Review: HELL'S KITCHEN at Straz Center
On stage through April 4
Hell’s Kitchen opens with the pulse of New York and the urgency of a girl on the edge of becoming. Directed by Michael Greif, Alicia Keys’ world unfolds in sound, movement, and the kind of emotional truth that doesn’t need embellishment to land.
Young Ali, played by Maya Drake, is extraordinary. She carries the restless hope of a teenager who wants everything at once: freedom, love, identity, a voice big enough to hold her dreams. She’s magnetic, vulnerable, and impossible not to look away from.
Jersey, her single mother, played by Kennedy Caughell, is the grounding force. Their relationship is the show’s emotional spine. She's loving, volatile, protective, and you can feel Jersey’s exhaustion and fierce devotion, and you feel Ali pushing against her with equal force.
Ray, the absent father played by Chikezie “Chike” Nwankwo, brings a complicated tenderness. You want to stay angry at him because he’s earned it, but the moment he sits at the piano and sings, the edges of that anger blur. Like Jersey, it’s hard to stay mad when the music plays.
Ali's love interest Knuck, played by JonAvery Worrell, is the quiet heartbreak of the story. He’s trying to do right, trying to rise above the assumptions placed on him, but the world keeps seeing him only as a thug. Worrell gives him a sincerity that makes you ache for him.
And then the show reaches its most powerful moment.
Roz White, as Miz Liza Jane, steps into “Perfect Way to Die,” and the entire room shifts. Her voice carries grief, love, and a quiet fury that settles into the audience like truth finally spoken aloud. As she sings, the stage transforms behind her. Raw images of young Black men lost to gun violence appear across the background. Not dramatized. Not softened. Just real faces, real lives, real loss. It all folds into Roz’s number, deepening its emotional impact until the room feels completely still as Act One closes.
I doubt there was a dry eye in the house.
From there, the production widens again, familiar Alicia Keys songs woven with new ones, vocals that soar, dance choreography that speaks as clearly as dialogue. The lighting design even turns simple beams into an elevator, rising and falling with nothing but precision and imagination.
Then comes the heartbreaking moment we all sensed was coming, and still it cuts deeper than we expected.
Hell’s Kitchen is messy, painful, joyful, and deeply honest. A girl finding her voice. A mother learning to loosen her grip. A community carrying both beauty and burden with New York as a backdrop that shapes them all.
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