By SHARON EBERSON
Extraordinary voices vying for best in show and a vibrant, pulsating production touched down at the Benedum Center this week, as Hell’s Kitchen made Pittsburgh the second stop in the musical’s first national tour.
Featuring more than 20 songs from the catalog of 18-time Grammy-winner Alicia Keys (including best musical theater album), the gritty coming-of-age story, with mother-daughter dynamics front and center, is woven with autobiographical elements of Keys’ own experiences.
It’s the story of a very short period in the life of rebellious, headstrong Ali, who at 17 takes momentous steps toward finding her power and her art, and reaching an understanding about unconditional love.
It takes some work getting there, as Ali’s rash behavior includes the hot pursuit of an older man.
Her harried mother, Jersey, is prompted to declare, via Keys’ Seventeen, all teens are “hormones and hoodies,” and as for Ali, well, “her brain just don’t work.”
That theme provides a throughline, giving way to repercussions and hard-earned lessons in the second act.
Along the way, we are treated to some spectacular singing on songs including Keys’ No. 1 hits, “Fallin’|, No One and “Empire State of Mind” (originally with Jay), and the title song of her hit album, “This Girl’s on Fire”.
They tell the story of Ali – Maya Drake, in a remarkable triple-threat stage debut – as she navigates teenage life in a one-room apartment with single mom Jersey.
to Hell’s Kitchen, in the North American tour of the Alicia Keys musical.
(Image: Marc J. Franklin)
Her mother is trying to keep her defiant daughter safe: safe from pursuing an older man, safe from the crime outside the doors of their apartment building, safe from making mistakes she made in the past – concerns that lead her back to Ali’s father, Davis, a nomadic piano player and absentee dad.
Broadway veteran Kennedy Caughell as mom Jersey and Desmond Sean Ellington as Davis, a role he understudied on Broadway, each bring the house down with distinctive voices – his, a seductively smooth, rich delivery; hers, a wide emotive range that includes jaw-dropping belts.
In the competition for most memorable vocals is Roz White as Ali’s piano mentor, Miss Liza Jane. White’s regal bearing is present in her musicality, infusing her character and her songs with dignity and authority.
Miss Liza Jane is the first to sit Ali at a piano and realize her talent, which is a fast-track storytelling device. It was in the Ellington Room (named for Duke) of Manhattan Plaza, 7-year-old Alicia Keys first found her way to the piano, guided by a resident artist. She was signed to Columbia Records at age 15.
As someone who grew up in a New York City apartment, albeit in Brooklyn, I can say that the musical gets right the concept of a building as a haven, and part of the village that helps to raise the children who live there. The Manhattan Plaza building in the real Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood is 46 stories of subsidized housing for artists, one with a rich history of its own. It is where Keys grew up and gave piano recitals, and where fictional Ali shares a one-bedroom apartment with her mother.
Jersey relies on neighbors and the building’s doorman in ways reminiscent of In the Heights. The attention can be stifling to a teenager, comforting to a parent.
The busy scenic design mirrors the activity going on behind many closed doors. In a representation of an elevator, Ali travels past favorite floors where she knows she will hear musicians practicing their crafts.
It’s not ideal for sleeping, but a lush urban landscape for a restless, creative teenager.
Hell’s Kitchen opens to the propulsive sounds of Keys’ The Gospel, with the opening lyric, “I said we’re all God’s children, products of the ghetto …” and proceeds to tell of some of the horrors of, “The roaches and the rats, heroin and the cracks … Everybody got a path but you could never go back.”
There’s no sense that things are quite that bad in the Manhattan Plaza, and yet there’s always trouble brewing outside, where Ali and her friends congregate, and she becomes infatuated with a street drummer and house painter named Knuck (Jon Avery Worrell).
Aided by Camille A. Brown’s Tony-nominated choreography, the first act, in particular, pulsates with kinetic energy while creating a sense of community around Ali. The movement stretches boundaries across a variety of genres, just as Keys’ music can’t be pigeonholed to hiphop, pop, jazz, R&B or soul.
The orchestrations, notably, are by Tony Award-winner Tom Kitt, working with Keys and Emmy- and Grammy-winner Adam Blackstone. The book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Kristoffer Diaz is at times heavy on messaging, but also contextual and complementary in ways in which other jukebox musicals have fallen short.
Hell’s Kitchen is likewise hard to pin down as a jukebox musical or a biomusical or a hybrid, or whatever. All that’s worth noting is that it is an uplifting story of the rise of an extraordinary artist, with her music presented as evidence by terrific artists in their own right.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Hell’s Kitchen is presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh at the Benedum Center, Downtown, through November 9, 2025. For tickets, visit https://www.trustarts.org/production/100446/hells-kitchen .
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