Theater Review: Not Everyone Will Be ‘Fallin’ About Alicia Keys’ Broadway Musical ‘Hell’s Kitchen’

‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ the coming-of-age musical about a 17-year-old piano prodigy named Ali, features beautiful new and old tunes from the 16-time Grammy Award winner and a talented cast, but only a small portion of the music . safe story that tries to seem more consequential than it is.

It wants to be authentic and raw – there are a remarkable number of swear words used, including 19 f-bombs – for what is ultimately a portrait of a young, talented woman who lives on the 42nd floor of a doorman building in Manhattan and learns to love her again protective mother.

The musical, which premiered Saturday at the Shubert Theater, features adaptations of Keys’ best-known hits: “Fallin,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” as well as several new hits. songs, including the great ‘Kaleidoscope’.

There is no doubt that Keys is a knockout songwriter. That playwright Kristoffer Diaz is able to create a convincing, recognizable rom-com that is also socially conscious is highly doubtful.

This is, appropriately, a female-led show, with Maleah Joi Moon utterly stunning in the lead role – a breathtaking singer who is funny, giggly, passionate and strident, a star. Shoshana Bean, who plays her single, prickly mother, makes her songs stirring, while Kecia Lewis as a soulful piano teacher is the show’s astonishing MVP.

When we meet Ali, she is a frustrated teenager who knows there is more to life and that ‘something is calling’, as she sings in the new song ‘The River’. Initially it is a boy: the sweet Chris Lee, who plays a house painter. There is also renewed contact with her unreliable father, a nice and smooth Brandon Victor Dixon. But what Ali calls out is of course the wing in the multifunctional space of her building.

Outside this apartment complex in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood – we get a sense it’s the early 1990s – there are “cockroaches and the rats/heroin in the cracks.” But there is no mention of crime – at worst, illegal krumping? – and the police don’t really abuse the citizens who are considered undesirable. They just chase them away. This is a sanitized New York for the tourists from the M&M stores, despite the lyrics in Keys’ songs.

Another reason why the musical fails to fully connect is that much of the music played on stage is fake; it’s actually the orchestra stuffed into the sides making piano scales and funky percussion. (Even the three bucket drummers on stage are mostly just pretending, which is a shame.) For a musical about a special artist and how important music is, this feels a bit like cheating.

Camille A. Brown’s choreography is muscular and fun and uses a hip-hop vocabulary, and director Michael Greif masterfully keeps things moving elegantly. But there is – forgive me – everything but the kitchen sink thrown in here: a supposedly funny chorus of two mom friends and two Ali friends, a ghost, some mild parental abuse and a strange fixation on dinner.

The way the songs are integrated is inspired, with “Girl on Fire” hysterically punctuated by rap bars, “Fallin’” transformed into a humorously seductive ballad, and “No One” transformed from a painful love song to a mother-daughter anthem.

But everyone is waiting for that song about “concrete jungles” where “big lights will inspire you.” It comes right after we see a young woman lying on a bench, high above the city she will soon conquer. That is also possible, as long as you pass the doorman and follow your dreams.

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