in the isolation of the studio and that energy that’s also coming with that from there being the live-performance element responding.

“Yes, that’s true. When I was making records, I didn’t really rely on anybody. I didn’t care what people thought for the most part. I was an island. In my younger days, I was arrogant about it. I was dictatorial—that’s what Chicago was responding to, too—but you know, an album is a singular vision. And this is a singular vision, too.

“I love the perfection that Jerry is going for. You’d have to ask him but I don’t think he reads that much into an audience. I think he’s just in his own head and watches the show every night and every afternoon and there’s notes every day. I’m sure the audience plays a part but he’s so focused on making the show as great as it can be. And I would say maybe the show came in at seven and a half and it’s going to end as a nine and a half.”

Foster has said in interviews that his favorite song is “Send in the Clowns,” a surprising choice. “Yup. And here’s the even weirder thing. That’s my favorite song because of the lyrics. And I’m a music guy, not really a lyrics person per se. Of course, the melody is incredible but there’s something about that lyric that just does me in. I don’t know what it is. ‘Me here at last on the ground / You in mid-air.’ Two people where the timing is off. I don’t know. It just gets me.”

Was Foster responding to Judy Collins? “No, I don’t give a shit who sings it.”

Had he seen “A Little Night Music” where the song originated? “No, I never saw the play. It just moves me.”

Was he a Sondheim fan at all? Or is it just a coincidence Foster’s favorite song was a Sondheim song?

“Loosely, but of course, now that I’m sort of in the Broadway swirl, I think Sondheim was brilliant. My only half-direct rub with him was that I had produced the song ‘Somewhere’ for Barbra Streisand [for ‘The Broadway Album.’] It was kind of big, unique and different, she liked it a lot. But then I found out [Sondheim] doesn’t even like to recognize that he wrote that piece because he only wrote the lyrics. Can you imagine? He doesn’t like taking credit for ‘West Side Story’ because he only wrote the lyrics and not the music and the lyrics. Are you kidding me?

“Then there’s also the musical aspect, of course. Listen, I’ve tried to steal from Sondheim since I’ve been doing ‘Betty Boop.’ Like fifty times. And guess what?  It’s not stealable. I’ve done my best, but it sounds like shit when it comes out. I’ve tried to deliberately rip him off. And there’s something that he did that was so unique and so magical and I can’t get close to it. I don’t know why. I would if I could.”

Did Foster have a choice in his lyricist for “Boop!,” Susan Birkenhead?

“I didn’t have a say in it but I’m so glad that they picked her because she’s just amazing. The music writer is third in line in terms of changing things, the lyricist and the book writer are first and second. She’s had to change so much stuff and she’s so good at it. She kind of goes by unnoticed but she’s just amazing. I’m so glad that I got to work with her. We were working together yesterday and she just spits out these great lines. She’s a pro and she’s a great person as well. And monstrously talented.”

Did Foster have any experience attending Broadway shows? Or was that an alien world? “Alien, alien.”

Did Foster grow up with any Broadway cast albums? “None. None.”

“My only touch with Broadway was that I produced the original ‘Dreamgirls’ album and watched ‘Dreamgirls’ fifty times. I didn’t know what a genius [director and choreographer] Michael Bennett was; I had never even heard of him. But I produced that album and we won a Grammy. That’s cool. And then I went on with my life.”

“West Side Story” didn’t come on your radar as a cast album?

“Nope. No. I never heard the name Sondheim until Streisand when we were doing ‘Somewhere.’ Sadly I didn’t know. I still don’t know that much. I’m friends with Andrew Lloyd Webber, whom I love. He’s amazing. Of course, Josh Groban I produced, an artist who’s killing it on Broadway right now. Slowly I’m getting connected now.

“Broadway as you well know, they don’t take kindly to people like me. And that’s still a bridge that I may have to cross even though I’ve put ten years into this project and learned along the way and learned the ways of Broadway so to speak. I now have a full understanding of what it really means to write a song for a musical where it has to advance the story and you have to do this and do that and you have to feel this. It is a lot different than writing a song for a record. I feel like I’ve earned the right to have a seat at the table now. But I may not have. I may. Broadway went gunning for my friend—well, I won’t say who. I don’t know if I’ve earned a seat yet. I guess we’ll just find out.

“Let me ask you,” says Foster, turning the tables. “Can’t critics have a bad day? Like a pilot can have a bad day? Like a songwriter can have a bad day? Can’t you have a bad day and not like a show that night but the next night you might have loved it?

“It’s kind of like in my life, I’ve been so wrong sometimes. I told Celine Dion that the ‘Titanic’ song would kill her career. God. I told Richard Marx that he’s going to be a great producer and songwriter but he shouldn’t try to be artist. Can you imagine? He never let me forget that.”

During the same decade that Foster has been composing “Boop!” he has also been touring.

“My wife and I tour together and I love that. And I love touring because I spent my life in a submarine environment—no windows, air-locked—pounding this music out and never seeing the real world. For the last ten years, I’ve been able to tour and experience what all the artists I’ve worked with experience. Celine and I would work on a song for an album in the studio, she goes out and plays it around the world and gets feedback. And I’m on to the next album.

“It’s been great to tour and I found out that people enjoy hearing the songs that I wrote or co-wrote or produced. And as long as I have great singers, which I do, they enjoy it and they don’t need to see Celine or Whitney or Madonna standing there.”

Anthony Melham (Dwayne), Jasmine Amy Rogers (Betty Boop)/Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Does Foster see himself doing another show? Ten years is a long time.

“Well, I know now much more than I did ten years ago. And so the answer is yes, I would love to do another show. And I know now that I’ll do it in two years, not ten. And right or wrong if that means after two years that it fails, so be it. But I won’t spend all that amount of time. It was a learning curve for me. And now I know what I know now. I know there’s a way to do it at a quicker pace. So if I get an opportunity I will definitely jump at it but with some new rules for me. Some self-imposed parameters.

“It was mainly the time element that was the problem because we went through a lot of metamorphosis. The problem we had with ‘Betty’ was there was no story because Betty is just a series of two-minute cartoons. So the story had to be created and that’s difficult to do and Bob [Martin] has done a great job, but he’s not the first writer on this. So it took a long time to get to this story. I’m running out of time, Jesus. I can’t spend another ten years on a show. If I had the opportunity again, I would look for a story that already was solid, already established.

“I’ve also learned for the most part, the only movies that work [as musicals] on Broadway for the most part are movies that didn’t do too well. Small movies. The blockbusters have had trouble with Broadway. There’s a huge list of them. So yeah. I thought of a small movie that I thought, wow, that would make an interesting musical.”

Time for rehearsal and back to the world of “Boop!”

“I’m hoping that people enjoy this musical. We worked hard and I hope I get to do it again. I hope people enjoy it. It’s been a great and huge learning curve for me and it’s something I can add to the bucket list now.”