Wanted

Artist page

Explore Wanted

Wanted tells the true story of Mary and Martha Clarke, twin sisters who in 1893 take up outlaw life to clear their mother's sharecropping debt and keep the family home. Light-skinned enough to pass as white, they rob their way toward freedom and learn what that disguise costs them. The sisters' scheme begins as desperate arithmetic - a debt they cannot pay, a mother they will not lose - and hardens into a way of living. Each robbery buys them time and takes something back: the safety of being known, the ease of being themselves, the trust between two people who have never been apart. The show sets a tense crime story against a harder question about what identity is worth trading away. Angelica Chéri wrote the book and lyrics, drawing on her own family history, since the Clarke sisters are her ancestors, and Ross Baum composed the score. The work was first staged in 2020 under the title Gun & Powder and was developed and revised across later productions before arriving under its current name, with music rooted in gospel and blues. What lingers is the sound of two voices in harmony and then in argument. The score is built for big singing, and the storytelling keeps the sisters' bond at the centre even as the money, the guns and the lie pull them apart. It is a period piece that feels immediate, and its questions about race, family and survival land without being spelled out. Wanted is for audiences who want a new musical with a real story behind it, sung at full strength. Anyone drawn to sibling drama, outlaw legend, or a score that earns its climaxes will find plenty to hold on to.1