There is a particular frustration in watching a Wanted Broadway musical review take shape onstage when the performers are giving everything and the book refuses to meet them halfway. That is the central tension of “Wanted,” the new musical now on Broadway, written by Angelica Chéri and directed by Stevie Walker-Webb. The show draws on the lives of Chéri’s great-great aunts, Mary Clarke and Martha Clarke, Black women in post-emancipation Texas who chose to pass as white and used their beauty and their guns to protect their family’s land and legacy. It is a premise loaded with danger, moral complexity and dramatic possibility. Yet the production’s narrative remains strangely muted, content to skim surfaces that cry out for deeper excavation.
A Strong Cast Doing Heavy Lifting
Solea Pfeiffer plays Mary, and Liisi LaFontaine plays Martha. Both performers arrive with the kind of vocal authority that can make an audience lean forward, and they are surrounded by an exceptional ensemble. The musical’s most beautiful asset is its sound: voices that carry genuine emotional weight and a stage presence that briefly convinces you the evening might turn a corner. Time and again, the cast generates heat that the material does not sustain. The performances are not the problem. They are the reason to keep watching, even as the story drifts.
What makes the disconnect so noticeable is that the actors appear to be playing a more urgent musical than the one written around them. Pfeiffer and LaFontaine bring conviction to women whose choices are inherently high-stakes, but the book gives those choices too little room to breathe. The result is a production where individual moments land while the overall arc feels slack.
Where the Narrative Loses Its Grip
The source material is inherently compelling: two Black women in post-emancipation Texas leveraging racial passing, beauty and firearms to hold onto land and family legacy. That is a story about survival, performance, risk and the brutal economics of freedom. Yet “Wanted” treats these elements with a restraint that reads less like subtlety and more like hesitation. The musical never fully commits to the tension its premise promises.
Chéri, who wrote both the book and lyrics, has built a show around real ancestors, and the familial connection is clearly meaningful. But inspiration alone does not solve structural problems. Walker-Webb’s direction keeps the evening orderly, and the production values are polished, yet the storytelling lacks the propulsion that would make the stakes feel immediate. Audiences are told what is at risk more often than they are made to feel it.
A Musical Caught Between Ambition and Caution
“Wanted” arrives with the hallmarks of a serious Broadway endeavor: a historical foundation, a distinctive cast and a creative team with clear personal investment. What it does not yet have is a narrative engine strong enough to match its stars. The show’s best passages suggest the musical that might have been, one where the moral contradictions of passing and the violence of land disputes were allowed to collide with real force.
Instead, the evening settles into a muted register that undersells both its performers and its history. The dazzling cast can elevate individual scenes, but it cannot rewrite the architecture around them. For a musical built on the idea that myths often grow from truth, “Wanted” too often lets the truth stay quiet.
