Broadway's 'Wanted': Rich Music, Runaway Plot at James Earl Jones

'Wanted' opened Sunday at the James Earl Jones Theater, and it set its story in 1893 — though, by the critic's account, the show doesn't always seem to know it.

The new Broadway musical, rooted in the writer Angelica Chéri's family lore, follows Black twin sisters who pass for white and become vigilantes in 1890s Texas. The New York review's verdict is blunt: the production is "often frustrating, occasionally thrilling," delivering rollicking music and vocal riches while a runaway plot saps the enterprise.

The material is genuinely promising. Chéri, the show's book writer and lyricist, based the story on tales of her great-great aunts, Mary and Martha Clarke, who spent part of the 1890s passing as white and committing an unspecified series of crimes. What Chéri knows for certain is narrower: they were Black outlaws in post-Emancipation Texas. From that single thread she spins a yarn with composer Ross Baum. A Greek chorus-like group called the Kinfolk warns the audience not to obsess over facts: "You know how family stories do / So we believe it's mostly true."

What works on stage?

The sisters carry real pedigree. Solea Pfeiffer plays Mary, Liisi LaFontaine plays Martha, and Ledisi plays their tough-minded mother, Tallulah. The show opens with the twins as sharecroppers, picking cotton on land their enslaved ancestors worked for generations and which they now hope to buy. "It's our inheritance!" they sing. An ugly encounter with the landowner convinces the biracial twins to pass as white to find profitable work. Then they rather accidentally discover a talent for banditry.

Beowulf Boritt's set is a huge plantation-house skeleton built from old timbers, adjustable to evoke a landscape, a brothel, a bar, a basement. The primary visual imagery, though, comes from scenic projections covering the back of the stage and the proscenium arch — from indicative cotton fields to impressionistic montages.

Where does it go wrong?

Plenty of places, per the review. The heists defy stakes. Martha points a gun at a dastardly white figure — a racist bank clerk, say, or a grinning Daughter of the Texas Confederacy — and that person immediately surrenders valuables. Director Stevie Walker-Webb stages these robberies as weightless rootin'-tootin' comedy: a lawman spots the women, aims his pistol offstage, and sings "Don't let 'em get away!" after they've already gotten away, then does a "gosh darnit" fist clench. At no point do the sisters seem in danger or even, really, on the run.

The design choices don't help. Costume designer Emilio Sosa "bewilderingly" dresses the twins' knee-length traveling skirts as if it's the 1930s, four decades late. And when Walker-Webb wants to ratchet up emotion, video designer Stefania Bulbarella supplies gargantuan sunsets, slow-motion galloping horses and fluttering U.S. flags. The result, the critic writes, makes the whole shebang look like "an A.I.-generated ad for a truck with four-wheel drive." That's the review's sharpest cut, and it lands.

The source notes that 1893 matters — and will prove relevant in a climactic moment. Whether audiences tolerate the deliberate squishiness around history long enough to get there is the question 'Wanted' now faces as it settles into its Broadway run.