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Hell’s Kitchen Is the WE❤NYC of Musicals
Anthemic songs with generalities in between.
The show’s a coming-of-age story about Ali, a rebellious 17-year-old who’s growing up in subsidized artists’ housing at Manhattan Plaza, learning to better understand her protective white mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), and make peace with her itinerant Black musician father, Davis (a dangerously louche Brandon Victor Dixon). Hell’s Kitchen is, to some degree, biographical — Keys did grow up in Manhattan Plaza with similar parents, though she had a recording contract at 15, before her fictional avatar discovers music — but the scenes between Ali and Miss Liza Jane strike out beyond cliché bio-musical reenactment to depict the origin of an artistic worldview. Once she starts to learn the piano in that music room, Ali launches into another new work, “Kaleidoscope.” It’s an uptempo number with jumbled lyrics (“nights like this, they belong in the Guinness”) that make you think first of pubs, then of clubbing, neither of which tracks for a teenager on the cusp of artistic discovery.
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