Broadway’s Rising Star Joy Woods on Giving Gen Z a Gypsy to Remember

Joy Woods
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)

Joy Woods doesn’t burn hot and fast with her characters. She’s more apt to let them simmer a while, giving them time to reveal themselves in due course—even if the Broadway calendar refuses to allow it. “You have a month of rehearsal, a few weeks of tech, a few weeks of previews, and then critics come,” she says to Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show, talking about her high-pressured star turn opposite Audra McDonald in George C. Wolfe’s revival of Gypsy at the Majestic Theatre. She plays Momma Rose’s mousy, talentless daughter Louise who, at the start, is a poor excuse for a cow’s behind, and by the end, emerges as the capitivating Gypsy Rose Lee (thanks to one epic strip tease). Sure, maybe it’s still more gimmick than talent, but the transformation is undeniable—and it can’t be microwaved.

“In a matter of three months, you need to have a full person built and ready to go,” Woods says of life on a Broadway time table. She adds, with a cool and level head, “It doesn’t take three months to get to know a person. Some people take years to find out if they wanna marry somebody.” She acknowledges the people who follow The Bachelor model of courtship and get engaged in three months, but says definitively, “I’m not one of them.” 

Her last Broadway role—the middle of three Allies in The Notebook, in which her younger counterpart was played by her current Gypsy sister Jordan Tyson—had a longer gestation. A Chicago premiere prefaced the show’s Broadway run where Woods won fans for her emotional outpour mid-downpour, and viral rendition of the new anthem of musical theater beltresses, “My Days.” She landed the role of Louise during The Notebook‘s Broadway run, and left the show to dive straight into the land of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s canonical musical, which, since premiering in 1959, has given every generation a Rose-Louise pair to call its own. 

“The last revival was what—2008?” says Woods, conjuring the Laurents-helmed production that won both Patti LuPone and Laura Benanti Tony Awards for their respective performances as Rose and Louise. She shocks her host: “I was eight.”

It puts in perspective the value of this latest Gypsy—reimagined with new staging, choreography (by Camille A. Brown) and historical context as the journey of a Black family scraping their way through the Orpheum Circuit in the 1920s and ’30s. “Anybody that is around my age, unless you were locked in with the theater world, we didn’t know what Gypsy was,” Woods says plainly.

This is Gen Z’s Gypsy—and to speak in Gen-Z vernacular, it’s a Gypsy that hard-launches an era of heightened responsiblity to take care of a musical that no longer has any of its original creators minding the store (Sondheim, the last surviving writer, died in 2021). “I think as long as we’re trying new and inventive theater, it’s nice to pay homage to the classics,” Woods says. “[I hope] that people of my generation get to feel that too.” 

Watch the full interview below.