Alicia Keys’ powerhouse ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ at Mirvish proves that jukebox musicals still have a pulse - Toronto Star

This semi-autobiographical musical succeeds on its hyper-specificity, along with some powerhouse vocals in this North American tour. 

Maya Drake as Ali, with the North American touring cast of “Hell’s Kitchen.” 

In recent years, it’s certainly felt like the jukebox musical has hit a lifeless, evolutionary dead end. The species that traces its ancestry back to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, Lerner and Loewe has somehow devolved into an empty dumping ground for pop stars who see Broadway as a la-di-da Shangri-La to park their song catalogues and pad their post-retirement coffers. The result is that so many bio-musicals over the past 10 seasons have looked and sounded identical.

But anyone who feels hopeless about the current state of the jukebox musical should pay a visit to the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, where Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” opened last Thursday night, proving that the art form still has a pulse, and a bounding one at that. This new musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2024, is a kaleidoscopic, genre-defying undertaking. And even when it falters, as it occasionally does, it still demonstrates a sincere desire to achieve what the best musicals do: to use music not as an end in itself (as most bio-musicals do), but as a means to explore the inner turmoil of its central protagonist when words simply fail.

That “Hell’s Kitchen” works as well as it does is testament to its hyper-specificity. Whereas most bio-musicals try to cram an artist’s entire life story into two hours and some change, Keys’ semi-autobiographical work takes what, in those musicals, would be a single scene early in Act 1 and expands it into a full-fledged show — one that’s equal parts a coming-of-age family drama and also an interrogation of one musician’s artistic awakening.