Even in the Golden Age of musical theater, performances died after intermission so often that critics invented a name for the disease. “Second Act Problems” are presented in a variety of ways: unleashed songs, desperate cuts, illogical crises, hasty workarounds. But all of these second act symptoms stemmed from the same underlying condition: first act ambition.
So it’s not really surprising that a hugely ambitious new musical like “Hell’s Kitchen,” the semi-autobiographical jukebox based on the life and catalog of Alicia Keys, disappoints after the mid-show break and plunges straight into the potholes which it spent the first half so cleverly avoiding. The surprising thing about this promising show, which opened Sunday at the Public Theater with the obvious intention of moving to Broadway, is how exciting it is until then.
At least surprising to me. I find that jukeboxes – especially biographical ones like “Motown” and “MJ” – almost inevitably add to the usual difficulties of musical construction difficulties specific to their origins. Including the original artists (or their estates) results in historical glossing over. The rush to hit all the highlights leads to a carefully selected resume. The retreads of the catalog, written for a different reason, do not advance the action. And since these songs are the selling point of the show, they end up spreading the story.
But Keys, working with playwright Kristoffer Diaz and director Michael Greif, avoids most of these pitfalls in the show’s first hour and builds the story with remarkable verve and efficiency. In neat order, the main characters (17-year-old Ali and her single mother Jersey), the main setting (the midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1990s), and the parameters of the plot (Ali’s thirst for love) are introduced ) and an immediate source of conflict (mother).
At the same time, it inundates us with music to establish the worlds it takes us into, well beyond the R&B and pop that Keys is best known for. In a wonderful elevator sequence, Ali encounters opera, jazz, merengue and classical piano as she climbs from the 42nd-floor one-bedroom apartment she shares with Jersey, an occasional actor juggling two jobs. (The Manhattan Plaza building provides affordable housing for artists.) When Ali reaches the street, she is enveloped in a huge rush of noise; All of New York seems to be singing, playing and dancing in Camille A. Brown’s excitingly contextual choreography.
We’re only a few minutes into the show and the structure is completely in place. We know this will be a story of love and letting go between mother and daughter as Jersey (Shoshana Bean, warm and pyrotechnic) tries to feed Ali and keep her safe. Although race is not an explicit issue between them, Jersey is white and Ali is biracial, and Ali (Maleah Joi Moon in a sensational debut) is gradually pulled away from her mother’s suffocation by the larger group of people she encounters.
One of them is the classical pianist, Miss Liza Jane (the masterful Kecia Lewis), who will demand that Ali take lessons from her – even though Keys actually started learning at 7, not 17. And out on the street, to the sounds of 2003 In his hit “You Don’t Know My Name,” Ali flirts with a bucket drummer named Knuck (Chris Lee, sweet as a child), even though he’s in his mid-20s. He will defend himself – at first.
And so, over the course of 11 songs, the first act does the work of ambitious first acts everywhere: it expands the show’s horizons to the larger world in which the action takes place (not a fair world for young black New Yorkers) and deepens our knowledge of the main characters through conflicts. There’s also humor: Diaz — whose hilarious professional wrestling play “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — saves the story from too much seriousness. Also credit Greif, whose consistent use of tone and tension elicits drama from a story that could easily have been too introverted.
Along with Keys, they also solve, or at least delay, many jukebox problems. By placing a very narrow focus on just a few weeks in Ali’s life, “Hell’s Kitchen” privileges the possibility of dramatic depth over the highlights of his career. There’s not much sugarcoating, either: Keys seems perfectly willing to portray her ambitious deputy as a hormonal teenager immune to common sense — and Moon, 21, is precocious and fearless when it comes to crafting that complex portrait delivery.
Most importantly, Keys’ songs, even hits like “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One,” fit into the story (and into the mouths of a variety of characters) without too much fuss . If this is not the case, the situation is effectively acknowledged. When Ali finally spends the night with Knuck – just in time, just before the various storylines merge into one terrible event at the end of the first act – Ali’s friend Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson) is upset because this is supposed to be an…uncompromisingly female-centered story. “The world is hers because she has a man now?” She complains, interrupting the 2012 banger “Girl on Fire,” which has been transformed here into an upbeat “I’m on top of the world” song . “This is what we do?”
Oh, “is this what we do?” That’s how I felt when the second act began. As if the creators had run out of time for finesse – even though Keys and Diaz have been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for more than a decade – the jokes congeal into lectures while the story, particularly Jersey’s, becomes blurred. Her tense relationship with Ali’s father, here a jazz pianist but in reality a flight attendant, bears the characteristic features of dramaturgical whiplash. (On the other hand, he is played by Brandon Victor Dixon, a human aphrodisiac, both vocal and otherwise.) An argument between Jersey and Miss Liza Jane seems similarly contrived until it is resolved in an obviously pathetic twist. And despite Bean’s skill, Jersey’s love for her daughter, the core of the series, is lost in the attempt to complicate it.
The second act songs follow this example; It’s no coincidence that the three new pieces Keys wrote for the production, all good, are at the top of the show. And although well-structured musicals typically contain far fewer songs in the second half than in the first to make room for the complexity of the plot resolution, here there are a whopping 14, which indulgently, if inevitably, begin with the New York anthem “Empire State of Mind” from 2009.” This makes “Hell’s Kitchen” almost what it wanted to avoid at the beginning: a hit dump.
But because these hits are hits for a reason, they’re still a joy to listen to. The vocals (led by Dominic Fallacaro) and the arrangements and orchestrations (by various hands, including Adam Blackstone, Tom Kitt and Keys himself) are exciting, if strangely unbalanced in Gareth Owen’s sound design. The fire escape sets (by Robert Brill), the expressive projections (by Peter Nigrini), the rich lighting (by Natasha Katz), and the often hilarious costumes (by Dede Ayite) are all Broadway-worthy.
I hope “Hell’s Kitchen” will be too. Of course, many musicals make the transfer without ever resolving their problems in the first act, let alone the second. That would be a shame here. Though not perfectly told, Ali’s discovery that art is love, with or without the man, is too rich not to reach a larger audience and a million more girls on fire.
Hell’s Kitchen
Through January 14 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.