Hell's Kitchen

Ali is seventeen, living with her protective single mother in Manhattan Plaza, an apartment building full of working artists in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in the 1990s. Restless and eager for a life bigger than her mother will allow, Ali falls for an older street drummer and begins sneaking out, testing the limits her mother has set. When she meets Miss Liza Jane, a formidable piano teacher in the building, Ali begins to discover a talent and a voice of her own, one that pulls her toward the piano even as it pulls her away from the safety her mother has tried to build around her.

Hell's Kitchen has music and lyrics by Alicia Keys, drawn from her own catalog of songs, and a book by Kristoffer Diaz loosely based on Keys' teenage years in New York. It premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2023 before opening on Broadway in 2024, where it won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.

The score reworks Alicia Keys' own hits and new songs for the stage, giving the show a contemporary R&B and soul sound built around piano, and its landmark numbers include Fallin', No One and Girl on Fire, each re-arranged to serve Ali's coming-of-age story rather than played as a straight concert. Watch for the mother-daughter tension at the show's center and for Miss Liza Jane's mentorship scenes at the piano, which anchor the more intimate moments of the evening. It suits fans of Alicia Keys' music and anyone who enjoys a coming-of-age story about finding your own voice against a parent's fears.