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music & lyrics by Alicia Keys, book by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by Michael Greif

Mirvish Productions, CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria Street, Toronto

September 24–October 25, 2026

Miss Liza Jane: “You are here because the voices of your ancestors have requested your presence”

You probably already expect that, once you enter Alicia Keys’s Hell’s Kitchen, you’ll spend much of the evening keeping time with the bounce of your head. You might expect glass-shattering voices. You might even guess that Kristoffer Diaz’s book, loosely inspired by Keys’s adolescence, runs on the bright logic of a ’90s teen movie. What you may not foresee is the political charge humming beneath all that polish — the kind of dramatic weight that makes Hell’s Kitchen such a persuasive case for the jukebox musical formula.

Built around some of the biggest hits of Keys’s career, the story centres on Ali (Maya Drake), a loose but recognizable alter ego for the young Keys. She is 17 and loves roaming the graffiti-covered streets of the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood of Manhattan. Her mother, Jersey (Kennedy Caughell), is considerably less thrilled. Yet that cookie-cutter conflict of a teenager itching for independence is complicated by race.

Ali is biracial, the daughter of Davis, an absent Black father (Desmond Sean Ellington), and an apprehensive White mother. Jersey’s anxiety nearly overflows the stage. Making pasta in the kitchen, Caughell fusses and frets as steadily as a pulse. She barely pauses to breathe through “Seventeen”, her first-act plea to keep her daughter safe, her full-throated voice soaring with startling ease.

Still, something keeps calling Ali back to the street. Maybe it’s her loud-and-proud best friends, Tiny (Sydney Townsend) and Jessica (Lulu Oro Hamlett). Maybe it’s Knuck (Jonavery Worrell), the magnetic bucket drummer whose rhythms send his friends singing and break-dancing around him. Or maybe it is something harder to name: a sense of recognition. In the neighbourhood's communal life, Ali begins to glimpse her own place within Black culture.

Camille A. Brown’s choreography makes that sense of collective identity physical. The ensemble becomes an echo chamber for each song, carrying its surges of feeling into movement. Blending African diasporic dance forms, jazz and hip-hop in loose, syncopated combinations, Brown gives the musical the kinetic grammar of a music video.

Drake captures Ali’s unfinished quality beautifully. Her pristine voice has effortless agility; her acting, by contrast, has all the snap and sprawl and the combustible energy of a teenager. Ali keeps crashing into rules she cannot quite see. “You wild girl”, Knuck tells her when she lunges in for a kiss. He has just spent “You Don’t Know My Name” explaining why they cannot be together. As a Black man, he knows how quickly other people can decide what kind of trouble he represents, and he wants none of it. Worrell gives Knuck a silky, almost nonchalant delivery and an appealingly low-key gravity.

The first act hurtles along like a quick-cut movie, Michael Greif’s direction whisking us from street to apartment and, in its cleverest sequence, floor by floor through Ali’s eccentric building. Treating the audience as her confidante, she introduces another neighbour, another life, even another musical genre at each stop. There is one floor Ali keeps returning to, the Ellington Room, where she finds Miss Liza Jane (Roz White), the formidable pianist who becomes her musical mentor. As their lessons become a daily ritual, Ali finds in music both an outlet for her feelings and a way into a Black inheritance.

The Room is where Ali retreats at the end of the first act, still reeling after the police take Knuck away. Miss Liza Jane first urges her to pour her anger into the piano, then responds with “Perfect Way to Die”, Keys’s searing 2020 protest ballad, written in response to racial violence. As White sings, black-and-white photographs of Black victims appear behind her. It is a reckoning with lives lost, but also a moving assertion of how Black music — from blues and jazz to R&B — has long made self-expression an instrument of resistance.

The second act lacks some of the first’s brisk momentum, and at times it feels little more than a string of excuses for its performers to show off. But they deliver. In “Pawn It All”, Caughell unleashes an impeccable vocal climax. Ellington is less commanding in the dialogue, but his rich voice gives “Fallin’” a sumptuous, irresistible warmth.

And beneath all the vocal pyrotechnics, Hell’s Kitchen never entirely loses sight of its political weight, keeping the musical grounded even at its most shamelessly crowd-pleasing. Ali spends the evening testing the limits of her freedom, burning to find herself — only to discover herself in a legacy larger than her own. Call it a coming-of-age story with the dial turned all the way up. By the end, this girl is on fire.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Maya Drake as Ali and the ensemble; Kennedy Caughell as Jersey and Maya Drake as Ali; Maya Drake as Ali and JonAvery Worrell as Knuck. © 2026 Marc J. Franklin.

For tickets visit www.mirvish.com.