HELL’S ON FIRE

Hell’s Kitchen, a jukebox musical featuring the music of R&B superstar Alicia Keys (with several new songs) and a book by Kristoffer Diaz, took Broadway by storm in 2024, racking up thirteen Tony nominations. And now, a little over a year later, its first national touring production has arrived in Chicago at the Nederlander Theatre.

The tour has retained the creative and technical team from the Broadway production. The set by Robert Brill is an elegant series of metal platforms designed to mimic the traditional NYC fire escape, with skylines and neighborhood markers projected by Peter Nigrini onto the backdrop. The show takes place in two neighborhoods, Hell’s Kitchen, specifically the Manhattan Plaza building, a Section 8 building mostly restricted to artists, and a few scenes in Gramercy Park.

I am not a fan of the jukebox musical as a genre.

I am a fan of the oeuvre of Ms. Keys, having followed her since her wonderful debut album Songs in A Minor (2001).

Going into Hell’s Kitchen,  I wondered which of these two tastes would win out. It only took about twenty minutes to declare Alicia Keys the winner.

  Kennedy Caughell as Jersey and Maya Drake as Ali

The show follows a fairly straight-forward plot: a precocious and headstrong 17-year-old girl, Ali (Maya Drake), longs to be independent of the overprotective and restrictive parenting of her overworked mother, Jersey (Kennedy Caughell), a former actress, raising her daughter by herself while working multiple jobs. Ali wants to experience life, fall in love, and jump into the sack with the handsome bucket drummer (Knuck) who plays in front of her building. Jersey, who got pregnant because of a moment of wild abandon when she was of Ali’s age, is determined to not let this happen, and has enlisted the building’s residents and doorman to her cause. Another maternal figure emerges in the form of Miss Liza Jane (Roz White), a resident who plays the piano in the building’s Ellington Room, the communal rec room where Ali flees to escape her mother’s nagging.

Maya Drake

Nothing unexpected happens here. Diaz’s book moves the action efficiently from one set piece to another without probing too much, which is understandable, I guess; given that the show is a very obvious homage from Keys to her mother, pushing too hard might not go over well even if it makes dramatic sense. There are no villains here. Even Ali’s roué of a father, Davis, gets a pass. Davis is played with absurd amounts of charm by Desmond Sean Ellington, who also deploys the sexiest falsetto I’ve ever heard on stage when he breaks into “Fallin’”, Key’s signature hit. The collective intake of breath from the audience when he hit the high notes threatened to make the windows cave in.

Maya Drake

The hit songs are nicely integrated into the show for the most part, helped considerably by the fact that they’re so damn good. The eleven new songs ain’t half bad either. The ensemble also brings a terrific amount of energy to the proceedings and with Camille Brown’s inventive choreography, it’s nigh impossible not to get sucked into the show. Kudos to director Michael Greif for keeping all the events beautifully calibrated and the pacing so rapid. The hours went by in a blur.

Kennedy Caughell and Maya Drake

Hell’s Kitchen reminded me a lot of Lin Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights; I thoroughly enjoyed that show but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the plot. It functioned as a love letter to the titular neighborhood. The same is mostly true here, just narrowed down to the Manhattan Plaza and its denizens. Keys has so much love for the neighbors in her childhood residence, and it comes across here. Every ensemble number is a joy.

The three leads are exceptional. Kennedy Caughell nails the exasperation of raising a headstrong child and my word, can she sing. As Miss Liza Jane, Roz White brings impressive gravitas and presence to the part, investing a stock teacher-student relationship with genuine emotion. As Ali, Maya Drake is on stage for almost the entire two-hour-plus length of the show and she carries it with an impressive amount of self-assurance and confidence. Even more impressive when you consider that this is her stage debut, and downright jaw-dropping when you learn that she only just graduated from high school, a fact I learned the day after the show while looking her up (don’t you feel like an underachiever now).

It’s fascinating to me that Keys has sanded off the rough edges from what was by all accounts a gritty coming-of-age in a dangerous neighborhood. She’s also severely downplayed Ali’s talent as a musician, if not her mulishness. For contrast, at seventeen, the same age as Ali in the show, Keys had already been signed to a record label for two years, had refused to yield her authorial vision and jumped to another record label which gave her more creative freedom. Three years later she would release her debut album and enter the record books. That a star with this pedigree, writing her first musical, would forgo all of that in favor of crafting an ode to mother-daughter relationships in general and her mother in particular, is sweet.

Now what are you going to get your mama for Mother’s Day?

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos of the North American Tour by Marc J Franklin

Hell’s Kitchen
national tour
thru Nov. 30, 2025, at Nederlander Theatre, 24 West Randolph St. in Chicago
for tickets, visit Broadway in Chicago
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit Hell’s Kitchen

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦