"Wanted," a new Broadway musical built around two real-life sisters who turned train robber in frontier Texas, opened Sunday night at the James Earl Jones Theatre to a critical reception that split cleanly in two: nearly every reviewer liked the singing, and nearly every reviewer had reservations about the story built around it.
The show, developed for years under the title "Gun & Powder" before its Broadway rebrand, follows twin sisters Mary and Martha Clarke, who passed as white and disguised themselves as men to rob trains across the Texas frontier in the 1890s. Composer Ross Baum and book writer and lyricist Angelica Chéri have shepherded the project since an off-Broadway staging in 2020, and Sunday's opening, after previews that began October 15, marked its first run on a Broadway stage.
Solea Pfeiffer and Liisi LaFontaine lead the cast as Mary and Martha, roles announced earlier this year, with Grammy nominee Luke James and R&B singer Ledisi filling out a company directed and choreographed by Stevie Walker-Webb.
A score that wins over skeptics
Where the reviews converged was on the music and the voices singing it. Writing in Variety, critic Aramide Tinubu argued the show's central problem is narrative, calling it "muted" even as the songs themselves landed -- a verdict echoed across much of the coverage gathered in a running critics' reviews page: this is, several reviewers suggested, a musical that works better as a cast album than as two and a half hours of theater.
Deadline's Greg Evans called it "spirited but uneven," pointing to thin characterization as the show races through its sisters' transformation from sharecroppers' daughters to armed outlaws. The Guardian's Richard Lawson was the toughest grader, awarding two stars and arguing the Broadway staging has lost some of the rawness of the musical's earlier regional productions. Entertainment Weekly's Shania Russell landed closer to the positive end, writing that the show has a "winning quality" that keeps breaking through its rougher patches. Even the New York Times, which named "Wanted" a Critic's Pick, hedged its praise, singling out the score and the leads' vocal performances while faulting a plot that gets away from itself in the second act.
A fuller tally, assembled by awards-season trackers reviewing the opening-night notices, found no outright pans among the major outlets -- a notable outcome for an original Broadway musical in a season when critics, per one roundup of the reviews, have been openly rooting for a new show to succeed on its own songs rather than on a familiar title or a film adaptation.
A frontier story built from newspaper archives
The Clarke sisters' story comes from Reconstruction-era Texas court and newspaper records documenting women who passed as men to survive on the frontier and, in this telling, to escape a life of sharecropping by turning to armed robbery. Baum and Chéri's musical reframes that history as a story about sisterhood and reinvention rather than straightforward outlawry, a choice several critics praised even when they found the surrounding plot mechanics clumsy. Walker-Webb's staging of the musical's big ensemble numbers drew specific praise for its sharpness, with multiple reviews singling out the choreography and lighting design as the production's most confident elements.
Industry attention now turns to whether strong word of mouth on the songs can offset the mixed notices commercially. Original musicals have had an uneven run on Broadway this fall, and producers of "Wanted" will be watching early grosses closely as the show settles into an open-ended run at the James Earl Jones Theatre. A Tony Awards conversation has already started around the cast's vocal performances, even as the consensus on the book itself remains unresolved -- the same tension that has defined the show's notices since Sunday's curtain came down.
