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Alicia Keys steps into a new spotlight

“Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway

One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.

She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing Hell’s Kitchen, a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighbourhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.

So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think Rose’s Turn from Gypsy and Little Girls from Annie). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.

She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.

“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.

That day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened non-profit where Hell’s Kitchen is to begin an off-Broadway run October 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.

“I am thinking a lot about Hell’s Kitchen, and obviously, the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”

With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.

Her musical, Hell’s Kitchen, is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalised, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.

“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”

In Hell’s Kitchen, Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidised housing development just outside Times Square where 70 per cent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’ own upbringing.

Hell’s Kitchen is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’ identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).

The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’ best-known hits: Fallin’, No One, Girl on Fire, If I Ain’t Got You, and, of course, Empire State of Mind, her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.

“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”

Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is, the overlap between the recording industry and musical theatre is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (MJ, about Michael Jackson) and fictional (& Juliet), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (Here Lies Love).

Keys is a lifelong theatregoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of The Wizard of Oz and had a cameo on The Cosby Show at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast; she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.

“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)

When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’ father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)

Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theatre tickets.

She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of Fallin’ and boosted by an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, her career took off.

Keys has continued to see theatre when she can, and in 2011, she co-produced a Broadway play, Stick Fly, about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theatre, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.

Stick Fly, Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up Hell’s Kitchen, she had audacious goals.

“Because I have all the experience with seeing theatre since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theatre, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theatre would love.”

Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theatre? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.

“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence, they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”

So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)

And what about reinventing theatre? When we ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.

“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”

Keys’ ownership — economic as well as artistic — of Hell’s Kitchen is commendable. Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.

“I want to own my story,” she said. “And I deserve to.”

She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.

Control has been a central theme of Keys’ career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mould her image and sound.

Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”

“I feel like, as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”

Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.

“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”

That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.

“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.