The new, original musical “Wanted” began as the thesis project for librettist Angelica Chéri and composer Ross Baum during their master’s program in musical theater writing at New York University. Having been paired with other students in their class during the first year, something clicked when Chéri, a Black woman from Los Angeles, and Baum, an Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish man from Westchester, teamed up. “It was the most fun I had working with anybody that whole year,” Baum recalled. “It felt like a no-brainer to team up to write for the [thesis in our] second year.” That’s when Chéri brought up her family lore of the Clarke sisters.
“I was raised, in part, after my mother passed away from breast cancer, by my paternal grandmother, Dora Lee Clarke,” Chéri explained in her introduction to “Wanted” during a September preview presentation for the press. “In her true fashion, she would sit me down at her kitchen table at five years old and whip out this massive photo album filled with reams and reams of pictures of my ancestors. And in the midst of this book were Mary and Martha Clarke, what appeared to be two white women in my family.” As it turns out, an enslaved woman and a Frenchman had a love affair and had a son, the father of the Clarke sisters.
“Then [my grandmother] told me [the sisters] were outlaws, in 1893 — Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde — but the story would change depending on what was on the table, what was in your stomach and what was in the kitchen,” Chéri continued. “Literally, one day they were outlaws because they robbed a train, they robbed a bank, they killed somebody… We don’t know.”
Together, Chéri and Baum created a story rooted in ancestry that crackles with thrill and drama. “Wanted” begins with Mary, Martha and their mother, Tallulah. They are sharecroppers who want to buy the land they’ve worked, but the landlord won’t have it and keeps “calculating” their debt. The sisters decide to leave home, pass as white and seek higher-paying work — but an encounter on a train renders them accidental burglars. The Clarke sisters realize they can earn trust by passing and money by robbing and embrace a life of banditry. But it gets complicated when Mary falls for their next mark, a rich white man, and Martha falls for his Black servant.
Over the past 12 years, Chéri and Baum have honed their musical version of the sisters Clarke — starting at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) festival in 2018, premiering out of town at Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theatre in 2020, bowing at Millburn, New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024 — all under the title “Gun & Powder” — before debuting on Broadway as “Wanted.” The creative team and cast told Broadway News that the version currently in previews at the James Earl Jones Theatre is the truest version of the show they set out to make.
