There is a fascinating contradiction at the center of Hell’s Kitchen. It is unmistakably inspired by Keys’ life, yet some of the most remarkable parts of that life aren’t in it. And that is intentional.
Keys has repeatedly emphasized that the musical is not an autobiography. She and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristoffer Diaz instead borrowed the emotional architecture and setting of her adolescence - the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex, a fiercely protective single mother, an inconsistently present father, the culturally electric but often dangerous neighborhood outside, a transformative relationship with the piano and a teenage girl determined to experience life for herself - and created a fictional story from it. Keys has explained that she specifically wanted audiences to encounter Ali at 17, before the inevitable second act of the Alicia Keys story: record contracts, “Fallin’,” Grammys and international superstardom.
It is a smart artistic decision, and one that allows Hell’s Kitchen to become far more universal than a conventional jukebox biography. But as I watched Maya Drake’s Ali push against the boundaries imposed by Kennedy Caughell’s Jersey, I kept thinking about the other musical hiding somewhere inside this one. The real Alicia Keys story is astonishing, and in some respects considerably more complicated than the fictional version Keys chose to put onstage.
At its heart, Hell’s Kitchen is a mother-daughter story, and that relationship is where the production is at its strongest. Ali is 17 and experiencing the completely natural urge to separate from her mother and discover who she is independently. She wants freedom, romance, sex, music, the city downstairs and the ability to make decisions without Jersey constantly making them for her. She has reached that maddeningly familiar age when teenagers can see adulthood directly in front of them and understandably cannot comprehend why their parents refuse to acknowledge that they have already arrived.
Jersey’s position is more complicated. She knows her daughter has to grow up, but she also knows exactly what can happen when a 17-year-old believes she understands consequences she has never experienced. Jersey isn’t simply trying to control Ali. She is watching her daughter approach decisions that resemble ones she made herself, particularly when it comes to men, and desperately wants to spare Ali from learning certain lessons the same painful way she did.
It is a smart artistic decision, and one that allows Hell’s Kitchen to become far more universal than a conventional jukebox biography. But as I watched Maya Drake’s Ali push against the boundaries imposed by Kennedy Caughell’s Jersey, I kept thinking about the other musical hiding somewhere inside this one. The real Alicia Keys story is astonishing, and in some respects considerably more complicated than the fictional version Keys chose to put onstage.
At its heart, Hell’s Kitchen is a mother-daughter story, and that relationship is where the production is at its strongest. Ali is 17 and experiencing the completely natural urge to separate from her mother and discover who she is independently. She wants freedom, romance, sex, music, the city downstairs and the ability to make decisions without Jersey constantly making them for her. She has reached that maddeningly familiar age when teenagers can see adulthood directly in front of them and understandably cannot comprehend why their parents refuse to acknowledge that they have already arrived.
Jersey’s position is more complicated. She knows her daughter has to grow up, but she also knows exactly what can happen when a 17-year-old believes she understands consequences she has never experienced. Jersey isn’t simply trying to control Ali. She is watching her daughter approach decisions that resemble ones she made herself, particularly when it comes to men, and desperately wants to spare Ali from learning certain lessons the same painful way she did.
Ali is looking forward at everything she wants to experience; Jersey is looking backward at everything she wishes she had understood. That distinction gives their conflict far more emotional weight than simply portraying a mother and daughter who fail to understand each other.
Kennedy Caughell was one of the great pleasures of Wednesday night’s performance because she makes Jersey far more than the mother whose job is to say no. It would be easy for the character to become an obstacle standing between Ali and the adventures the audience wants her to have, but Caughell gives Jersey tremendous warmth, vulnerability, frustration and humanity. She also has an incredible voice and her singing is some of the best in the play. Even when we experience the story largely through Ali’s perspective, Caughell makes it impossible not to understand the mother’s.
That becomes even more powerful once you know how much Jersey owes to Keys’ actual mother, Terria Joseph. Joseph moved to New York as a teenager to pursue acting and eventually secured an apartment at Manhattan Plaza, the subsidized artists’ housing complex where Alicia would grow up. She became pregnant during a relationship with Alicia’s father, Craig Cook, and largely raised her daughter alone while working as a paralegal and pursuing acting work when she could. Keys has consistently credited her mother with giving her the discipline, opportunities and resilience that helped shape her life, including surrounding her with activities and supporting the piano lessons that would eventually change everything.
Kennedy Caughell was one of the great pleasures of Wednesday night’s performance because she makes Jersey far more than the mother whose job is to say no. It would be easy for the character to become an obstacle standing between Ali and the adventures the audience wants her to have, but Caughell gives Jersey tremendous warmth, vulnerability, frustration and humanity. She also has an incredible voice and her singing is some of the best in the play. Even when we experience the story largely through Ali’s perspective, Caughell makes it impossible not to understand the mother’s.
That becomes even more powerful once you know how much Jersey owes to Keys’ actual mother, Terria Joseph. Joseph moved to New York as a teenager to pursue acting and eventually secured an apartment at Manhattan Plaza, the subsidized artists’ housing complex where Alicia would grow up. She became pregnant during a relationship with Alicia’s father, Craig Cook, and largely raised her daughter alone while working as a paralegal and pursuing acting work when she could. Keys has consistently credited her mother with giving her the discipline, opportunities and resilience that helped shape her life, including surrounding her with activities and supporting the piano lessons that would eventually change everything.
The musical’s Davis, played by Desmond Sean Ellington, is where the distance between fiction and Keys’ actual life becomes especially interesting. Davis is flawed and unreliable. He comes and goes, and Jersey knows enough about him to be deeply suspicious when he reappears and begins captivating their daughter. But Ellington also makes him charming and human. He isn’t presented as some terrible villain. There is enough affection and charisma in Davis to understand why Ali is fascinated by him and why Jersey once was too.
Keys’ actual relationship with her father was much more difficult. Cook left when she was very young, and Keys grew up with little relationship with him. She has spoken over the years about the anger created by his absence and about how dramatically her mother’s constant presence contrasted with it. Keys has also made clear that Davis is not intended as a literal portrayal of Cook - her real father wasn’t the jazz musician we see onstage - and that distinction matters.
Davis is a dramatic creation designed to illuminate Ali and Jersey rather than reproduce Alicia Keys’ family history. Still, knowing how much harsher the reality was makes Keys’ choice fascinating. She could have turned Hell’s Kitchen into a much darker father-daughter story. Instead, she fictionalized that relationship into something more nuanced and forgiving.
My other favorite performance came from Roz White as Miss Liza Jane, who provides an entirely different kind of maternal presence. Where Jersey wants to protect Ali from the world, Miss Liza Jane wants to prepare her to confront it. She recognizes the young woman’s musical ability but has little interest in simply telling her how talented she is. Music demands work, technique, discipline and respect, and White brings enormous authority and soul to a character who understands that talent without those things means very little.
Here again, reality is arguably even more interesting than the theatrical version. Ali discovers this musical mentor at 17, but Alicia Keys began studying classical piano at seven. She spent years developing the skill that would eventually become inseparable from her public identity, began writing songs as a young teenager and pursued music with a discipline that seems almost improbable when considered alongside the environment in which she was growing up. There wasn’t one magical teenage moment when Alicia Keys discovered music. There were years of lessons, practice, sacrifice and a mother finding a way to make those opportunities possible.
Maya Drake succeeds as Ali precisely because she doesn’t try to impersonate Alicia Keys. Ali is funny, impulsive, stubborn, romantic, hormonal, talented and occasionally spectacularly certain about things she does not yet understand. In other words, she is a convincing 17-year-old. JonAvery Worrell gives Knuck the warmth necessary to make Ali’s first serious romantic awakening believable, while Ellington gives Davis enough charm to complicate rather than simplify the family dynamic. The company is uniformly strong, Camille A. Brown’s choreography gives the neighborhood an almost restless physical energy, and director Michael Greif makes Manhattan Plaza and the streets surrounding it feel like characters themselves.
And then, of course, there is Keys’ music. “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “No One,” “Empire State of Mind” and other songs that have been embedded in popular culture for decades acquire surprising new meanings when placed inside relationships and circumstances for which they were not originally written. That may be Hell’s Kitchen’s most impressive accomplishment as a jukebox musical. Rather than stopping the story so everyone can applaud a familiar Alicia Keys song, the production frequently makes you reconsider what that song can mean.
Yet the more I learned about Keys’ real childhood after seeing the show, the more I found myself wanting that musical too. Not because Hell’s Kitchen should have been a predictable celebrity biography racing through career milestones toward a triumphant Grammy Awards finale, but because the reality contains contradictions no playwright would need to invent.
My other favorite performance came from Roz White as Miss Liza Jane, who provides an entirely different kind of maternal presence. Where Jersey wants to protect Ali from the world, Miss Liza Jane wants to prepare her to confront it. She recognizes the young woman’s musical ability but has little interest in simply telling her how talented she is. Music demands work, technique, discipline and respect, and White brings enormous authority and soul to a character who understands that talent without those things means very little.
Here again, reality is arguably even more interesting than the theatrical version. Ali discovers this musical mentor at 17, but Alicia Keys began studying classical piano at seven. She spent years developing the skill that would eventually become inseparable from her public identity, began writing songs as a young teenager and pursued music with a discipline that seems almost improbable when considered alongside the environment in which she was growing up. There wasn’t one magical teenage moment when Alicia Keys discovered music. There were years of lessons, practice, sacrifice and a mother finding a way to make those opportunities possible.
Maya Drake succeeds as Ali precisely because she doesn’t try to impersonate Alicia Keys. Ali is funny, impulsive, stubborn, romantic, hormonal, talented and occasionally spectacularly certain about things she does not yet understand. In other words, she is a convincing 17-year-old. JonAvery Worrell gives Knuck the warmth necessary to make Ali’s first serious romantic awakening believable, while Ellington gives Davis enough charm to complicate rather than simplify the family dynamic. The company is uniformly strong, Camille A. Brown’s choreography gives the neighborhood an almost restless physical energy, and director Michael Greif makes Manhattan Plaza and the streets surrounding it feel like characters themselves.
And then, of course, there is Keys’ music. “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “No One,” “Empire State of Mind” and other songs that have been embedded in popular culture for decades acquire surprising new meanings when placed inside relationships and circumstances for which they were not originally written. That may be Hell’s Kitchen’s most impressive accomplishment as a jukebox musical. Rather than stopping the story so everyone can applaud a familiar Alicia Keys song, the production frequently makes you reconsider what that song can mean.
Yet the more I learned about Keys’ real childhood after seeing the show, the more I found myself wanting that musical too. Not because Hell’s Kitchen should have been a predictable celebrity biography racing through career milestones toward a triumphant Grammy Awards finale, but because the reality contains contradictions no playwright would need to invent.
Keys was a biracial girl raised primarily by a white single mother in a rough pocket of 1980s and 1990s Manhattan. Her father was largely absent. Her mother worked relentlessly while pursuing her own artistic ambitions. Keys has described growing up around drugs, prostitution and violence and developing an emotional armor to navigate the neighborhood, even deliberately dressing in ways intended to avoid unwanted attention. At the same time, this same child was receiving classical piano training, writing music and excelling academically.
Then consider what happened next. Keys graduated high school at 16 as valedictorian, briefly attended Columbia University and entered an unforgiving record industry while still extraordinarily young. Her first record deal did not become the fairy-tale beginning one might expect. She fought to retain control over her identity and music, eventually left Columbia Records and signed with Clive Davis, and at 20 released Songs in A Minor. The album debuted at number one, produced “Fallin’,” sold millions of copies and led to Keys winning five Grammys in a single night. The teenager raised by a struggling single mother in Manhattan Plaza became one of the defining musical artists of her generation.
Knowing all of that does not diminish Hell’s Kitchen. It actually made me appreciate the musical more, because Keys had every opportunity to construct a monument to Alicia Keys and chose not to. The audience never gets the inevitable wink toward Ali becoming a global superstar because Ali doesn’t become Alicia Keys. She remains Ali. Keys has said that was deliberate: something is clearly brewing inside this young woman, but the musical is interested in becoming an adult rather than becoming famous.
That decision is why the story can belong to everyone else. You do not have to become Alicia Keys to remember wanting independence from your parents. You do not have to raise Alicia Keys to understand the terror of watching your teenager approach mistakes you desperately wish you could prevent. You do not need a Grammy to remember the intensity of first love, and you certainly do not need to grow up in Manhattan Plaza to recognize that strange period when a child begins becoming an adult before either the child or parent is entirely prepared for it.
There was something particularly meaningful about seeing the production in San Diego one night after Keys herself surprised the Civic Theatre audience at Tuesday’s opening performance. Keys and her husband, Swizz Beatz, have developed increasingly substantial ties to the region since purchasing La Jolla’s famed Razor House in 2019. Their Giants: Art from the Dean Collection exhibition arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego this year, and the couple’s recent local appearances have ranged from Keys leading an impromptu “No One” singalong at Lou Lou’s Jungle Room in North Park to joining Beatz at Chicano Park Day. At Tuesday’s curtain call, Keys spoke about San Diego’s importance to her family and memorably called it “the coolest city in the world.”
But seeing the musical without Keys herself standing onstage the following evening made something else resonate. The woman who seemingly has everything today was once the daughter of a single mother trying desperately to guide her through a difficult New York childhood. Decades later, she spent years transforming some version of that relationship into art. Perhaps Hell’s Kitchen isn’t ultimately Alicia Keys’ attempt to tell us how Alicia Keys became famous. Perhaps it is partly her opportunity, from the perspective of adulthood and motherhood herself, to look backward at the woman who helped make Alicia Keys possible.
That may be why Caughell’s Jersey stayed with me as much as any character in the production. Teenagers inevitably experience restrictions from their parents as restrictions on their lives. Only later do many come to understand the fear, experience and sacrifice underlying them. Ali needs to get away from Jersey in order to become herself, while Jersey has to accept that protecting a child cannot mean preventing her from living. Neither reality makes the other disappear.
I walked out of the Civic Theatre thinking about Terria Joseph and Alicia Keys almost as much as Jersey and Ali: a mother who understood exactly how easily the decisions of adolescence could alter the course of a life, a daughter who naturally needed the freedom to make those decisions anyway, and the remarkable woman that daughter eventually became. Learning the true story behind Hell’s Kitchen did not make me appreciate the musical less. It made me appreciate Alicia Keys more.
Then consider what happened next. Keys graduated high school at 16 as valedictorian, briefly attended Columbia University and entered an unforgiving record industry while still extraordinarily young. Her first record deal did not become the fairy-tale beginning one might expect. She fought to retain control over her identity and music, eventually left Columbia Records and signed with Clive Davis, and at 20 released Songs in A Minor. The album debuted at number one, produced “Fallin’,” sold millions of copies and led to Keys winning five Grammys in a single night. The teenager raised by a struggling single mother in Manhattan Plaza became one of the defining musical artists of her generation.
Knowing all of that does not diminish Hell’s Kitchen. It actually made me appreciate the musical more, because Keys had every opportunity to construct a monument to Alicia Keys and chose not to. The audience never gets the inevitable wink toward Ali becoming a global superstar because Ali doesn’t become Alicia Keys. She remains Ali. Keys has said that was deliberate: something is clearly brewing inside this young woman, but the musical is interested in becoming an adult rather than becoming famous.
That decision is why the story can belong to everyone else. You do not have to become Alicia Keys to remember wanting independence from your parents. You do not have to raise Alicia Keys to understand the terror of watching your teenager approach mistakes you desperately wish you could prevent. You do not need a Grammy to remember the intensity of first love, and you certainly do not need to grow up in Manhattan Plaza to recognize that strange period when a child begins becoming an adult before either the child or parent is entirely prepared for it.
There was something particularly meaningful about seeing the production in San Diego one night after Keys herself surprised the Civic Theatre audience at Tuesday’s opening performance. Keys and her husband, Swizz Beatz, have developed increasingly substantial ties to the region since purchasing La Jolla’s famed Razor House in 2019. Their Giants: Art from the Dean Collection exhibition arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego this year, and the couple’s recent local appearances have ranged from Keys leading an impromptu “No One” singalong at Lou Lou’s Jungle Room in North Park to joining Beatz at Chicano Park Day. At Tuesday’s curtain call, Keys spoke about San Diego’s importance to her family and memorably called it “the coolest city in the world.”
But seeing the musical without Keys herself standing onstage the following evening made something else resonate. The woman who seemingly has everything today was once the daughter of a single mother trying desperately to guide her through a difficult New York childhood. Decades later, she spent years transforming some version of that relationship into art. Perhaps Hell’s Kitchen isn’t ultimately Alicia Keys’ attempt to tell us how Alicia Keys became famous. Perhaps it is partly her opportunity, from the perspective of adulthood and motherhood herself, to look backward at the woman who helped make Alicia Keys possible.
That may be why Caughell’s Jersey stayed with me as much as any character in the production. Teenagers inevitably experience restrictions from their parents as restrictions on their lives. Only later do many come to understand the fear, experience and sacrifice underlying them. Ali needs to get away from Jersey in order to become herself, while Jersey has to accept that protecting a child cannot mean preventing her from living. Neither reality makes the other disappear.
I walked out of the Civic Theatre thinking about Terria Joseph and Alicia Keys almost as much as Jersey and Ali: a mother who understood exactly how easily the decisions of adolescence could alter the course of a life, a daughter who naturally needed the freedom to make those decisions anyway, and the remarkable woman that daughter eventually became. Learning the true story behind Hell’s Kitchen did not make me appreciate the musical less. It made me appreciate Alicia Keys more.
Hell’s Kitchen continues at the San Diego Civic Theatre through Sunday, August 16. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit broadwaysd.com/upcoming-events/hells-kitchen.
Originally published on August 13, 2026.