Hell’s Kitchen Is the WE❤NYC of Musicals

From Hell’s Kitchen, at the Shubert. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

This review was originally published on April 20, 2024. At the 77th Tony Awards, Maleah Joi Moon and Kecia Lewis won awards for their performances in Hell’s Kitchen.

It’s worth being wary of any musical that positions itself as a love letter to New York City. There are plenty of reasons to love New York (this publication makes a habit of compiling them), but any ode to this great trash-stained metropolis can get nonspecific awfully quickly. Remember the lessons of last season’s tourist brochure that was New York, New York. Or take, for instance, Alicia Keys’s famous hook to “Empire State of Mind,” which arrives with thudding inevitability at the end of her musical Hell’s Kitchen: New York is a “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” because there’s “nothing you can’t do / now you’re in New York.” As an anthem, it’s awfully rousing, especially when Keys — or her musical’s stand-in character Ali, played by Maleah Joi Moon — extends the “e” and “o” of “New York” over that roil of drum and piano like they’re the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hearing that refrain at the Shubert Theatre, where the bass has been cranked up enough to trigger a seismograph, you understand why the song has staying power and why it’s our current mayor’s favorite pump-up music.

But as a piece of storytelling, “Empire State of Mind” doesn’t get far past generalities. In this case, the song is even shorn of the more vivid picaresque neighborhood-hopping that constitutes Jay-Z’s rap verses. (According to my Playbill, the show licensed Keys’s solo answer song “Empire State of Mind, Part II (Broken Down),” not the more famous duet.) As they do elsewhere in the production, Hell’s Kitchen’s director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown throw all the rousing energy they can into the grand finale, but the pizzazz covers for an underdefined core. Why does Ali love this concrete bunghole? Why is an Obama-era-recession banger closing a musical set in the 1990s? Why is this all happening in front of a montage of New York landmarks that looks like a Real Housewives segue?

That sequence is frustrating because there are elements of Hell’s Kitchen that are specific and well motivated and moving, and they’re obscured by the musical’s tilt toward bombast. Three versions of Hell’s Kitchen are competing for attention, creating a multiple-personality quality in Kristoffer Diaz’s zigzagging book. The show’s a coming-of-age story about Ali, a rebellious 17-year-old who’s growing up in subsidized artists’ housing at Manhattan Plaza, learning to better understand her protective white mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), and make peace with her itinerant Black musician father, Davis (a dangerously louche Brandon Victor Dixon). It’s also a sorta-romance between Ali and an older, seemingly bad boy, Knuck (Chris Lee, sweetly recessive), at the expense of losing her actual friends (who exist mostly to sing “Girl on Fire” about her). Then, in its most compelling form, Hell’s Kitchen is about becoming an artist. Ali, almost by accident, starts getting piano and life lessons from an older Black woman in her building, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis, magisterial).

Hell’s Kitchen is, to some degree, biographical — Keys did grow up in Manhattan Plaza with similar parents, though she had a recording contract at 15, before her fictional avatar discovers music — but the scenes between Ali and Miss Liza Jane strike out beyond cliché bio-musical reenactment to depict the origin of an artistic worldview. Within the dynamic between teacher and student, Hell’s Kitchen explores how creation becomes a way for Ali to process everything else raging around her, using music as a conduit of discipline, sensitivity, and history. Liza Jane lectures her on the history of Black-woman pianists like Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Hazel Scott. Later on, you see the joy of invention in action as the notes Ali plunks during a piano lesson swell into the construction of “Girl on Fire.” And when Ali’s mother’s actions lead to the cops arresting her daughter’s older love interest Knuck, Lewis provides solace through art. At the end of the production’s first act, her voice constructs a cathedral of sound as she sings the ballad “Perfect Way to Die.”

As powerful as that moment is, it also exemplifies the imprecision that makes Hell’s Kitchen so frustrating. Keys released “Perfect Way to Die” in the summer of 2020, with lyrics inspired by the police murders of Mike Brown and Sandra Bland. Those losses bear an emotional weight that Hell’s Kitchen itself can’t contain nor is interested in fully reckoning with. In the second act, Knuck — after we learn he is okay — remains secondary. That’s fine! The show is about Ali, but there’s sleight of hand involved in deriving so much pathos from an event that tangentially involves your main character. Ali’s dynamic with her parents becomes similarly blurry. In their book scenes, Greif directs Moon, Bean, and Dixon like they’re in a naturalistic serious musical drama, a Next to Normal or Dear Evan Hansen in A minor. Robert Brill’s set for Ali and her mother’s apartment resembles those shows’ Wayfair furniture interiors — plus some classic Greif scaffolding in the Rent vein. But that naturalism sits awkwardly with Keys’s songbook. She writes to her own impressive technique, and the actors follow suit. You can imagine the logic: If we’re going to be singing Alicia Keys, we better sing. The results tend toward showboating. It can work: When Jersey and Davis reminisce about their past by way of Keys’s early hit “Fallin,’” you get the sense of an entire relationship through Bean and Dixon’s vibrato alone — she’s tight as a sinew, and he sounds as if he’s trying to unwind her. But when songs force the story line to loop-de-loop around itself, things just get silly. Jersey storms into one scene and tries to get Davis’s musician friends to buy her jewelry because, according to Diaz’s thin justification, she’d be willing to pay them to get him out of her life. The real reason is that Shoshana Bean needs to set a torch to the number “Pawn It All,” which she does with a considerable armature of riffs and options. Keys herself advised the singers, alongside musical director Lily Ling, and the vocal performances keep stopping the show — the consequence of that being that it often feels as though it’s not moving at all.

Moon, to her credit, grounds all this wherever she can. She’s a great discovery, a virtuoso who also appears surprised and delighted by her own talent. In Dede Ayite’s throwback ’90s costumes — so much Tommy Hilfiger, such giant pants — Moon has both swagger and that crucial touch of naïveté that makes Ali feel like a real and contradictory teenage girl, even when the plot swerves around her. Her voice, for all its power, has a sandpaper edge, a texture that makes her stand out when so many young singers sound cleanly uniform. If only the material written for her could be as distinctive. Hell’s Kitchen contains three new songs by Keys; one, a yawp of ugh-my-daughter frustration called “Seventeen,” is sung by Ali’s mother. Ali herself sings a standard-issue “I Want” song called “The River,” about the sliver of the Hudson she can see from her window — a nice image, but the results are vague (“I know there’s more to life than this / ’cause something’s calling me”). Once she starts to learn the piano in that music room, Ali launches into another new work, “Kaleidoscope.” It’s an uptempo number with jumbled lyrics (“nights like this, they belong in the Guinness”) that make you think first of pubs, then of clubbing, neither of which tracks for a teenager on the cusp of artistic discovery. No matter: Greif has the scene explode into a profusion of light and color, as Brown’s ensemble of dancers enter with a burst of enthusiasm. If it’s a great spectacle of music and motion on its own, it’s also less than you might hope for from a musical.

Hell’s Kitchen is at the Shubert Theatre.