EMPIRE STATE OF MIND

A rare jukebox musical that finds fresh
life by letting the songs tell the story

A jukebox musical is an inheritance. Someone else wrote the songs, lived the life, banked the meaning, and the show arrives to spend it. Most of them spend it badly, doling out hits like an allowance until the audience claps from muscle memory. Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys musical now at the Pantages on its first national tour, is about a girl learning what to do with what she was handed. The form and the subject turn out to be the same thing.

Maya Drake plays Ali, a seventeen-year-old version of a young Keys, growing up in Manhattan Plaza, the Midtown high-rise where artists raise each other’s children whether they mean to or not. Drake is 19, a San Jose native making her professional debut. Broadway rarely takes that risk. A touring company sometimes can. An actor’s social media following and press coverage stop mattering on the road. Training and instrument start mattering more.

Drake does not perform exhaustion at the end of the night. She arrives at it. By the time she reaches “Girl on Fire,” she has earned every degree of the heat, and the Pantages audience roars back at her like it has been waiting all evening for permission.

What separates Drake from the merely gifted is restraint. She does not belt to prove she can belt. She lets Ali be sullen, then petty, then briefly cruel, and keeps the voice in reserve through all of it. Watch her with her mother. She rolls her eyes the way a real teenager rolls her eyes, which is to say not for the audience. The voice, when it finally opens, lands as consequence rather than display.

She is not carrying the show alone, and that is by design. Kristoffer Diaz, who wrote the book, knew a seventeen-year-old cannot hold a two-hour-and-thirty-five-minute evening by herself, so the score spreads across the building. Kennedy Caughell plays Jersey, Ali’s white single mother, and she sings “Pawn It All” like a woman itemizing every sacrifice in real time. Caughell has played Carole King and Elphaba on the road. The experience surfaces in what she holds back. She does not ask for sympathy. She presents the bill and lets you read it.

Roz White takes Miss Liza Jane, the resident pianist who becomes Ali’s mentor, and she gives “Perfect Way to Die” a stillness that quiets the house completely. Desmond Sean Ellington plays Davis, the father who drifts in and out of Ali’s life and inspires her talent on his way past. Ellington is a Hamilton alumnus, and his voice carries a warmth that makes the character’s unreliability almost reasonable. You understand why Jersey fell. You also understand why she stopped. JonAvery Worrell‘s Knuck, Ali’s older crush, harmonizes through “Un-thinkable” with a sweetness that keeps the relationship from curdling, which the book needs him to do.

The debts are visible, and Diaz does not hide them. He has said In the Heights shaped this book, and the inheritance shows. A single building carries a whole neighborhood. A mentor dies, and the block has to absorb it. The likeness is structural, not lazy, and Camille A. Brown‘s choreography is what keeps it from feeling secondhand. Her dances are a ninety-minute argument that hip-hop vocabulary and modern-dance phrasing were never separate languages. The ensemble moves like a neighborhood, not a corps.

This is the rare jukebox musical that justifies its own existence. The radio hits are not trotted out and dusted off. They are rebuilt, rerouted, and handed to the right voice at the right moment, and this production sings them with a force most touring productions never reach.

There is a real limit, and it sits in Act One. The act traffics in teenage grievance, and a viewer over thirty will see early that Ali is going to be fine. The stakes are the stakes of a seventeen-year-old. What rescues the slightness is the music supervision. Music supervisor Adam Blackstone reroutes the catalog with cunning. The chorus floods “Girl on Fire” at Ali’s peak. Her parents flirt their way through “Fallin’.” “If I Ain’t Got You” becomes a fragile truce between a girl and the father who keeps leaving. “No One” carries mother and daughter back to each other. A song you have heard five hundred times means something because the staging gives it somewhere to go.

Keys deserves a line of credit here. She is a producer with leverage, and she used it to let herself be drawn as a headstrong brat—a talented one, but a brat. Vanity would have sanded Ali smooth. The show is sharper for the refusal.

Touring productions can survive a little compression. They cannot fake this. Maya Drake stands center stage on Hollywood Boulevard, a teenager singing a teenager, the gap between performer and part closed to nothing. That gap will not stay closed. The role is seventeen forever and Drake is not. Catch her now, while the part can still keep up.

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photos by Marc J. Franklin

Hell’s Kitchen
national tour
Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd
ends on June 21, 2026
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit Hells Kitchen

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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