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.
I am here to meet Alicia Keys, who later that day will play the penultimate set in her five-week-long, 22-city Keys to the Summer Tour, concluding at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, the following evening. But hours before she strides onstage to an incantatory arrangement of “Fallin’ ” (the chart-topping lead single from her debut album, Songs in A Minor, now a shocking 22 years old), wearing a coruscating green bodysuit and matching coat from Self-Portrait, a friendly assistant leads me down a flight of stairs, through a warren of passageways, and into the tranquilizing quiet of her dimly lit dressing room.
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. (Since the summer of 2016, when she famously eschewed any obvious maquillage at a string of public events, including that year’s Democratic National Convention and MTV Video Music Awards, Keys has transitioned to more of a no-makeup makeup look, primarily using products from her Keys Soulcare line: “I just have to kind of focus on the skin and little accents,” she says.) As we chat a bit about the tour, she speaks very softly—probably, I figure, to protect her voice.
With the end of Keys to the Summer comes about a six-week break, which she’ll spend with family, including her husband, producer Kasseem Daoud Dean, known professionally as Swizz Beatz, and their sons Egypt, 12, and Genesis, 8. (The day before our interview, she and Dean celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary in Seattle by sleeping in, getting massages, and setting intentions for each other: “I think it’s so amazing to be able to reground and recommit to all the things that we want to experience together,” Keys says. “I love how much we love each other.”) Then, in September, rehearsals begin for Hell’s Kitchen, a new musical loosely based on Keys’s life, at New York’s Public Theater. (Performances run from October 24 to December 23.) This, she is all too happy to pipe up about.
Directed by Michael Greif, with a book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by the prodigious Camille A. Brown, the show centers on a 17-year-old girl, Ali (newcomer Maleah Joi Moon), being raised by a no-nonsense single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), in a high-rise building in New York’s creative but rather rough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, near the Theater District. At the razor’s edge of adulthood in the heady 1990s, Ali feels stifled by her mother’s protectiveness—a budding romance with the evasive, older Knuck (Chris Lee) is a particular source of tension between them—but it’s also what steers her toward the old piano in their building’s community room. Keys has written the score, which mixes songs from her catalog (often reworked with Keys’s longtime music director Adam Blackstone) and new material.
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. (About two thirds of Manhattan Plaza’s units were earmarked for performing artists, and “rent, thankfully, was a percentage of residents’ feast-or-famine incomes,” Keys recalls in her 2020 memoir, More Myself.)
As Augello auditioned and temped, eventually finding stable work as a paralegal, she would take Keys, her only child, to see shows. “TKTS was definitely our best friend to get the discount tickets. We were standing on that line,” Keys says with a laugh. She remembers seeing a lot of musicals—Cats, Miss Saigon, Rent—and discovering, through her mother, just how enchanting and plainly powerful live theater could be. “She’s the best person to go to a Broadway play with. She is the loudest, the one that’s gonna sing the most…. She’s gonna be the one that everyone’s telling to shush,” Keys says. “We’re definitely the troublemakers in the theater, and it’s a good thing, because you should be able to have a good time. I can’t stand those stiff people.”
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.” (Sure, Keys’s own 17th year looked pretty different from most people’s—by then, she was already signed to Columbia Records but eyeing a move to Arista with record executive Clive Davis—but the basic emotional landscape was the same.) Manhattan Plaza also seemed the perfect setting for a musical, with its teeming community of striving musicians, actors, and dancers.
And so, she set out to find a collaborator. “The thing is, growing up at that time in the city really requires a certain mentality,” Keys says. “Like, you have to know what the city was, and you have to understand the rawness and the darkness of it too. And a lot of people couldn’t really say they related to that.” Diaz—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and, perhaps more importantly, a native of Yonkers, a city just north of the Bronx—was a different story. “When I connected with Kris, like, he knew what I knew, and I knew what he knew,” Keys says, clapping her hands for emphasis. “I remember just feeling so excited to be able to have that connection.”
Diaz remembers things the same way. The awesome surreality of being summoned to meet Keys—a major star by any standard—was quickly dispelled as the two began talking. “I’m pretty sure that the things we bonded over in that moment were the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. We had that same vibe right away.” They mused about structuring Hell’s Kitchen like Nas’s 2001 song “One Mic,” which doesn’t so much build to a single climax as shift back and forth between dense, eruptive verses and a notably quiet chorus. Similarly, they could have Ali’s story “exploding in these moments of big emotion, and maybe the end is her coming to some kind of peace with herself,” Diaz says. “Not to spoil it, but that’s kind of where we ended up.”
Although their process involved many sprawling conversations about Keys’s life—and, as she told The New York Times this summer, “there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song” that she hasn’t signed off on—neither she nor Diaz was interested in the theater equivalent of a biopic. More germane to the show than the actual facts of Keys’s girlhood were the emotional beats: the intensity of her relationship with her mother; the nagging pain of her estrangement from her father, Craig Cook, a flight attendant (he’s reimagined in Hell’s Kitchen as a traveling instrumentalist); the splendor of finding herself through song; the head rush of young love (Keys’s first serious boyfriend, Kerry “Krucial” Brothers—with whom she eventually moved up to Harlem—would help produce her first four albums). All the same, at one early run-through, Augello leaned over to Clive Davis, eager to clarify that she’d never actually had any of her daughter’s boyfriends arrested. “She was like, I just want you to know that,” Keys reports, cackling.
In 2018, Keys and Diaz finally engaged a director for Hell’s Kitchen: Greif, a four-time Tony nominee, known for directing Rent and Dear Evan Hansen. “Michael is, like, one of the three or four reasons that I do theater,” says Diaz. “Rent is the show that changed my life.” To Greif, the story felt wonderfully alive by the time he came on board. “Ali was already interesting and unique and extraordinarily sympathetic and familiar all at the same time.”
Instantly, he seemed to understand something that neither Keys nor Diaz had fully latched on to themselves. “He said to us, ‘You’ve done something really smart here. You’ve written a show that looks like it’s a conventional love story, but it’s actually a love story between a mother and a daughter,’ ” Diaz continues. “And he said, ‘Not only is that a smart artistic idea, that’s a smart business idea, because that’s who goes to the theater—mothers and daughters.’ And from across the room, Alicia and I just looked at each other, like, Oh, yeah! That’s what we’re doing.”
For Keys, leaning into that dynamic has been among the most rewarding parts of getting Hell’s Kitchen off the ground. “I feel like this creative process has definitely made me understand my mother even more,” she says. “There is this thing that ties us all together as mothers—there’s no limit to what we’d sacrifice—and your kids will never know. Not until they finally have a family of their own or kids of their own, and then maybe they can understand what you had to do, what you had to give up.”
The question of a production’s economic viability would be important anywhere, but at the Public—which made headlines over the summer for slashing staff and putting its experimental Under the Radar Festival on indefinite hiatus—Hell’s Kitchen represents a genuine gamble: It’s reportedly the most expensive show the organization has ever put on. Yet to longtime artistic director Oskar Eustis, there’s a logic to its economics. “Hell’s Kitchen is a quintessential New York coming-of-age story,” he says in an email. While the show “requires substantial resources, it promises to be a net economic gain for The Public.” They weren’t staging it instead of another play or program, he argues, but indeed to help “support those other, vital activities.”
Eustis’s confidence is rooted, at least in part, in the strength of Keys’s searching piano ballads, R&B bops, and bold pop anthems, all of which have an uncommon way of reaching people. At her Keys to the Summer shows in Brooklyn and Oakland, I am astounded by the multiplicity of ages, races, and gender identities screaming along to, say, “Girl on Fire.” (Moon can also attest to Keys’s multigenerational appeal: “I grew up listening to her,” the 20-year-old tells me. “My dad loves her, my mom loves her, my whole family listens to her.”) Hell’s Kitchen makes good use of her songbook: Its numbers include rejiggered arrangements of “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “Un-Thinkable (I’m Ready),” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” as well as riffs on deep cuts like “The Gospel” and “Work on It,” from her 2016 album Here, and the gorgeous “Like Water” from 2021’s Keys. “You’re hearing the songs that you love, but in ways you’ve never heard them before,” says Keys.
“It’s a little baffling that she’s never worked on a piece of theater before,” Greif says. He praises Keys’s deftness, not only as a lyricist and composer—she could have new music ready within days of discussing a scene—but also as a reinterpreter, marrying song to story: “She has an incredible sense of how a song works dramatically.”
Yet another draw, audiences will soon appreciate, is Moon (yes, that is her real name), a singer and actor from Franklin Township, New Jersey. “It was very hard to cast that part with that level of vocal skill, that level of street energy—because you have to innately have a certain vibe—and, on top of that, also have a beautiful naturalness and realness,” Keys says. With Moon, “There’s no question that we’re watching a star be born.”
When I meet Moon at the Public one grimly hot afternoon, she looks the picture of Gen Z cool, sipping something pink and frothy from Starbucks and dressed in a sleeveless black top and khakis. “I’m getting into the Y2K, ’90s thing,” she explains later. Based on footage that I’ve seen of her singing, I know that she shares Keys’s soulful tone and that there is a slight physical resemblance. (In fact, with her loose curls and long, ruffled dress, Moon looks quite like Keys in her first-ever Vogue shoot, from 2004—another story photographed, as it happens, by Norman Jean Roy.) Yet as we talk, I’ll also learn that they both played Dorothy in school productions of The Wizard of Oz (“Out of all of the little clubs and extracurriculars that I picked up, theater felt the most natural to me,” Moon says), and that both are deeply fond of Stevie Wonder.
Moon has now been involved with Hell’s Kitchen for about a year: Not long after entering Pace University to study musical theater and appearing in a virtual talent showcase run by Disney, she was cast in a workshop of the production last fall. She admits now to going into the audition feeling lost. Moon knew that she was a storyteller—in her free time, she likes to pick at a guitar and noodle with music production software—but “I had no idea what I wanted to do in this industry,” she says. At the urging of her agent, however, she tried out anyway, singing “Home” from The Wiz for a room that included Greif, Diaz, and Camille A. Brown. “It was the most nerve-racking and probably the best audition I think I’ve ever had,” Moon says.
“Whatever brief acting training she’s had, it was either really good, or she really gleaned the very best out of it,” notes Greif. “She gets it. She really knows how to mine something for the greatest stakes.” (Adds Diaz: “She walked in, and she’s captivating—she commands a room. You’re just like, Man, please let her be able to sing.”)
Since officially being offered the part—“I remember taking the NJ Transit home and calling my parents and being like, ‘Daddy, Mommy, they want me!’ ” she says, beaming—Moon has felt only held, only supported, by the show’s cast and crew. She describes learning songs with Keys as “a dream come true” and calls Greif “a generous collaborator”; someone with a special knack for encouraging young performers. Yet her closest friend and confidant has been Chris Lee, who plays Ali’s love interest, Knuck. “He called me the other day, and he was like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to check up on you. How’s everything going?’ ” Moon says. Lee, who was also once plucked from college for a major show (in his case, the 2016 production of Hamilton in Chicago), wondered if she understood just how “crazy” things were about to become. I ask her some version of the same thing: Is she ready for Hell’s Kitchen to change her life?
Moon considers the question levelly. “There are definitely going to be times where I’m going to slip and fall, or I’m not going to know how to navigate a situation because it’s all very new, but I’m surrounded by people who want the best for me, and I want the best for them,” she says. “As terrifying as all of this could be, it’s too beautiful for me to be scared.”
In this story: hair, Nai’vasha; makeup for Alicia Keys, Ayako Yoshimura; makeup for Maleah Joi Moon, Kuma. Produced by Boom Productions.