Ray (Chad Carstarphen), the doorman, has been charged with keeping Ali safe. The more she forbids her daughter from leaving the apartment in the evening when she’s at work, the more Ali is compelled to disobey her. Jersey knows that Ali is fascinated by the music of the streets. Saturday Night” and has recorded six solo albums.) But this is the role she’s been waiting for - and she delivers in a way that renders almost irrelevant the script’s shortcomings. (She received a Tony and a Grammy nomination for “Mr. Broadway has long known that Bean possesses one of the great musical theater voices of her generation. Shoshana Bean plays Ali’s mother, Jersey, a former actor who’s holding down two jobs while keeping a strict eye on her daughter. Portraying the 17-year-old Ali with a mix of swagger, defiance and vulnerability, Moon transcends impersonation to provide a soul-print of an artist as a young woman. It’s an astonishing performance, and not only because Moon sings with luster and power that must have made Keys swoon. For a precocious kid with prodigious musical talent waiting to cultivated, it was an ideal place to grow up, even if it was smack in the middle of all the dangerous allures of a big city - and thus a source of constant worry for an overprotective single mother wanting to keep her daughter from repeating her own mistakes.Īli, Keys’ surrogate, is played by Maleah Joi Moon, who’s making a staggering professional debut. Riding the elevator was a musical experience for the young Keys, as the sounds of musicians practicing, singers harmonizing and dancers trying out new moves wafted from every floor. But Manhattan Plaza, which provides affordable housing to artists, is a magical kingdom. The neighborhood’s name sounds rough and tumble - and when Keys was growing up in the 1990s it was grittier. “Hell’s Kitchen” has been informally dubbed the “Manhattan Plaza musical” by New Yorkers familiar with the federally subsidized residential complex on the western edge of the theater district where the musical is set. Right now, the genius of the show is located in Keys’ score. There’s a more ruthlessly honest version of this coming-of-age story waiting to be told. Diaz, perhaps not wanting to intrude into areas that are so personal to Keys, doesn’t dig as relentlessly into the complexity of the material. It has a stakes problem that’s evident throughout. “Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t have, like so many new musicals, an Act Two problem. Usually at a jukebox musical, I’m ticking off the hits like a clerk in a hardware story carrying a clipboard. Maybe that’s why I was surprised by how rapturously I fell under the musical’s spell. I have my share of Keys’ music in my digital library, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a zealous fan. The performers - singers of extraordinary talent who approach their musical roles as actors - make the numbers their own, which is to say their characters’ own. Instead they are artfully reimagined, their rhythms rediscovered in jazz, their lyrics redirected into new contexts. The songs don’t feel plunked down the way so many jukebox musicals do. The show, which features a book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz (a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”), soars whenever the gifted cast is singing one of Keys’ brilliantly reinterpreted hits. Forgive me, but I’m still a bit giddy from the musical high of “Hell’s Kitchen,” the new semi-autobiographical musical by singer-songwriter Alicia Keys that’s having its world premiere at the Public Theater in a stylishly kinetic production directed by Michael Greif.
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