‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Review: How Alicia Keys Got Her Groove

Even in the Golden Age of musical theater, shows died so often after intermission that critics coined a name for the disease. “Second Act problems” are presented in many ways: isolated songs, desperate cuts, illogical crises, hasty solutions. Yet all those symptoms of the second act stemmed from the same underlying condition: ambitions in the first act.

So it’s not really surprising that a hugely ambitious new musical like “The kitchen of hell”, the semi-autobiographical jukebox built on the life and catalog of Alicia Keys, disappoints after the mid-show break and tumbles straight into the pits it so cleverly avoided in the first half. What’s surprising about this promising show, which opened Sunday at the Public Theater with the clear intention of moving to Broadway, is how exciting it is up to that point.

Surprising to me anyway. I think that jukeboxes – especially biographical ones, like “Motown” and “MJ” – almost inevitably contribute to the ordinary difficulties of musical construction, with difficulties unique to their origins. The involvement of the original artists (or their estates) leads to historical sugar-coating. A rush to hit all the high points results in a cherry-picked resume. The updated catalogue, written for a different reason, fails to move the action forward. And since those songs are the selling point of the show, they wag the story.

But Keys, working with playwright Kristoffer Diaz and director Michael Greif, avoids most of these pitfalls in the show’s first hour, setting up the story with remarkable verve and efficiency. Neatly consecutively, it introduces the main characters (17-year-old Ali and her single mother, Jersey), the primary setting (the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan in the late 1990s), the parameters of the plot (Ali’s hunger for love). and art) and a threatening source of conflict (mom).

At the same time, it floods us with music to establish the worlds it takes us into, far beyond the R&B and pop Keys is best known for. In a beautiful elevator sequence, Ali meets opera, jazz, merengue and classical piano as she descends from the one-bedroom 42nd-floor apartment she shares with Jersey, a former actor who juggles two jobs. (The building, Manhattan Plaza, provides affordable housing for artists.) Then when Ali reaches the street, she is surrounded by a gigantic stream of sound; It seems like all of New York is singing, playing and, in Camille A. Brown’s exciting contextual choreography, dancing.

We’re only a few minutes into the show and the fixture is fully in place. We know this is going to be a mother-daughter love-and-let-go story, as Jersey (Shoshana Bean, warm and pyrotechnic) tries to keep Ali fed and safe. Although race isn’t explicitly an issue between them, Jersey is white and Ali biracial, and Ali (Maleah Joi Moon in a sensational debut) will gradually be drawn away from her mother’s suffocation by the broader group of people she encounters.

One is the classical pianist, Miss Liza Jane (the magisterial Kecia Lewis), who will demand that Ali take lessons from her – even though Keys actually started studying at age 7, not 17. And on the street, under the thrill of the 2003 hit “You Don’t Know My Name,” Ali will flirt with a bucket drummer named Knuck (Chris Lee, sweet as pie), even though he’s in his mid-20s. He will resist at first.

And so, over the course of eleven songs, the first act does the work of ambitious first acts everywhere: expanding the show’s horizons into the larger world in which the action takes place (not a fair world for young black New Yorkers) and deepening our knowledge . knowledge of the main characters through conflict. Humor, too: Diaz — whose hilarious professional wrestling performance, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — saves the story from too much seriousness. Also credit Greif, whose steady management of tone and tension coaxes drama out of a story that could easily have been too intimate.

Together with Keys, they also solve many of the jukebox problems, or at least slow them down. By keeping a very narrow focus on just a few weeks in Ali’s life, “Hell’s Kitchen” chooses the possibility of dramatic depth over career highlights. There’s not much concealment, either: Keys seems very willing to present her ambitious role as a hormonal teenager immune to common sense — and Moon, 21, is precocious and fearless in delivering that complex portrait.

Most importantly, Keys’ songs, even hits like “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One,” fit into the story (and into the mouths of various characters) without too much fluff. If they don’t, the situation is effectively acknowledged. When Ali finally spends the night with Knuck – right on time, just before the various storylines merge into a terrible event at the end of the first act – Ali’s girlfriend Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson) is miffed, as this would be an unapologetically female-centric story. “The world is hers because she has a husband now?” she complains, interrupting the 2012 banger “Girl on Fire,” here repurposed as an upbeat “I’m on top of the world” song. “Is that what we’re doing?”

Unfortunately, “is that what we do?” is how I felt the moment the second act started. As if its creators no longer had time for finesse — even though Keys and Diaz have been working on Hell’s Kitchen for more than a decade — its humor spills over into readings as the story, especially Jersey’s, becomes hazy. Her tense relationship with Ali’s father, here a jazz pianist but in reality a flight attendant, shows the characteristic signs of dramaturgical whiplash. (On the other hand, he’s played by Brandon Victor Dixon, a human aphrodisiac, vocal and otherwise.) An argument between Jersey and Miss Liza Jane feels similarly contrived, until it’s resolved in an obvious pathos twist. And despite Bean’s skill, Jersey’s love for her daughter, the heart of the show, is lost in the attempt to complicate it.

The songs of the second act follow suit; it’s no coincidence that the three new ones Keys wrote for the production, all good, top the show. And while well-structured musicals typically feature far fewer songs in the second half than the first to make way for the complexity of plot resolution, here there are no fewer than fourteen, ending indulgently, if inevitably, with the New York anthem “Empire State of Mind’ from 2009. .” The result is that “Hell’s Kitchen” almost becomes what it tried to avoid in the beginning: a hit dump.

But because those hits are hits for a reason, they are still listened to with pleasure. The singing, arrangements and orchestrations (by various hands including Adam Blackstone, Tom Kitt, Dominic Follacaro and Keys himself) are exciting, if strangely uneven in Gareth Owen’s sound design. The fire escape sets (by Robert Brill), expressive projections (by Peter Nigrini), saturated lighting (by Natasha Katz) and often hilarious costumes (by Dede Ayite) are all Broadway-ready.

I hope “Hell’s Kitchen” will be too. Of course, many musicals make the transition without ever solving their problems in the first act, let alone their second. That would be a shame here. Though not perfectly told, Ali’s discovery that art is love, with or without the man, is too rich not to reach a wider audience, and a million more girls on fire.

The kitchen of hell
Through January 14 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheatre.org. Playing time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.