Istvan Dugalin ➤

The company of the North American Tour of Hell’s Kitchen | Photo by Marc J Franklin

“…and then you play this note.”
“…and then you play this note.”
“…and then you play this note.”

This ad nauseam bit of instruction from a dying piano instructor to her rebellious teenage pupil is emblematic. Training involves monotonous repetition—this is right and practical, music is, on a technical level, just one note after another. The exalting allure of art, though, is alchemy—the sum being somehow greater than the parts—and that just didn’t happen for me in Hell’s Kitchen—the Alicia Keys’ musical, a North American tour presented by Mirvish, that loosely tracks her early days in the titular New York neighbourhood and which is, admittedly, not my thing.

Living on an upper floor of a Manhattan high-rise in the 1990s, tension forms between Ali (Maya Drake), our Keys stand-in, and her white mother, Jersey (Kennedy Caughell), when she gets the hots for one of the bad boy plastic bucket drummers outside their building. She awkwardly pursues the rather adorably named Knuck (JonAvery Worrell)—who is, indeed, very sexy and far too sensible for her nonsense—and he gets caught up in her under-age wiles. Her mother—with trust issues stemming from her unreliable ex-husband, Ali’s father, walking out on them, and buying Rudy Giuliani’s clean up the streets rhetoric—sets the cops on him.

This admittedly irresponsible overreaction causes a major rift between the two and sends Ali into the stern yet loving maternal-musical embrace of an older Black woman, Miss Liza Jane (Roz White), who spends her days practicing on the piano in the bafflingly always empty except for her “Ellington Room.” Like everyone here in Kristoffer Diaz’s serviceable yet uninspired book, she’s written to maximize all the tropes as she evokes their ancestors to channel Ali’s anger into art. Her fate is as cloying as it is visible from a narrative distance.

There is some resonant Black Lives Matter theming—the averted yet devastating potential of Knuck’s run in with police and the sombre tribute of “Perfect Way to Die”—but these feel a bit ham-fisted and perfunctory. I all but rolled my eyes at the clumsy, girl-power lamp-shading of “Hold up, the world is her’s cuz she got a man now?” I do very much appreciate, though, the muted and comfortingly mundane resolution. Things don’t work out perfectly here, but they’re “alright” and that’s lovely.

Maya Drake & Roz White in the North American Tour of Hell’s Kitchen | Photo by Marc J Franklin

Drake has a charming enough presence, in both her giddy and morose modes, to be a solid focal point, but Ali’s not the most compelling character in her own story or on the stage. As I mentioned, Worrell’s Knuck is a very appealing love interest and gives understated authority and dimension to the rather tritely written misunderstood thug with unappreciated integrity stereotype. White provides as much humour and gravitas as she can within her own trope-y burden. As Davis, the musician ex-husband and wayward father figure, Desmond Sean Ellington has intense charisma. His back in your life, baby flirtatious advances in “Fallin” are a highlight. Of them all, Caughell gets the best opportunities to flex vocal chops—her “Pawn It All” pretty much brought the house down. Other highlight numbers include the trippy visuals of “Kaleidoscope” and the rousing sense of independence and community in “Girl on Fire.”

My favourite bit of Camille A. Brown’s choreography is the proud voguing and ballroom culture vibes of “Work on It.” Though all the choreography is dynamic, I did have an issue with it all feeling a bit too unmotivated. People will suddenly appear with their fine moves then dip out. I understand it’s all very contemporary, very TikTok, but it just reads as stagy to my middle-aged sensibilities. There is something rather poignant in how dancers—either solo or in duet—will interpret the specific emotions of more intimate scenes, though I feel like these get lost in the overall clutter.

The pivotal intention of the imagery, in the linear frameworks of Robert Brill’s scenic design and Peter Migrini’s supporting projections, is to conjure New York—specifically the height, density and radiance of skyscrapers. Visually, the city is the star of the show—most bombastically asserted in the “Empire State of Mind” finale, where the cityscape is rendered in an array of glowing, flyby perspectives. Vertical movement is another crucial motif, with Ali’s elevators rides up and down rendered in hypnotically kinetic sequences.

The flashy hip-hop aesthetics of Hell’s Kitchen are haphazardly majestic and electrifying, and perhaps the original Off-Broadway/Broadway productions felt more genuinely vital, but the material (specifically the book) and director Michael Greif’s production just don’t transcend the set the tracks then let the train go mechanics of replica Musical McTheatre in the same way the sturdy classics do. Held up to the standard of The Phantom of the Opera, CATS or Les Misérables—or even recent hits like & Juliet (jukebox), Hamilton (hip-hop) and Hadestown (folk)—this functions yet falters in schematic reproduction.

Hell’s Kitchen
September 23 to October 25, 2026
CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre
(244 Victoria Street)
2 hours, 35 minutes (includes intermission)

Maya Drake & JonAvery Worrell in the North American Tour of Hell’s Kitchen | Photo by Marc J Franklin