James Earl Jones theatre, New York City
A ‘mostly true’ tale of 19th-century sisters running from the law is underserved in a production stuffed with superfluous showboating
The new retooled musical Wanted, from writer Angelica Chéri and composer Ross Baum, opens with a blare of excitement: a Greek chorus of sorts, clad in billowing white garments like spirits from the great beyond, lay their scene in 1890s Texas. There, we meet two Black sisters, Mary and Martha Clarke, who will become wanted criminals. The tone of Baum’s music is portentous, its volume high, suggesting that an epic journey is about to unfold. What ensues from there is, sadly, not quite as suspenseful, moving or grand as advertised.
Chéri based this “mostly true” story on two of her great-great aunts, daughters of an emancipated sharecropper whose absent father was white. Mary and Martha are light-skinned and thus figure they can pass in the white world, at least long enough to earn some money that might allow their mother, Tallulah, to buy the cotton-field land she’s been working for decades. It’s a dangerous gambit, and soon devolves into a gun-wielding crime spree in which the sisters rob various deserving targets. But that potentially invigorating spree is reduced to a mere montage, a quick flurry of activity that saps these daring acts of their inherent tension, of any true sense of risk. Despite its dynamic subject matter – marginalized people violently asserting themselves in a repressive time and place – this is a dismayingly tame production, albeit a more muscular one than was staged at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024.
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