Solea Pfeiffer and Liisi LaFontaine have been waiting to get Wanted to Broadway since 2018. Back then, the rollicking Broadway musical, which opened last night at the James Earl Jones Theater, was slowly being developed from Angelica Chéri and Ross Baum’s grad school thesis. Though LaFontaine had broken out as Deena in the West End premiere of Dreamgirls two years earlier, as Pfeiffer reminds her, she was intimidated to be co-starring with someone hot off the original Hamilton tour.
“Then on our first day of rehearsal, our voices blended like crazy and we had the same sense of humor,” LaFontaine remembers. “I was like, This is going to be my first New York friend.”
Their voices still soar divinely when combined—this is probably the best-sung show on Broadway right now—but the intervening eight years have been as winding as the musical’s inspiration: Chéri family lore that her great-great aunts Mary and Martha Clarke were able to pass as white in Reconstruction-era Texas and might have gotten into some outlaw hijinks.
Wanted has gone through its own transformations, from a title change (it was formerly Gun & Powder) to significant retooling across two different stagings, starring either Pfeiffer or LaFontaine—never together. And the theater landscape itself has completely changed since the pandemic, in ways good and bad. What’s stayed firm is the remarkable talent of these leading ladies, whom time and hard-earned opportunities have made young industry veterans.
A few days before their big night, Pfeiffer and LaFontaine got together to discuss the show’s evolution, and how significant it is for them to be leading an original musical as performers who, like their characters, are mixed race.
Vogue: Does it feel like you’re in a different industry now from the one you walked into?
Solea Pfeiffer: There’s kind of a shift happening in the industry right now. A lot of development is starting in London before it comes here; a lot of shifting in the gestation process of musical theater at the moment. It’s strange. This season, this moment on Broadway… I think we’re going to learn a lot about the state of the art in the next few months. There’s so much Black art that’s happening all over New York, and at the same time, producers and the discourse are saying, “Broadway is dying, Broadway’s so alive, we’re grossing more than ever.” There are so many statements out in the ether about the state of musical theater, and whether it’s doable or profitable or worth it. Depending on how this season goes, I think we’re gonna learn a lot about who’s right about what.
