“Hell’s Kitchen,” a new musical loosely based on Alicia Keys’s years growing up in that vibrant but rough Manhattan neighborhood, arrives at the Public Theater next month. It’s a New York story, for everyone.
An empty arena is an eerie place. I feel this distinctly on a Tuesday in early August as I hasten across an enormous parking lot to the dark entrance of the Oakland Arena, a 19,200-seat venue just east of the San Francisco Bay. Near the checkpoint where I wait, a metal detector blinks and beeps indiscriminately.
Keys, seated at a large vanity, is swathed in a white terrycloth robe, bare-faced, as a stylist dutifully brushes her hair and she applies her own makeup—lightly, and mostly with her fingers. As we chat a bit about the tour, she speaks very softly—probably, I figure, to protect her voice. The show has been in development, at least in theory, for over a decade, but the seeds were sown even earlier. Born Alicia Augello-Cook in the winter of 1981, Keys grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a 46-floor residential complex in Hell’s Kitchen, with her own single mother, Teresa “Terri” Augello, a struggling actress.
In about 2011, Keys started sketching out the concept for a show about being 17—that thrilling, frustrating, all-important age. She wanted to “dig into how much you’re looking for in that time; how much you are figuring out who you are, who you’re not, what you like, what you don’t, what’s good for you, what’s not.” Manhattan Plaza also seemed the perfect setting for a musical, with its teeming community of striving musicians, actors, and dancers.In her home studio as a teenager.
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