Wanted Keeps Its American Tall Tale Bright and Shiny

Somewhere around the middle of Wanted — Angelica Chéri and Ross Baum’s musical about sister outlaws in Reconstruction Texas — I finally put my finger on why the score kept pushing a specific button in my brain: Those gospel riffs, that sax, the glistening electric piano setting that’s the aural equivalent of Vaseline on the lens… It’s ’90s Disney, baby! Sure, it’s hardly a hot take to talk about the Disneyfication of Broadway anymore, but I mean this more granularly. In all sorts of ways, from the character of Baum’s music to the show-stealing sassy sidekicks, Wanted is channeling the Mouse House during its second golden age of animation, the era of Simba, Aladdin, and the muses of Hercules. Whether or not this is something to be celebrated is going to depend very much on who you are and what you like.

What can be said unequivocally of the show is that its cast sure can sing. They can holler and rumble, glide, glitter, and soar. Chéri (who wrote the book and lyrics) and Baum give them big crescendo after big crescendo, rolling waves of let’s-get-what’s-ours songs, eventually complemented by swooping I’ve-never-felt-this-way-before ballads and moody belters on the I’m-doing-what-I-have-to-do–to–what-have-I-become? spectrum. Despite a surface that often feels — after two developmental runs, at Virginia’s Signature Theatre and at Paper Mill Playhouse — polished to a commercial, salable gloss, the production began as a distinctly personal story. Its heroines, Mary and Martha Clarke, are Chéri’s great-great-aunts. She grew up hearing tales, no one could quite say how tall, of their adventures. Whether or not they were actually wily pistol-toting thieves, what was certain was that they were two Black women who braved and risked much by passing for white in the post-emancipation South. “You know how family stories do,” the leader of Wanted’s chorus (the colossal-voiced Melody A. Betts) tells us with a wry head tilt as the show begins: “So we believe it’s mostly true.”

That chorus is known as the Kinfolk. Cleverly costumed by Emilio Sosa in a range of silhouettes, from antebellum to traditional African, all in layers of fluttering, ethereal white fabric, they are Martha and Mary’s ancestors, always keeping an eye on the spiritual welfare of their girls. They’re plenty majestic when they want to be, but it’s a strength of the musical that they also prove mischievous and more than a smidge judgy. Wanted is fluent in a variety of Black vernaculars, including the devastating side-eye, and while that particular weapon is most often deployed by those sidekicks I mentioned, first we’ve got to meet our protagonists. Mary (Solea Pfeiffer) and Martha Clarke (Liisi LaFontaine) live with their mother Tallulah (Ledisi, whose vocal gravitas could split rock) as sharecroppers in Marlin, Texas. It’s been thirty years since the Emancipation Proclamation, but the Clarkes are still holding their own in a world where Tallulah’s bid to buy out her profligate landlord (Nathan Quay Thomas) results in violence and an untenable hike in the rent. The mortgage melodrama is, as Mrs. Potts once warbled, a tale as old as time, and Chéri uses its basic shape as a launch pad for the sisters’ adventure. In this telling, it’s the nasty landlord who winds up giving Mary and Martha their big idea: “Never forget who ya really are…” he snarls at them. “Sure, that skin’a yours plays tricks on ya. Hell, maybe somewhere else you might even have somebody fooled.”

Cue lightbulb! Cue we’ve-got-a-plan song! The fruit is generally low-hanging and the fish awaiting bullets in a barrel in Wanted. After Mary and Martha hit the road — with their faces powdered and Tallulah’s old six-shooter hidden in a carpetbag — it takes them hardly more than another up-tempo song to reach their second big eureka. (That song is almost clever: Listening to a bunch of passengers in the “Whites Only” train car, the girls hear their vanilla badinage as, “Something something cup of tea / Something something honeybee / Something and a big magnolia tree.” Chéri’s “something something” idea is fun, but I wished what followed had been more piquant.) Initially, Mary and Martha’s plan to “pass” is only meant to find them higher paying jobs, but when Martha pulls their gun on a couple of brutes who menace them on the train, the men drop their cash and run. “Mary,” she tells her sister, “I know how we gon’ get that money for Mama.”

It’s a big fat laugh line, working on the audience with the same Lego-click action of the preceding “you might even have somebody fooled” moment, and the show rolls merrily along. I’m not trying to be snippy, just descriptive: If there’s seldom been a cuter, cleaner rendering of the Old West — or, more accurately, the Old South — than in Wanted, that’s by design. This bouncing, driving directionality, the kind that’s headed toward a happy ending even if it swerves through some darkness along the way, is the idiom the show’s creators have clearly selected. There’s not a speck of grit to be seen, not even in the single number that it takes for the big-dreaming heroines to develop into hardboiled bandits (“Gun and Powder,” a romp that used to be the musical’s punny title song). As Mary and Martha whirled through this set of increasingly brazen stick-ups, eventually landing in a sleazy (but still cute) saloon intending to asset-strip its rich owner, I kept seeing flashes of an alternate-universe version of the project — probably a graphic, moody Netflix series à la East of Eden or Godless. There, Mary and Martha would brood and suffer; there would be resentment and conflict and a color palette like a bruise; things couldn’t possibly end well, not really, not in the real world.

But Wanted doesn’t take place in the real world, and it never set out to. Despite the giggles I suppressed with only partial success as Stevie Walker-Webb and set designer Beowulf Borritt transformed both set and staging into the cover of a steamy romance novel during Mary’s duet with her love interest, Jesse (Bradley Jaden) — that saloon-owning mark, now turned dubious ally, with whom the sisters linger too long — I couldn’t and still can’t really fault the musical for taking the sunnier, sillier side of the street. The thing about those Netflix series? They’re by mostly white creatives for, I’m guessing, mostly white audiences. They rush into the “realism” of violence partly as an upside-down form of apology: Yes, we did this and we acknowledge it — now look as we try to get some characters of color on screen in meaningful roles. Chéri and Baum have taken a different approach, closer to Bridgerton than to Deadwood. In their telling, Wanted is an intentional fantasy: It’s about enthusiasm, enjoyment, and rooting for a story’s Black heroes rather than devoting time to their, or our own, trauma.

That’s why some of the best parts of the show are its most comic, especially whenever the wonderful Aurelia Williams and Awa Sal Secka are on stage. As Sissy and Flo, a pair of maids who work for Jesse and who see everything, this cheeky, charismatic duo winds up being Wanted’s secret pair of stars. “Now, ya know I ain’t one to gossip,” says Sissy, launching the song “Dangerous” with a line and a look that already have everyone in stitches. Chéri does some of her broadest, most gleeful work here, as every time Sissy and Flo get close to hinting what they think is going on with the Clarke sisters, the lyrics veer away to another scene in the manner of an Archer transition:

SISSY & FLO: …’Cuz the pot got burned when it called the kettle —
JESSE (the next day, shopping with Mary): — black really brings out your eyes.

How to balance such shenanigans with the unavoidably unsettling undertones of this story? For the most part, Chéri and Baum simply go full steam ahead, which means that their intermittent attempts to have things both ways usually end up falling flat. Martha’s potential lover, a free man named Elijah played by Luke James, has a pretty forgettable song about feeling “Invisible” to everyone but the second Miss Clarke. The show also has to do some questionable gymnastics when it comes to wrapping everything up in a way that lets the sun keep shining on all the folks who deserve it. But there is an exception to these moments when the schticky and the serious don’t quite jell, and Pfeiffer sings the heck out of it. It’s “The Way I Am,” and it’s unquestionably Wanted’s grimmest song, a smoldering crooner of deluded self-annihilation. Pfeiffer’s lower register seems to produce thick smoke as she applies more and more powder before her wedding to Jesse, singing about her faith in his love even as she tries to white herself out. I don’t blame Wanted for taking the way of most enjoyment in its telling of Mary and Martha’s story. Still, these few minutes with Pfeiffer open the door on a show that has more up its sleeve than the old Disney songbook.

Wanted is at the James Earl Jones Theatre.