I love UK crime dramas. If there’s a troubled detective in a rolling green setting with sheep and gulls and no guns and (despite no guns) an absolutely absurd murder rate per capita, I’m there. They honestly don’t even have to be that good (I’m looking at you, Hinterland). This is a formula — and as much time as the theater-critical among us spend objecting to such things ipso facto, sometimes they just work. There’s a reason recipes exist; when you want chocolate-chip cookies, you don’t feel compelled to throw in cauliflower and hot sauce.
Hell’s Kitchen—the new musical spearheaded by the multi-Grammy-winning R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys—is chocolate-chip cookies: Its shape and taste are familiar, and when it’s best, it’s because there are some extremely high-quality ingredients in the mix. Speaking to the Times about the show, Keys started out big: “Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too.†Then she walked it back: “I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway.†She was right to reel it in: The show isn’t reinventing anything, but Hell’s Kitchen has clearly been made with test-kitchen precision — honing certain contemporary musical-theater recipes to a fine point. Keys and the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (who wrote the book to her music and lyrics) have been developing the show for more than a decade, more recently with the collaboration of director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown, and Hell’s Kitchen does sometimes have a shiny, focus-grouped quality. And yet, damn, its singers can sing, and its dancers can dance — and Keys’s songs haven’t been streamed over 5 billion times for nothing. The man next to me was weeping by the end of the first act, and by the finale, well, I definitely had something in my eye.
It’s a funny experience — seeing the machinery that’s moving you and being moved nonetheless. (Especially when that machinery has been constructed with such blatant intentions: “The goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway,†Keys told the Times.) It does, however, take a little while before Hell’s Kitchen really starts to cook. The show’s establishing beats are its most stale, which makes sense given the textbook coming-of-age premise. Although Keys and her team undoubtedly made the right decision to steer clear of a straight bio-musical, turning Hell’s Kitchen into the story of Ali (Maleah Joi Moon)—a spirited 17-year-old growing up in colorful 1990s New York, where rats, roaches, and heroin are all lyrics but not realities—still lands us squarely in Musical Theater 101 territory. The show fits right into the Disney era, which helped wrench the wheel of the musical steamship toward the teen market. Yes, The Fantasticks’ Louisa was singing about wanting “much more than keeping house†all the way back in 1960, but now, we’ve got Belle, Quasimodo, Hercules, Elsa, Simba, Ariel — and any one of them could sing along with Ali’s lyrics in “The Riverâ€:
I know there’s more to life than this
Cause something’s calling me
So I’ll follow the river…
I’m gonna catch the wind, cause I’m dying
To begin
“The Riverâ€â€”a standard “I want†number—is Hell’s Kitchen’s second song and one of only three written by Keys especially for the show. All three new songs are knocked out early in Act One, and it’s a good thing, because they’re the most generic in the piece. That’s saying something, though — because technically, Hell’s Kitchen is about 90 percent jukebox musical, which means that it runs the high risk of its material feeling shoehorned into place, not made for purpose. That so few of Keys’s pre-existing hits stick out in this way is impressive. Of course we’re ready for “Fallin’†and “Girl on Fire,†but along with her co-arranger Adam Blackstone (and Tom Kitt, who worked with Blackstone on orchestrations), Keys has tailored her songs to their setting, remaking and shaking them up so that they feel like they belong to Ali as much as to Alicia — or even, in the case of the two chart-toppers above, to Ali’s parents, dedicated single mom Jersey (Shoshana Bean) and charming-wastrel-dad Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), or to her friends. As one of Ali’s ride-or-dies, Jessica, the epic belter Jackie Leon gets to take the lead in “Girl on Fire,†while her other bestie, Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson), interrupts the song with an angry rap warning Ali, who’s starry-eyed with a crush, not to forget her friends. It’s a confident move to break one of your most anticipated songs in two for dramatic purposes, and it helps Hell’s Kitchen start to feel like more than the sum of its parts.
The play follows Ali over the course of one hot, formative summer, where she meets both her first love—a tough-but-sensitive bucket drummer called Knuck (Chris Lee)—and the love that will, at least implicitly, define her life: the piano. Act One mostly belongs to the girl-meets-boy plot. When that goes dangerously south due to interference from the concerned, protective Jersey, Act Two shifts gears into the growing significance of music in Ali’s life, especially as a means of processing grief and loss. Things are a little clunky at the start: The impact of “Kaleidoscopeâ€â€”an artist’s-revelation song that Ali sings after hearing a tenant in her building, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), play the piano—feels immediately abandoned as the storyline shifts right back to teenage love affairs. But once Miss Liza Jane steps more fully into the frame as Ali’s teacher (strict and magisterial, true to the recipe), we begin to be caught up in the music.
Given that Hell’s Kitchen continues to check narrative boxes all along the line, what catches us? Mostly, it’s Lewis and Moon. From opposite ends of the career spectrum, these two performers absolutely carry the show. Lewis is a Broadway veteran, with gravitas enough to make us all blush and say “Yes ma’am,†and a voice that feels downright mythic. It can float, soft and clear and impeccably controlled, and it can plummet to the lower depths. Act One ends with Miss Liza Jane’s rendition of “Perfect Way to Die,†a 2020 anthem responding to racist police brutality. Jersey, who’s white, has called the cops on Knuck, and Ali is sick with rage at her mother and dread for her lover. Miss Liza Jane offers Ali “Perfect Way†as an example of how to convert anger and despair into art, and the song comes straight out of Lewis’s ribcage. She’s rooted and unshakable, and she succeeds in shaking us. I could have done without Peter Nigrini’s projections of recognizable tragic headlines and faces across the surfaces of Robert Brill’s set (a pretty standard abstracted evocation of New York City housing blocks). This kind of “In Memoriam†gesture feels rote, especially when you have a singer like Lewis actually managing to transcend the maudlin, filling the house with such a mighty requiem.
And then there’s the 21-year-old Moon, who’s making her professional debut as Ali with sparkling passion and ease. Her singing voice is huge, gorgeous, and pliable—effortlessly leaping from a belt to a shimmer—and her speaking voice is wonderfully distinctive. There’s a little gravel in it, an endearing roughness that can, in certain moments, make her seem more childlike, and in others set her apart from the standard ingénue. She doesn’t push, and she moves with a sense of joyful release, slipping in and out of Brown’s athletic, celebratory, emotionally charged choreography alongside the show’s muscular and graceful ensemble (which, it’s exciting to say, is full of real bodies, all different, all charismatic, moving with true ferocity).
As Ali’s estranged parents, Bean and Dixon also bring loads of vocal power and variety to the show. Davis, Ali’s father, is a musician with a golden smile who can’t be trusted to show up for dinner (or for most of Ali’s life), but who can break hearts at the piano. Keys—who’s been involved in every aspect of Hell’s Kitchen and retains the rights to it—apparently had much to say at music rehearsals: “She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,†said Dixon — and turns out she knows her business. Dixon is doing beautifully acrobatic things, light and lilty and looping, with “Not Even the King†and “If I Ain’t Got You.†And though Bean is often assigned the show’s least gracefully incorporated numbers (it takes some wedging to get “Pawn It All†in there), she can rattle window panes all day long.
Ultimately, Hell’s Kitchen is a mother-daughter story (or, considering Miss Liza Jane, a mothers-daughter story), and when Bean and Moon join each other for a half-teary, half-playful version of “No One,†it’s genuinely affecting to listen to Keys’s romantic bop change shape to fit a different kind of love. Though it sticks to the tried-and-true in its form, Hell’s Kitchen manages to avoid “-and-trite†as often as it does because of the sheer force of its performances. They take Keys’s remarkable solo work and fill it out, expanding its feeling of context and community. A jukebox plays what you’ve heard before, and though Hell’s Kitchen is unquestionably a slick commercial machine, it’s also, with admirable frequency, able to pull off the feat of making the musically familiar feel brand new.
Hell’s Kitchen is at the Public Theater through January 14.