Betsy Wolfe doesn’t mind if audiences who catch her performance in “Joy: A New True Musical” are expecting to see a show about a mop ― so long as they take time to ponder the sweet message of self-empowerment at its core, too.
“Joy,” which opened Sunday at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre in New York, chronicles the life of Joy Mangano (Wolfe), who rose to prominence in the early 1990s as the inventor of the Miracle Mop.
A Long Island native, Mangano endeared herself to legions of consumers with regular appearance on television network QVC, and by 2000, was selling $10 million worth of Miracle Mops annually.
“There’s very few, if any, musicals written about modern women whose complete journey is that of entrepreneurship while also changing their family’s life,” Wolfe, whose credits include Broadway’s “Falsettos” and “Waitress,” told HuffPost in an interview. “A lot of people refer to theater as an escape from their lives. This show is a beautiful examination of where you are, where you’ve been, and where you could go.”
As the musical shows, Mangano’s success was hard-fought. Not only is she raising her daughter Christie (Honor Blue Savage) as a single mom, but she’s also a source of financial and moral support for her own mother Toots (Jill Abramovitz) and father Rudy (Adam Grupper), as well as her ex-husband, Tony (Brandon Espinoza), who is dreaming of music stardom while living in her basement. While her newfound career progresses, she faces further obstacles, many imposed by male business honchos who question her drive.
