The Old West comes to Broadway in Wanted — but this new musical is a Western with a twist.
“We have all the tentpoles of the genre,” says the show’s cocreator Angelica Chéri of this “mostly true” story she based on enduring, intriguing family lore about her own real-life relatives. “We’ve got a train robbery, a bank robbery, a saloon, and a romance. But we’re not telling a typical Western story.”
That’s because Wanted puts two Black, female outlaws at the center of its tale. In 1893 Texas, twin sisters Mary and Martha Clarke, passing for white, embark on a life of lawlessness to help their mother settle her sharecropper’s debt.
Little is known for sure about the real-life Clarke sisters. That was part of the appeal for Chéri, who teamed with composer Ross Baum to turn the rip-roaring tales of her ancestors’ extralegal exploits into a musical that’s both a old Hollywood Westerns and an affecting story of sisterhood, justice, bloodlines, and belonging.
Previously titled Gun & Powder, the show premiered at Signature Theatre in Virginia in early 2020 and played a pre-Broadway run at the Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024. But if you think you’ve seen Wanted before, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Chéri, Baum, and their collaborators, led by director Stevie Walker-Webb and choreographer Chelsey Arce, have significantly reimagined the show for Broadway, forgoing the automated set seen at Paper Mill in favor of a staging that’s grittier, more tactile, and more human-powered.
“We’re really concentrating on making the world ruddier, scrappier, and more dangerous,” says Walker-Webb (Ain’t No Mo’).
Chéri agrees: “Now we can feel the dirt and smell the dust.”
The sweeping horizons of a new projection design by Stefania Bulbarella contribute to the show’s epic feel, while designer Beowulf Borritt’s revamped, multilevel set adds verticality to the visual storytelling. The latter brings fresh resonance to the show’s depiction of the Kinfolk, a group of ancestors who serve as the tale’s narrators and spirit guides.
“I call the Kinfolk the essential oils of this musical, because they’re just in the air of the story,” says choreographer Arce. “They’re ever-present.”
For the Broadway staging, Arce’s choreography finds new texture and shading in the show’s characters. “I think about Chelsey’s dance as architecture,” the director explains. “Even when we’re transitioning between scenes, there’s so much storytelling happening.”
Collaborators agree that Arce’s movement sequences have particularly enriched the portrayal of the housemaid characters in the story. “I really wanted to make the status of these folks land truly hard,” Arce says. “Just from watching their movements in the transitions between scenes, you’re finding out what their relationship is, how they feel about one another, and where they might go after our story ends.”
Composer Baum, too, has honed his work as Wanted made its way to Broadway. He and Chéri first began collaborating as students in New York University’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program. The initial incarnation of the musical, with music by Baum and book and lyrics by Chéri, premiered as their thesis project in 2014.
The duo has been rethinking and refining their song list ever since. “The vault is deep for this show,” Chéri says, laughing. “I think we’ve written somewhere around 130 songs.” Five tunes from that first thesis version remain in the Broadway version.
Baum’s music has proven a key component in evoking the style and feel of a Western while also mixing things up to keep audiences on their toes. “We definitely draw inspiration from classic Spaghetti Western soundtracks with those really iconic, melodic guitar themes,” he says. “But what’s most exciting to me is how we marry that with pop and R&B and gospel genres.”
Baum’s score also contributes to the breakneck velocity of the story. “It’s a Western, so it’s meant to be fast-paced,” Baum says of the show. “It’s like a train just bursting out of the station.”
All the collaborators say they’ve watched Wanted become ever more timely and resonant in the years since they began working on it. “There’s a bigger story here about the history that brought us to where we are, and what we owe to those who come after us to make a better history,” says Walker-Webb. “Ultimately I hope it will inspire people to believe that if we continue to do our part as living ancestors, we’ll leave a legacy worth remembering.”
“Wanted makes you think about where you come from, where you find your belonging and where you find your strength,” adds Baum. “So many people are going to see themselves in this show.”
