Joy: A New True Musical is a rags to riches story about a divorced, recently fired Long Island woman who makes a fortune inventing a different kind of mop. A mop? Yep, it’s unfathomable why millions of people would fall in love with a mop but that’s what happened to Joy Mangano whose unlikely story is being told at the Laura Pels Theatre with Betsy Wolfe starring. It is based on Mangano’s memoir, Inventing: Dare to Build a Brave and Creative Life. A 2015 film starred Jennifer Lawrence.
The show, with a book by Ken Davenport, begins with young Joy (Nora Mae Dixon) sitting alone in front of a box of her inventions. She pulls out her favorite, a glow-in-the-dark dog collar. In “The Shape of Things” (music and lyrics by AnnMarie Milazzo), she describes its usefulness: I see a dog collar glimmer/ brightly lit up/ made out of cardboard and glow tape/ like a bike reflector for a pup. It shines like a star/ so my neighbor’s dog won’t be hit by a car.
It’s a great idea, one that makes somebody else lots of money years later because she didn’t pursue her idea.
It takes the grown-up Joy getting fired from her airport job to spur her to action. With a house full of people she is more or less supporting -- her teenage daughter, Christie (Honor Blue Savage), her mother, Toots (Jill Abromovitz), who hasn’t gone out in years and spends her days on the living room sofa watching TV in her robe, her father, Rudy (Adam Grupper), and her ex-husband, Tony (Brandon Espinoza), who lives in the basement with her father – she energetically begins trying to sell the product she invents by accident, a mop with an super absorbing cotton top that can be tossed in the washing machine for use again and again, and that can be wrung out without someone bending over. While this might sound as if it were happening in the 1950s, she invented the mop in1990 when she was 35. Why anyone at any time, much less the 90s when the whole world was on the verge of changing with the creation of the Internet, would get excited about a housecleaning tool, with the unlikely title of Miracle Mop, is beyond me but as the musical’s title indicates, it’s a true story.
The first act is a frenzy of the core cast and the 11-member ensemble coming on to say why they feel frazzled, especially the women. Director Lorin Latarro does a great job of controlling the swirling action.
All of this makes for a fun first act but in the second act the novelty starts wearing out. Joy achieves phenomenal success on QVC convincing all those frazzled people that her mop will save them time for other things. This in spite of a disastrous start when she freezes in front of the camera on live TV. Because of her father’s carelessness in managing her business affairs, she ends up in court on the brink of bankruptcy and fighting for her patent.
Choreographer Joshua Bergasse, who nicely handles the chaos of the show, has a cute number with the five QVC judges, the SUITS dancing to “We Sell Stories.” As a giant QVC sing descends they sing: We’re a heritage of the same old boys. It’s a department store/ Laid out on your living room floor/ Reinventing how to make a sale/ We are blazing a trail/ Place and order and it’s in the mail.
While all of this seems like a lot of fuss over a mop the show clearly is about far more. It’s about honoring your creativity, fighting for what you believe in and never giving up. Wolfe portrays it all well.
