The hits are still hitting … and hitting hard.
That is the first thing you’ll notice about “Hell’s Kitchen,” the Alicia Keys jukebox musical at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts now through March 22.
The singer/songwriter’s chart-toppers are powerfully reproduced, maybe even more so with Broadway-tized arrangements that up the vocal drama with thrilling trills, glamorous glissandos, meticulous melismas — vocal acrobatic flourishes that are dolce sweet one minute, then joyfully down-and-dirty the next.
You might say they have been show-tuned-up.
Booming throughout “Hell’s Kitchen” is the 17-time Grammy Award winner’s songbook, including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “No One,” “Empire State of Mind,” “You Don’t Know My Name,” “Teenage Love Affair,” “Un-thinkable (I’m Ready),” “Perfect Way to Die” and more.
There are also some new songs — “Seventeen” and “Kaleidoscope” — that Keys wrote exclusively for the musical, and they stand up to anything else you’ll hear from other Great White Way successes.
After more than a decade of development by Keys, “Hell’s Kitchen” opened off-Broadway in 2023 where the run was extended three times. The stage musical opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in 2024, going on to win two performer Tony Awards and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album before closing on Feb. 22.
To be fair, this doesn’t feel or present like a typical jukebox musical. Those tracks, for the most part, meld seamlessly with the story.
Also, this isn’t, strictly speaking, an autobiography of Keys, who already had a recording contract when she was 15. More to the point, there’s none of that jukebox-esque jive of “Then I did this” and “Then I did that.”
Instead you get a spotlight on a series of back-in-the-day experiences that very loosely helped to shape the recording artist we all know today, specifically her teenage years in the 1990s, dealing with the challenges of growing up in (as the title tells you) Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood in Midtown West Manhattan.
Marc J. Franklin
Alicia Keys’ Broadway jukebox musical “Hell’s Kitchen” runs through March 22 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. (Marc J. Franklin/Courtesy)
“It’s like all of New York is singing to you,” says Ali, whose free-spirited ways cause friction with her overprotective mother, Jersey, who feels that teens are “Babies in grownup bodies … hormones in hoodies.”
Along the way we get a narrative that winds its way in and around and through first love, teenage tantrums, the epiphany of music, an absent father, police harassment, tragic loss, finding inspiration and reconciliation.
It must be said, the storyline for “Hell’s Kitchen” is all rather predictable with zero plot points that shake you in your theater seat.
But then again, for two hours including a 15-minute intermission, you are hip-hop-ed, pop-rocked, jazz-ed, R&B-ed and soul-ed in your chair (because Keys is clearly not concerned about sticking to any particular music genre).
The earnestness of the show is balanced by a cast who just let it flow, singing with pulsating ebullience and dancing in a cacophony of choreographic styles — they won’t be contained, making you sit up and take notice of the notes.
They hit it hard.
“Hell’s Kitchen” runs through March 22 in the Au-Rene Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets range in price from $60.48 to $243.38. Visit browardcenter.org or call 954-462-0222.
Marc J. Franklin
Maya Drake as Ali and Kennedy Caughell as Jersey in the Broadway national tour of “Hell’s Kitchen.” (Marc J. Franklin/Courtesy)