Theater Evaluate: Not everybody will probably be ‘Fallin’ over Alicia Keys’ Broadway musical ‘Hell’s Kitchen’
Should you had been to shut Alicia Keys ’ large semi-autobiographical musical on Broadway with any of her hit songs, which wouldn’t it be? After all, it needs to be “Empire State of Thoughts.” That’s the pure one, proper? It’s additionally as predictable because the R prepare being delayed with sign issues.
“Hell’s Kitchen,” the coming-of-age musical a couple of 17-year-old piano prodigy named Ali, has great new and previous tunes by the 16-time Grammy Award winner and a proficient forged, however solely a sliver of a really protected story that tries to appear extra consequential than it’s.
It needs to be genuine and gritty — a outstanding variety of swear phrases are used, together with 19 f-bombs — for what in the end is a portrait of a younger, proficient girl dwelling on the forty second flooring of a doorman constructing in Manhattan who relearns to like her protecting mother.
The musical that opened Saturday on the Shubert Theatre options reworks of Keys’ best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Woman on Fireplace,” “If I Ain’t Bought You,” in addition to a number of new songs, together with the terrific “Kaleidoscope.”
That Keys is a knockout songwriter, there is no such thing as a doubt. That playwright Kristoffer Diaz is ready to make a convincing, relatable rom-com that is additionally socially aware may be very a lot doubtful.
That is, appropriately, a woman-led present, with Maleah Joi Moon utterly gorgeous within the lead position — a jaw-dropping vocalist who’s humorous, giggly, passionate and strident, a star flip. Shoshana Bean, who performs her single, spiky mother, makes her songs soar, whereas Kecia Lewis as a soulful piano instructor is the present’s astounding MVP.
After we meet Ali, she’s a pissed off teen who is aware of there’s extra to life and “one thing’s calling me,” as she sings within the new track, “The River.” At first that is a boy: the candy Chris Lee, taking part in a home painter. There’s additionally reconnecting together with her unreliable dad, a properly slippery Brandon Victor Dixon. However the factor calling Ali is, in fact, the grand piano in her constructing’s multipurpose room.
Exterior this condominium constructing within the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood — we get a clue the time is the early Nineties — are “roaches and the rats/heroin within the cracks.” However no criminality is proven — at worst some unlawful krumping? — and the cops don’t truly brutalize these residents deemed undesirable. They kind of simply shoo them away. This can be a sanitized New York for the M&M retailer vacationers, regardless of the lyrics in Keys’ songs.
One more reason the musical fails to completely join is that numerous the music performed onstage is pretend — it is truly the orchestra tucked into the edges making these piano scales and funky percussion. (Even the three bucket drummers onstage are largely simply pretending, which is a disgrace.) For a musical a couple of singular artist and the way vital music is, this feels a bit like a cheat.
Choreography by Camille A. Brown is muscular and enjoyable utilizing a hip-hop vocabulary, and director Michael Greif masterfully retains issues shifting elegantly. However there’s — forgive me — every part however the kitchen sink thrown in right here: A supposed-to-be-funny refrain of two mother associates and two Ali associates, a ghost, some delicate parental abuse and a bizarre fixation with dinner.
The way in which the songs are built-in is impressed, with “Woman on Fireplace” hysterically interrupted by rap bars, “Fallin’” become a humorously seductive ballad and “No One” remodeled from an achy love track to a mother-daughter anthem.
However everyone seems to be ready for that track about “concrete jungles” the place “large lights will encourage you.” It comes proper after we see a younger girl snuggling on a sofa, excessive over town she is going to quickly conquer. You possibly can, too, in the event you simply go previous the doorman and observe your desires.
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Comply with Mark Kennedy on-line.
