Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine and Ledisi Bring a Bold New Sound to Broadway’s Wanted

Wanted blazes onto Broadway this fall, telling the story of twin sisters Mary and Martha Clarke, Black women passing for white in 1893 Texas. Ahead of the original musical beginning performances on October 15, the creative team and stars Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine, Ledisi and Bradley Jaden discuss bringing the story to life.

“The music stirs you down to your core,” says Pfeiffer, who plays Mary, of Angelica Chéri and Ross Baum's genre-bending score. “You get to embody the full range of emotion that a person has, and I think in 2026, a lot of women are being vilified for that. We're not supposed to tell the truth. We're not supposed to tell people we're angry. We're supposed to stay quiet. You're going to hear us in this one. It’s really, really cool to just get out there and take up as much space as humanly possible.”

According to LaFontaine, who makes her Broadway debut as Martha, “The music really lends itself to the story. There's country, there's gospel, there's R&B, there's folk.” Speaking to the sisterhood at the heart of the show, she says, “We have crafted very detailed backstories for these girls. I think their relationship is so relatable, [in terms of] the complexities of sisterhood and having completely different ways of getting what you want,” while teasing, “There's twists and turns every couple minutes.”

Jaden also makes his Broadway debut as the charismatic saloon owner, Jesse. “Immediately I spoke to my agent and was just like, ‘Whatever we have to do, we've got to get in the room. This has to be told and I have to be part of that message,'" he says of his first introduction to Wanted. “This is a new sound. This is a new journey. As an actor, how lucky that I get to challenge myself daily.”

“The heart of it is the music and the lyrics of freedom, the passion to hold onto yourself. Freedom is holding you accountable to being yourself and fighting for your dream. It's beautiful,” says Ledisi of Wanted’s thematic anchor. The production is directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, who received a Tony nomination in 2023 for directing the comedy Ain’t No Mo’. “Stevie makes sure we're natural. It's not a forced thing,” says Ledisi, who plays the matriarch Tallulah. "That has liberated me as an actress, working with a director that likes who you are and says, ‘Make sure it's what a natural mama would do.’”

“You can feel when someone is singing from their soul and when they're singing by the numbers. We create a room together where people are having to show up and tell the truth,” says Walker-Webb, who directed the pre-Broadway run of Wanted at Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024. “When it came down to the brass tacks of it, I got to experience something that was gritty and real and there was sweat on that floor when I walked out of the theater. That's what I want people to experience.”

Hear the cast in rehearsal in the video below!

Get tickets to Wanted!