Wanted review: a generic crime musical without outlaw grit

By Daniel Okafor

Wanted, the retooled musical by Angelica Chéri and Ross Baum at New York’s James Earl Jones Theatre, earned one blunt verdict from The Guardian on November 9, 2026: generic, loud and short on outlaw grit.

Chéri and Baum set the piece in 1890s Texas. Their Greek chorus opens the story in billowing white garments, like spirits from the great beyond. Baum’s music is portentous. Its volume is high. It signals an epic journey. The suspense does not arrive.

The Guardian’s reviewer reads that overt scale as a promise, then finds the resulting production neither suspenseful, moving nor grand as advertised. The judgment lands on more than the score. It exposes a gap between the story’s violent potential and the show’s tame delivery.

What story did Chéri adapt?

Chéri based the “mostly true” story on two of her great-great aunts, the Black sisters Mary and Martha Clarke. Their mother, Tallulah, was an emancipated sharecropper. The sisters’ absent father was white.

The plan depends on racial passing (presenting as white): because Mary and Martha are light-skinned, they believe they can pass, at least long enough to earn money. Their mother wants that money to buy the cotton-field land she has worked for decades.

The scheme soon turns the sisters into wanted criminals. The gamble gives Wanted its strongest pressure: money, land, family and the threat of the law. The source describes the plan as dangerous. That danger later matters less than the production can dramatize.

Chéri and Baum ground the story in Chéri’s family history and a bargain over Tallulah’s land, giving Wanted a social reason for crime that its loudest passages do not fully exploit.

What does the retooling change?

Wanted is a retooled musical, and The Guardian compares this staging with an earlier version at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024. The review judges the current production more muscular. The comparison concerns physical force, not the musical’s grip.

The verdict implies greater energy. It does not credit the retooling with greater suspense. The action that should carry the sisters from hardship to outlawdom still passes too quickly.

Against that stronger physical scale, the gamble feels underwritten, and the promised tension dissolves whenever the story reaches the action that should most efficiently concentrate its risks. More staging energy is not the same as suspense. One can make a scene louder without making its danger clearer.

Why does the crime spree feel tame?

Mary and Martha’s attempt to raise money becomes a gun-wielding crime spree. They rob “various deserving targets,” in The Guardian’s pointed phrase. The phrase keeps a moral judgment attached to the sisters’ choices.

The robbery arrives as a quick montage (a compressed run of short scenes), so the daring acts lose their tension and any true sense of risk. The review calls the result dismayingly tame.

Although marginalized people violently assert themselves in a repressive time and place, the production turns that premise into spectacle without giving it dramatic weight. The source’s larger verdict is severe. The premise has force. The staging does not. More gunfire would not repair a problem created by compression.

What does the Greek chorus contribute?

The Greek chorus gives Wanted a formal frame and a forceful entrance. Baum’s high-volume music suggests that something momentous is about to happen. The scene presents grandeur before the plot has made a convincing case for it.

That setup works as announcement, but the narrative that follows never earns the scale it requests, leaving loudness to stand in for suspense, emotional movement and grandeur. The review does not dismiss the musical’s ambition. It recognizes a dynamic subject and calls the current staging more muscular than the 2024 Paper Mill version.

The Guardian also finds the production stuffed with superfluous showboating. Baum’s score keeps insisting on importance. The narrative keeps withholding proof. The 2024 comparison shows that the team can increase force. The larger task is to make that force produce sustained tension rather than simple volume.

For any further staging, the task is clear: give the crime spree sustained dramatic time and preserve the risk embedded in Mary and Martha’s scheme. Until then, Wanted makes rebellion look loud while making danger look thin.