As its name suggests, “Hell's Kitchen” is much sexier than “Manhattan Plaza.” That's probably why Alicia Keys' new musical, based on the book by Christopher Diaz, has a hotter title. After its world premiere at the Public Theater last year, “Hell's Kitchen” opened Saturday at Broadway's Shubert Theater.
The musical is reportedly semi-autobiographical. The term “loosely based” is sometimes used in news reports. Diaz's book looks back at the singer-songwriter's life as a teenager growing up with her single mother in the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex on the south end of Hell's Kitchen.n.d. and 43rd street. There is no greater resemblance between the old Hell's Kitchen rowhouses once inhabited by Irish immigrants and his 1970s-built high-rise apartment buildings to accommodate upper-middle-class tenants.
When renters with that kind of money weren't littering to live right in front of dingy Times Square, Manhattan Plaza turned into a haven for people in the performing arts, with 70% of its roughly 1,700 apartments discounted/ We dedicated it to those artists at a reduced price. stipulated rent. The remaining residents continue to be occupied by elderly people and nearby residents.
Early in “Hell's Kitchen,” 17-year-old Ali (Malea Joy Moon) sings a lovely wishlist titled “The River,” in which she laments being stuck on Route 42. ing.n.d. With her mother Jersey (Shoshana Bean) on the floor of the Manhattan Plaza Tower. Her only solace is the view of the Hudson River from her apartment, which serves as a source of inspiration for this teenage girl, symbolizing her desire to be free and adrift.
“The River” works because it’s one of only four songs written specifically for the musical. This is what you would call a book song, establishing characters and moving the story forward, but director Michael Greif makes the most of the moment.
He prepares us for “The River” by establishing the film's most effective visual leitmotif. Natasha Katz's lighting and Peter Nigrini's projections recreate Manhattan Plaza's many floors, each offering a different musical motif to embody the different artists who live there.
When Ali isn't holed up upstairs, she encounters a group of young street musicians playing bucket drums and wants to sleep (or read a book, or watch porn in peace).Eventually, the police are called in to stop the noise. You will have to call.
Sorry, it's music.
Disclaimer: I live in Hell's Kitchen, a few blocks north of Manhattan Plaza. So she had a little trouble rooting for this seemingly well-dressed character, Ali, who has an unobstructed view of the Hudson River, but has a “dirty window,” she said. she complains, someone who staunchly supports the noisy drummer. She also wondered how she was able to get into Manhattan Plaza, where the rent is reduced/regulated, since her single mother is no longer an actor.
To this day, Manhattan Plaza stands as a collection of ivory towers in a once-desolate neighborhood, and all the meanings conveyed by the words “tower” and “ivory” also include the word “white.” I am. But in Keys' song or Diaz's book, Ali's special status in Manhattan Plaza is never explored.
Ali told us, blowing away all his advantages. [the doorman] “Once you walk past him and walk through this door, it's like the whole city of New York is singing to you.” Like many 17-year-olds, Ali believes that he is I don't think I'm privileged just because I'm privileged.
Keyes and Diaz focus instead on the young heroine's burgeoning sexual desires and her passionate pursuit of one of the street drummers, Knack (Chris Lee). It's refreshing to see the tables turn. Here, a girl actively pursues the elusive object of her love, a boy. Ali follows Nak to her place of work, sometimes painting the exterior of her building on a ladder. Robert Brill's set makes beautiful use of scaffolding to hint at the cityscape and accommodate the orchestra members.
Ali, played by Moon, is cocky and confident in her desire to seduce the distant Knack. But after a while, hearing a man say “no” repeatedly becomes no more interesting to her than hearing a woman say “no” repeatedly before the inevitable romantic surrender. At one point in “Hell's She's in the Kitchen,” she might want to scream at the stage. “Will you two make a fuss to start this story?'' When they finally have sex, it's clear that Moon and Lee have simulated this task many times on stage. They both take off their costumes with the precision of a robot couple.
Ali's biggest concern is dealing with her overprotective mother, who has not recovered from being abandoned by Ali's father (Brandon Victor Dixon). Most of the songs on “Hell's Kitchen'' are Keys standards. I'm glad to hear their songs so well. The exception is the angry “Pawn It All,” in which Shoshanna Bean goes to extremes to surpass Leslie Rodriguez Kritzler's caterwauling diva parody currently in the “Spamalot” revival. are doing.
“Pawn It All” and nearly two dozen other Keys songs on her many albums are not book songs. These effectively summarize emotions and mental states, but stop the story from feeling cold. To keep the show moving, Greif's direction worked with choreographer Camille A. Brown to bring dancers on stage to perform stomps, waves, lunges, turns, and other exercises. By placing a lot of them, we are enhancing this moment.
Some of these choreographed moments are also delivered during solo and duet performances, as if great vocals weren't enough. This is theater access already a cliché at the stuffy old Metropolitan Opera. Since HD performances have been broadcast to movie theaters around the world, directors have had to offer audiences something visual to keep them from refilling Juji's box of fruit. I feel sexual.
An interesting feature of Greif's production is that he tends to leave Brandon Victor Dixon alone and undisturbed when he sings. Only once in his four songs does the dancer feel the need to take his focus away from the song. Dixon is consistently captivating, and here he gives one of the show's most understated and powerful performances, even though he's essentially playing the villain.
“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t have much of a story to tell, so Diaz ramps up the drama in several ways that ultimately feel like lies. He concludes the first act of his two-and-a-half-hour musical with a showdown between the cops and the Knack, which leads to the launch of Keys' 2020 single, “Perfect Way to Die.” The references to Black Lives Matter are strong, but they carry more weight than this musical can sustain, especially when the fact of Knack's “arrest” is revealed in the second act.
Another big fake drama occurs when Ali hears a pianist playing at Manhattan Plaza. She is a woman incredibly named Miss Liza Jane (Keshia Lewis), based on the famous Margaret Pine, Keyes' real-life piano teacher and wife of character actor Larry Pine. Masu. Miss Liza Jane, played by Lewis, lives on the roof of Carnegie Hall and is surrounded by an immigrant ballet and voice instructor (played by Maria Uspenskaya) whose extreme contempt is meant to convey her artistic rigor. It's similar to the old MGM metaphor: In “Hell's Kitchen,” the character is an arrogant bore, but Miss Lisa Jane's piano teaching method is similar to the way Johann Strauss (Fernand Gravey) composed the 1938 camp classic “The Great Waltz.” As fun and silly as it gets.
On Broadway, Ali gets excited about his piano lessons and sings a song he didn't hear in “Hell's Kitchen” at the Public Theater. The title of the new song is “Kaleidoscope,” but when it was performed at the Schubert Theatre, the lyrics could not be deciphered, so I had to look it up. Here is a sample: “Kaleid-Raid-Raid-Raid-Raid-Raidscope/Everyone's looking up and down, oh, not yet, oh no/You're moving, moving, moving, moving too slow / I got the antidote, oh, oh, no.”
Keys and Diaz can make up as many stories as they want, and what they come up with resembles a publicist's press release. Keys began taking piano lessons as a child, not at age 17. Her father was a flight attendant, not a jazz singer and pianist. Her piano teacher was white and not a black historian of African American music.
Obviously, Keyes' real-life privilege and fairly ordinary childhood (aside from living among hundreds of A-list artists in a doorman's building with spectacular but “dirty” views of the Hudson River) , would not work well for her fans. She worships a much more radical idol.
