The genesis of Wanted began while Chéri was a student. She went into the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU in 2013 completely neutral to the form, having previously focused on playwriting during her first master’s degree at Columbia University. A Columbia elective taught by award-winning playwright Deborah Brevoort had showed Chéri she had a talent for lyrics.

During her second year at NYU, Chéri was paired with Baum. When the late professor Sarah Schlesinger introduced a writing prompt about historical figures, Chéri initially thought of women like Ida B. Wells and Zora Neale Hurston. Eventually, she turned her focus inward. She remembered the historical figures in her own family, Mary and Martha Clarke, noting that the elusive nature of their story felt liberating to adapt.

While the creative team had little historical documentation, they did have one surviving photograph of Mary and Martha. Chéri said the image revealed “the razor-sharpness behind Martha’s eyes and the soft strength of Mary.” What struck the team most was the sisters’ “regal presentation,” as Chéri described it; they looked “polished, untouched, pristine.”

“We found most striking the paradox that they would be outlaws,” she explained. The creative team leaned into the juxtaposition of the Clarkes' large dresses, curls, and soft makeup alongside what Chéri called “the powder and the gun, the power, the fearlessness, the feminine strength.”

To build out the Western aesthetic, Chéri also drew inspiration from historical texts like The Female Outlaw and real accounts of 19th-century saloon takeovers.

Wanted takes place in 1893, less than 30 years after enslaved people in Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation on Juneteenth (June 19, 1865). Chéri said the Reconstruction era was a time when the country was redefining itself, with Jim Crow laws implemented to suppress the upward mobility and civil rights of African Americans. These laws mandated strict racial segregation across public spaces; notably, Texas passed a Separate Coach Law in 1891 that forced African Americans into inferior train cars.

This reality serves as the musical’s inciting incident. The Clarke sisters and their mother, Tallulah, save enough money to buy the land they have been sharecropping. However, their landlord creates “an arbitrary amount of exorbitant debt” they cannot afford. The sisters’ underlying struggle is a universal one, Chéri noted: “We are all fighting for the same human dignity.”

In the show, Mary and Martha leave home and pass for white in order to survive. Historically, this disguise required intense silence and isolation because any slip of the tongue or exposed secret could be lethal. To reflect this on stage, the sisters have to pick up a foreign dialect while riding the whites-only train car for the first time.

The stakes heighten when they both attract romantic interests, as Chéri noted that in reality, being honest about their identities “could mean death for either or both of them.”

In the musical, the sisters do not leave home intending to become outlaws, but rather fall into it out of a need for self-defense. When they leave, Tallulah gives them a family-heirloom gun named Old Betsy. This plot point was drawn directly from Chéri’s family history; she said generations of Clarke women carried small Derringers in their church purses to protect themselves against the violence of the era. “They were not going to be victims, and they were going to defend themselves,” Chéri said.

For the sisters’ subsequent crimes, Chéri borrowed from her family’s oral tradition, which included tales of a train robbery, a bank heist, and encounters on the road. She also found that train robberies and saloon takeovers were not uncommon for the time. During the 1890s alone, there were over 260 train robberies; some historians estimate trains were held up on an average of every four days in the West during the late 19th century.

The plot of Wanted isn't the only thing connected to Chéri's family: Bringing the show to the James Earl Jones Theatre holds a deeply personal and full-circle meaning for her. Before her father passed away in 2024, he would repeatedly encourage her using the words of two iconic characters: Mufasa and Darth Vader.

“He said, ‘I am your father, and it is your destiny, and you must go,’” Chéri shared. “He even said at times, ‘I am your father, and I am Mufasa, and it is your destiny.’”

Chéri recently realized her father had mixed up quotes from the two characters, but that both were voiced by James Earl Jones. Landing her Broadway debut in the venue named for the legendary actor felt to Chéri like a fated full-circle moment.

Get Wanted tickets now.