Angelica Chéri & Ross Baum Explain How WANTED’s 'The Way I Am' Went From a Minor Moment to a Major Song

What goes into making the music of our favorite Broadway shows? How do Broadway composers make our favorite characters sing and our favorite scenes come alive? BroadwayWorld is finding out with Notes on a Score.

Today we continue the series with Angelica Chéri (book and lyrics) and Ross Baum (music), who make their Broadway debuts this season with Wanted. Watch as they unpack Mary's (played by Solea Pfeiffer) big Act 1 ballad, "The Way I Am."

Texas, 1893 — Twin sisters Mary and Martha Clarke are on the run. The sisters, Black women who pass for white and hide in plain sight, straddle a dangerous line between two Americas. But as powerful forces close in to keep their family from claiming a future of their own, Mary and Martha are driven to desperate measures to save their mother and their family's legacy. When survival demands they do the unthinkable, the sisters nevertheless fight for self-determination, dignity, and the inheritance they have long been denied.

"'The Way I Am' was originally part of 'The Nightmare,'" explained Baum. "It was originally an Act Two song by a completely different character, a minor character. And it was a smaller, shorter version. We only wrote the first section of it because it was part of a larger sequence. And then it was Robert O’Hara who suggested that we give this song to the main character of Mary and expand it, because he said, 'That’s her Tony.'"

"I think we definitely started with tone," added Chéri We knew we Wanted something to feel like a jazz standard torch song—this unrequited, brooding, timeless [song]. It could be 1893 or 2023. … I knew I Wanted the lyrics to remain sparse and really existential and human, that weren’t talking specifically about what was happening between Mary and Jesse and the characters specifically in detail, but emotionally, this is encapsulating someone who wants to be accepted, who wants to be seen, who loves, who wants to be loved."

Oh lover, don't you love me just the way I am?
Wouldn't you love me just the way I am?
It doesn't matter where I'm from,
what I did, who I was.
It's who I am that matters. 

Wanted will open on Broadway on November 8 at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

Photo Credit: Marc J. Franklin