Grammy Award-winning artist Alicia Keys and Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Kristoffer Diaz bring their exhilarating coming-of-age musical HELL’S KITCHEN to The Public this fall.
In a cramped apartment hanging off the side of Times Square, 17-year-old Ali is desperate to get her piece of the New York dream. Ali’s mother is just as determined to protect her daughter from the same mistakes she made. When Ali falls for a talented young drummer, both mother and daughter must face hard truths about race, defiance, and growing up. Ali feels trapped, until the sound of a neighbor playing piano opens the door to an unexpected friendship and a radically different future.
Choreographed by Tony Award nominee Camille A. Brown and directed by Tony Award nominee Michael Greif, HELL’S KITCHEN is an unforgettable new show featuring both newly created music and the soulful, iconic songs of New York’s own Alicia Keys.
In contrast to its intimate domestic scale and relatively subdued dramatic stakes, Hell’s Kitchen is slick and aggressively commercial; Keys, also the producer, has made no secret of her desire to transfer uptown. Ending with the earwormy urban jingle “Empire State of Mind” more out of fan service than anything story related, this feel-good empowerment fable hungers for a home on Broadway. And why not? Tourists are not going to nitpick about where a neighborhood begins or ends. They probably won’t even visit.
Yes, Alicia Keys songs are organized to tell a story loosely based on a moment in Alicia Keys’ life: At the age of 17, Ali (portrayed by Maleah Joi Moon, making an impressive professional debut) pursues a boy and discovers the piano while rebelling against her strict mother, Jersey (Soshana Bean.) But the story is not what’s most fresh or distinctive about “Hell’s Kitchen,” and enough of the details have been altered to turn Ali into a fictional character: Keys’ passion for the piano was ignited by age six, for example, not 17 as in the show; her largely absent father was a flight attendant, not a pianist.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Choreographer | Camille A. Brown |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Featured Performer in a Musical | Kecia Lewis |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Featured Performer in a Musical | Shoshana Bean |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Lead Performer in a Musical | Maleah Joi Moon |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Musical | Hell's Kitchen |
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