In one of the several moments throughout “Joy” that felt like being trapped inside an old infomercial, albeit an entertaining one, Joy Mangano (Betsy Wolfe) has just sold her first five thousand Miracle Mops on the QVC shopping channel when during the Act I finale cast members fan out through the theater giving out the mops – retail price at least $19.95 – to about a dozen members of the audience, including an older man sitting in front of me.

“Are you going to use it?” I asked the man at Intermission. But just at that moment, somebody from the production approached him to take back the mop, giving him a business card in exchange with the show’s logo. (Update: Apparently, as per commenter below, the card entitled bearer to pick up a mop later.)

The man asked me: “Are you enjoying the show?” I  simply said yes – it would be inappropriate to review a show for a stranger at intermission – but I couldn’t help adding “It’s quirky.” Then I asked: “How about you?”

“Well yeah,” he replied, “my daughter wrote it.”

The story of Joy Mangano, harried single mother on Long Island turned successful inventor and entrepreneur of household products, was told in the 2015 movie “Joy” starring Jennifer Lawrence, and then in Mangano’s 2017 bestselling  “Inventing Joy,” a combination autobiography and self-help book.   The movie embraced the surreal aspects of her life, playing up the comedy of her idiosyncratic extended family. The book was more earnest. (“I’ve spent thousands of hours on TV addressing hundreds of millions of people, and in all that time I’ve done one thing and one thing only – spoken straight from my heart….I believe we can all make meaningful impactful changes that will make the world around us better.”)  

“Joy: A New True Musical”  lies somewhere between the movie and book in tone, but it has a quirkiness all its own, in part because, well, it’s fifteen musical numbers about a woman who sold a mop, but mostly because it exists in an art form that tends to skewer business people. (The exception: show business people.)

Musicals roast people in business for comedy (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), straight plays picture them as tragic (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Lehman Trilogy ultimately), or savage them to make political points about the evils of capitalism (Enron, Ink, supposedly Glengarry Glen Ross.) But “Joy: A New True Musical” is clearly meant to inspire theatergoers with the story of an ordinary woman who overcame all obstacles, including her own family.   And theatergoers can surely be won over by the musical’s inspirational message, AnnMarie Milazzo’s pleasing if not especially memorable score, Joshua Bergasse’s lively choreography, and an appealing cast led by the phenomenal Betsy Wolfe – as long as they don’t mind occasionally feeling like the target of a marketing campaign.

At the start of the show, we learn how inventive Joy was from the time she was a child, and how messy her life has become in the early 1990s.  In the first song, “Welcome to My World,” she is the no-nonsense center of a typically chaotic morning with a household that includes her children, her grandmother, both parents even though they are divorced (her mother Toots never leaving the house, her father Rudy always out on a date), and Joy’s ex-husband Tony, who keeps hoping for a gig as a singer, but mostly just practices in the basement, which he shares unhappily with his ex father-in-law. If Joy seems to be the only person holding the household together, she’s not doing a great job of it: She always forgets to attend her daughter’s games, and she gets laid off from her job at the airport. In “The Shape of Things,” she wonders why she can’t use her talent for redesigning everyday items to redesign her life:

I close my eyes and imagine shapes in my head
I can turn the lines into patterns
But why can’t i shape my life instead
To keep it together ’cause i’m falling apart
What’s the shape of together?

On this fateful day, she knocks a wine bottle off the kitchen counter, which breaks into a thousand pieces. Her mother Toots (Jill Abramovitz) says “let me help” – and her idea of help is to get a mop and bucket, and leave it to Joy to use. She does, when she wrings out the mop by hand, she cuts her hand on some of the glass. This gives her the idea for a self-wringing mop, which is explained at length in dialogue and song 

Her family is skeptical, reminding her of the basement filled with boxes of her ideas that never worked, elaborating in the song “This is”

Your chocolate syrup you distilled
Your underwater radio
If that turned on 
We would’ve been killed

The rest of the musical is a step by step, song by song, account of how she and her mop triumphed over adversity – from lack of financing and support, to lack of  interest by retailers and shoppers alike, to shenanigans by business associates. This is a business story – there’s no getting away from that – but the creative team tries its best to have us see it as a story of female empowerment and family reconciliation, and there are some nice touches along the way. Joy gets her initial funding from her father’s floozy-looking new girlfriend,  Lorraine (the terrific Jaygee Macapugay) who turns out to have gone to high school with Joy (that’s how young she is.) At first she’s reluctant to invest: “ I worked very hard for what I have. My husband was not supposed to live that long.”

Before Joy pitches to QVC, we get an energetic chorus line of suited executives in “We Sell Stories,” singing about the then newly-formed cable channel’s philosophy; they sell

A perfume to remind you of your first kiss
Or a Christmas doll so you reminisce
About the days behind you
See, we don’t just sell products
We sell stories

The main conflict in Act II is a dispute over contracts and patents with a Texas contractor named Cowboy Eddie Arnold (Paul Whitty), who is a full-out villain– not just underhanded but proudly, insultingly sexist — which leads to an absurdly implausible courtroom scene. The best that comes of this sequence are a couple of tuneful country melodies, and then Wolfe’s showstopping number in court, “A Better Way”

Ken Davenport, who wrote the book, is a man of wide-reaching theatrical experience – a Tony-winning producer, playwright, general manager, blogger, teacher, social media maven, entrepreneur, marketer. He’s a great salesman.  This might explain what drew him to the story of Joy Mangano in the first place. It’s surely the key to the show’s ending, which puts less emphasis on female empowerment or family reconciliation than on another Mangano achievement. The Act II finale and the curtain call are full of product placement, cast members literally displaying such Mangano products as wheeled luggage, while the items are projected a la HSN on screens above the stage. The final words of the show, projected on the screen: “Over $3 billion in products sold.”

Joy: A New True Musical
Laura Pels Theater through August 17
Running time: Two hours, including an intermission
Tickets: $72 to $179
General Rush: “First 19 people in line can purchase up to two tickets for $19.95 each – the price of the original Miracle Mop!”
Book by Ken Davenport, music and lyrics by AnnMarie Milazzo,
Additional material  by Amanda Yesnowitz.
Directed by Lorin Latarro
Choreographed by Joshua Bergasse
 Music supervision and arrangements by Andy Einhorn, music director Jillian Zack (Music Director), 
Scenic design by Anna Louizos, costume design by Tina McCartney, lighting design by Yael Lubetzky, sound design by Daniel Lundberg, production and video design by David Bengali, hair and wig design by Liz Printz 
Cast:Betsy Wolfe as Joy, Jill Abramovitz as ‘Toots,’ Honor Blue Savage as ‘Christie,’ Adam Grupper as ‘Rudy,’ Brandon Espinoza as ‘Tony,’ Jaygee Macapugay as ‘Lorraine,’ Paul Whitty as ‘Cowboy Eddie,’ Charl Brown as ‘Dan,’ and Gabriela Carrillo as ‘Ronni.’ Dana Costello, Ryan Duncan, Gaelen Gilliland, Sydni Moon, Manuel Santos, Brian Shepard, Allysa Shorte, and Alan Wiggins. Briana Brooks, Nora Mae Dixon, Michał Kołaczkowski, Lael Van Keuren, and Jerome Vivona.