‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Makes You Appreciate Alicia Keys More

The Tony-winning Broadway play “Hell’s Kitchen” isn’t about Alicia Keys. Though incorporating much of her life story and discography into its narrative, the coming-of-age jukebox musical is somewhat analogous to the girl-group epic “Dreamgirls”: Objectively not about The Supremes, but guided enough by the trio’s biography to court conjecture about which narrative elements match and which methodically stray, for dramatic purposes, from the record.

Keys’ equivalent in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is currently touring North America and began a six-day engagement at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre last night, is named Ali (Maya Drake). Seventeen when we first meet her, she is not the laser-focused prodigy we know Keys to be — the woman who was trained in classical piano from 6-18, built a recording studio in her first apartment, and once called Chopin “my dawg.” She’s what most 17-year-olds are: hopelessly distracted by schoolkid crushes, sick of parental authority, uncertain of their futures.

The biracial teen lives in a one-bedroom on the 41st floor of an apartment building in the show’s eponymous neighborhood with her single white mom, Jersey (an astounding Kennedy Caughell), a former stage actress working multiple jobs to keep her family of two afloat. Ali sings of feeling like a damsel imprisoned in a tower. Her alienation is stoked by maternal overprotectiveness, which regularly results in calls to the police when Ali loiters for too long with some of the young Black men who often hang out in the front of the building. Jersey explains away her more-than-microaggressive vigilance by calling the men she’s needlessly endangering as “hormones with hoodies,” and by invoking her own past. She’d gotten pregnant too young — Ali’s now-mostly-absent father is a singer-slash-pianist, Davis (Desmond Sean Ellington), whose ample charisma and knock-you-back singing voice make you want to forgive his reliable selfishness — and doesn’t want to see her progeny have her life’s ambitions prematurely thrown off course in the same way.

Keys has described “Hell’s Kitchen” as both “a love story between a mother and a daughter” and a story about following one’s heart. It’s most successful at the former, cultivating tangible tension between women who, beyond racial difference, haven’t yet arrived at the moment in their relationship where they can fully respect each other’s points of view. Drawn sometimes with flashes of Catherine O’Hara-like humorousness, Mom is still mostly a party-pooping nag. Daughter is still a baby without a clue about what’s best for her. The play traffics in coming-of-age-story clichés, including their reconciliation — there is no wheel reinvention happening genre-wise here — and its insistence on expository fourth-wall breaks can be frustrating, implying the audience can’t read between the lines.

But “Hell’s Kitchen”’s across-the-board-excellent performances and inspired reframing of Keys’ body of work capture the heart enough to make you not think much about the innumerable times we’ve seen a version of this story before. The mutable minimalism of its sets — a collection of quickly movable fire escapes, chairs, counters, couches, pianos, and more, backed by wall projections that place us variously from the streets of New York to Ali’s apartment building’s practice room — is well-suited to the emotional enormity of its melodrama, too. (It gives the play plenty of room to breathe.) And the stylish curation of the clothes — there’s much Tommy Hilfiger and FUBU — does subtle wonders to situate us in its early-2000s setting.

What one can’t help but yearn for, watching “Hell’s Kitchen,” is more direct echoing of Keys’ own musical journey. The main one is how she found (and Ali finds) purpose once the piano comes into her life. But there’s not much in the show suggesting that Ali’s new artistic discovery will radically develop into a singular musical identity of her own. Only a fraction of the rush of creative discovery is here; the decision to forego songwriting as a parallel between Keys and Ali insinuates that it’s almost insignificant. (Part of what made the public latch onto Keys, a freakishly talented young old soul with great taste, was how in her music she so singularly cross-contaminated the aesthetics of 1960s and ’70s soul with the instincts of au courant R&B and hip-hop.) The power of piano, however, is stirringly depicted enough that I’ll admit to looking up the cost, mid-intermission, of portable keyboards, suddenly longing for the decade-plus I spent in childhood channeling my inner Beethoven. That strain of the plot also engenders one of the play’s most commanding performances: Roz White as Miss Liza Jane, Ali’s regal neighbor and de facto piano teacher who will eventually be tragically reconfigured as a semi-angel figure and guiding light for her eager-beaver protégé.

More of “Hell’s Kitchen” hinges on its mother-daughter conflict and the romance Ali starts with the older Knuck (JonAvery Worrell), an aspiring drummer and regular churchgoer who resents the “thug” stereotype Jersey has assigned him and, initially, how a decent chunk of Ali’s attraction to him comes from her pull toward rebellion. Their courtship is puppy-love-sweet though feels slightly requisite compared to “Hell’s Kitchen”’s main “Mildred Pierce”-esque thread. Then again, it would be a mistake to give it a comparable amount of weight: Both relationships are transformative to Ali, but only one will continue to evolve alongside her.

For the most part, “Hell’s Kitchen” cleverly — to the point of giving them a brand-new-feeling charge — retools Keys’ songs so that you can hear them from different angles. (Its sole flub is the use of “Empire State of Mind”: It inevitably soundtracks the climax, but it struck me as belaboring points that had already been made — inserted there simply because it had to be.) The lovelorn “You Don’t Know My Name” becomes comedy skit-like, sung mostly by a pair of Ali’s friends (Stemarciae Bain and Miya Bass) who are teasing her about her crush on Knuck and their doubt that she’ll work up the courage to speak with him. The discontent of the latter-period cut “Pawn It All” is cranked up to better service a moment that turned the Paramount pin-drop-silent with awe: Jersey interrupting one of Davis’ auditions so that she can publicly castigate him for how recklessly he’s treated her and Ali. In a show full of hair-raising vocal performances, Caughell’s work in this particular scene feels, more than anyone else’s at that point has, like it’s grabbing and shaking you. The pitch and volume of one particular sustained final note fleetingly takes “Hell’s Kitchen” to a near-holy place; the Teena Marie comparison I’d jotted down in my notebook was instantly turned into an understatement.

The characters that surround Ali arguably rivet more than Ali herself. That’s not any fault of Drake’s. Her unexpectedly comedically sharp performance recalls, in moments, peak Jim Carrey with its regular indulgences in facial and physical noodliness as manifestations of her adolescent awkwardness. The play needs her to be an easy-to-root-for blank slate still being sculpted into the artist we know she’ll soon become. Drake’s voice, while sometimes drowned out by the play’s hard-charging live instruments, doesn’t share that to-be-filled emptiness, though. It’s bell-clear, traveling between notes with the certainty of water gliding through a creek bed. It might have less grit than Keys’, who’s always seemed to fight for notes even while earning them, but its pristineness befits a play that’s about, in part, the clarity of hindsight.