Wanted

Wanted is a new musical with a Western setting. Angelica Chéri wrote the book and lyrics, and Ross Baum composed the score. Its heroines are Mary and Martha Clarke, Black twins in 1893 Texas who become outlaws and, while on the run, pass for white. The show is also listed under the longer title Wanted: The Legend of the Sisters Clarke.

The Clarke sisters were real people. They were Chéri's great-great-aunts, and her family remembered them through a pair of portraits kept in a photo album and through the explanation that came with them: the two women in the pictures were Black and had lived as white. Beyond that, the family stories never lined up. Some relatives said the twins held up a bank or shot and killed an attacker; others said they married Pullman porters and lived quietly. With no single version to follow, Chéri and Baum invented their own. The producers present it as a mostly true story, but it is best understood as a family legend turned into a musical, not a documented history.

Before Broadway the show was called Gun & Powder. Under that name it was staged in 2020 at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, and again in 2024 at Paper Mill Playhouse, before taking its new title for its Broadway premiere at the James Earl Jones Theatre. Among the new musicals of the 2026–27 Broadway season, it was billed as the first to open.

The Clarkes are a sharecropping family in post-emancipation Texas. Tallulah Clarke, the twins' mother, owes a debt on the land she works, and unless it is paid she will lose her home. Mary and Martha set out to raise the money and clear what she owes. The Kinfolk, a chorus of ancestors, watch over the twins and steer them along the way.

People with power want to keep the Clarkes from building anything of their own, and the sisters are pushed into desperate steps that make them outlaws. Passing for white keeps them hidden while they rob their way across the state and send what they take back home to Tallulah.

The scheme holds until the sisters reach a saloon town and romance enters the picture. Mary and Martha start out acting as one, but as the story goes on they split, and each twin looks for safety and freedom by her own road. In the song list, two second-act duets pair Mary with Jesse and Martha with Elijah. Other characters include Sissy, Flo, Fannie Porter, Mr. Billingsley and a crowd of Townspeople.

The show has been reworked over the years, so earlier productions are only a partial guide. In the 2020 staging, Jesse was a wealthy white saloon owner, Elijah was his manservant, and Sissy and Flo worked as maids in his house. On Broadway the cast list names him simply Jesse, without the surname Whitewater he carried in 2020 and 2024.

Beneath the outlaw adventure, the musical is about who gets to decide a family's future. Its concerns are race, color and racial passing, the bond between two sisters, and a family's claim to what it has long been owed. It also puts Black life in the American West, after slavery ended and before the civil rights era, at the center of a Western. This page does not describe how the story ends.

Baum's original score draws on country, soul and blues. Gospel, folk, jazz, a cappella singing and R&B are also among its influences, alongside traditional musical theater writing, and each main character and each community in the story is given a musical style of its own.

A few numbers give a sense of the score. "Prologue" belongs to the Kinfolk, and "Inheritance" joins them with Mary, Martha and Tallulah. Both were among the three songs the company performed for the press on September 29, 2026; the third was "Under a Different Sun," a second-act duet for Martha and Elijah. "Wide Open Plains" and "Mama's Name" are duets for the twins. "Gun & Powder" is a full-company number that once gave the show its title. "The Way I Am" is a solo for Mary, and "Freedom" pairs Martha with the Kinfolk.

The first recordings came before Broadway. "Gun & Powder" was released as a single in June 2025, and Wanted: The Studio EP, a five-track recording from 2025 that runs about 15 minutes, includes "Wide Open Plains," "The Train," "Gun & Powder," "The Way I Am" and "Freedom," sung by Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine and a studio cast. A live version of "Inheritance" was captured at a one-night concert in May 2026 at Artist House, a New York venue. As of October 2026, no Broadway cast album has been announced.

The Broadway company is organized around the three Clarke women. The twins and their mother sit at the center, with the Kinfolk around them and a group of Townspeople filling out the frontier world the sisters pass through.

As of October 2026, Solea Pfeiffer plays Mary Clarke and Liisi LaFontaine plays Martha Clarke. Pfeiffer played Mary in the 2020 premiere, and LaFontaine played Martha at Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024; the two first met at a 2018 workshop of the show. Wanted is the first time either of them has originated a leading role on Broadway, and it is LaFontaine's Broadway debut. Ximone Rose is the standby for both sisters.

As of October 2026, Ledisi plays Tallulah Clarke, her first principal role on Broadway; New York audiences have seen her before in Hair and Caroline, or Change. Luke James plays Elijah, and Bradley Jaden makes his Broadway debut as Jesse. Aurelia Williams (Sissy) and Awa Sal Secka (Flo) return to roles they played earlier, at Paper Mill Playhouse and Signature Theatre respectively. Katie Thompson plays Fannie Porter, Nathan Quay Thomas plays Mr. Billingsley, and six actors make up the Kinfolk. Casting can change, so check the official website for the latest company.

Wanted started as Chéri and Baum's thesis in NYU Tisch's graduate program in musical theater writing; Chéri pitched her great-great-aunts' story to Baum as they planned their thesis year. The writers have said they began the project around the time Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. In 2015 the show had its first workshop production at NYU, directed by Jerry Dixon with Tisch undergraduates in the cast. Afterward the writers rewrote it from top to bottom, keeping only seven songs from the first draft.

Several programs for new musicals helped shape it next. In 2017 Signature Theatre chose it for the SigWorks lab out of 170 submissions, and Joe Calarco directed a presentation there. In 2018 it was developed at Theater Latté Da's NEXT Festival and picked for NAMT's Festival of New Musicals. In January 2019 it went to the Goodspeed Writers Grove in Connecticut, and it also had development residencies at Goodspeed, at Two River Theater and with the Barnett Residency.

The world premiere, still under the title Gun & Powder, ran at Signature Theatre from January 28 to February 23, 2020, directed by Robert O'Hara. Emmy Raver-Lampman and Solea Pfeiffer led the cast as Martha and Mary, with Marva Hicks as Tallulah.

A second production followed at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, from April 4 to May 5, 2024. Stevie Walker-Webb directed this one; Liisi LaFontaine played Martha, Ciara Renée played Mary, and Hunter Parrish was Jesse Whitewater.

The new title, Wanted, was announced on May 12, 2025, and on June 26, 2025, workshop presentations at New 42 Studios featured Pfeiffer and LaFontaine as the twins, with Will Swenson as Jesse. The Broadway engagement at the James Earl Jones Theatre was announced on March 17, 2026, with the same two actors confirmed as the sisters. In May 2026, Ledisi was introduced as Tallulah at Wanted Unplugged, the Artist House concert in SoHo. Previews began on October 15, 2026, with opening night set for November 8, 2026.