Joy – 24 July 2025

Even a miracle mop couldn’t clean up the mess that is Joy, a new off Broadway musical starring Betsy Wolfe as aforementioned mop inventor. But after a couple days of reflection, I have some ideas. In broad, sweeping generalizations, I’m going to break this down by casting choices, writing structure, and thematic content.

In this cast, Betsy Wolfe was clearly in a league of her own. Her incredible, mind boggling talent really exposed the flaws inherent in the voices of other cast members and the writing of the show at large. Everyone else was on a similar level, and with a protagonist at that level this would have seemed like a fun show with a lot of heart. Yet because Wolfe was so incredible, the audience found themselves waiting for her to come back, suffering through moments she was not in when all of a sudden the caliber of the production hit the floor. It was clear that Joy (Betsy Wolfe)’s character had nowhere to grow in because the perceived mediocrity of the rest of the cast held her back from having a character arc. I’d like to argue that, with a Joy who gave less, the cast wouldn’t have seemed mediocre. We would have seen and felt the heart of this production and the momentum the writing was striving for if we had been willing to listen to the other characters. We weren’t. We were waiting for the talent to get back on stage and belt— which she did beautifully. This phenomenon prevented the audience from connecting with the world of the story and the characters. It felt more like we were at a concert waiting through the other acts for the person we came to see to perform and enjoying those performances as individual songs, not part of a story.

The score and lyrics (Annmarie Milazzo) in this show were simply uninspired. They were somehow both too lofty and too literal to resonate, and there were moments, like the love duet with Joy and Tony (Brandon Espinoza), that crossed the line between campy and cringey. The show had too many reprises, such that by the time it neared its conclusion, I was puzzled as to why this was a two act show with so many reprises of “The Shape of Things” when the story could have fit neatly into a one act that would be less repetitive. “The Shape of Things” is a great song— but it’s not a full length musical all on its own and reusing it started to feel like a cop out for actually writing enough songs for a meaningful full length show. I was significantly moved by Toots (Jill Abramovitz)’s song about each successive generation being better than their mothers— yet it was very out of place in this show. It was the only moment that made me feel something, but it was too little too late and in the grand scheme of the plot of the show completely unnecessary. Betsy Wolfe put a lot of emotion into her numbers and the emotion wasn’t fully written into the numbers, such that it exposed every weak point in the writing like a sore thumb. Just like her character, Betsy Wolfe was trying to make something out of nothing.

As for the thematic content, the primary thing that Pages on Stages typically writes about, the only thing I can really think of to say is that this was an attempt at intergenerational empowerment of women to create things that improve the world. There’s not much to deconstruct here. It’s blatant and it’s literal and it’s supposed to be funny but most of the time it’s quirky at best. I wanted so hard to like it, but when I left, I found myself let down. This was a show that didn’t really have a purpose. It told the story that was simple in a way that was unremarkable somehow made worse by top-tier Tony nominee talent. To me, the excessively lengthy preview period is proof that from the beginning the creative team knew that this project was going to require a lot of work if it was going to come together as something worth seeing. In the end, they failed to salvage whatever investors saw in it.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.