Review: HELL'S KITCHEN at Blumenthal Performing Arts

When you’re served a verbal soup instead of songs, when smooshed syllables largely replace dialogue, it’s hard to recommend a musical. But when you’re sitting at Belk Theater on opening night as a critic who has covered the beat for nearly 40 years, you just shake your head when Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen rolls into town and becomes the latest touring show to be sabotaged by an unruly sound system at Charlotte’s marquee venue.

Often after a jukebox musical, I turn to Spotify, today’s most ubiquitous jukebox, to dig further into a spotlit artist’s work during the ride home. It can be Tina Turner if you live in the Queen City, Carole King, Cher, ABBA, MJ, the Million-Dollar Quartet, Frankie Valley, or – looming on the horizon – Neil Diamond. The jukeboxers whet your appetite to revisit the original recordings if you know them or to seek out more if you don’t.

Sadly, the sound booth settings rarely dial in on opening night with the pristine perfection of MJ. So it’s an aspect of production that stands out all too clearly when it does happen. Keys was so ill-served at her QC opening that summoning her on Spotify on the highway served multiple purposes that should be needless: to confirm that original recordings of her hits were more intelligible than what we’d heard live and to learn, besides the notes, exactly what she had written.

The comparative clarity of Keys’ recordings was a relief rather than a surprise. If it weren’t for the stellar performances by Roz White and Desmond Sean Ellington on Keys’ bluesier songs, we could say that more lyrics were clearer on my car’s speaker within my first 10 minutes on the road than were intelligible all evening long at the Belk.

Even if the sound crew got their act together, I had a far more substantial and meaningful revelation as my wheels hummed down I-77 South. Without exception, every song that we heard live that evening sounded better than the hits they covered. Part of the difference was the quality of White’s and Ellington’s voices, as well as those of Kennedy Caughell and JonAvery Worrell, all of whom spectacularly support Maya Drake as Ali, whose story significantly parallels Keys’ hardscrabble upbringing without exactly replicating it.

For me, the bigger parts of the musical’s upgrade are the arrangements by Keys and Adam Blackstone, further elevated by the Tony Award-winning orchestrations layered on by Blackstone and the legendary Tom Kitt. Clear as they may be, Keys’ original recordings struck me as thin and pallid by comparison. Now, 1.7 billion players of “Empire State of Mind” on Spotify and nearly the same following for “If I Ain’t Got You” can’t be dead wrong – nor can the smaller number of voters who won Keys 17 GRAMMY Awards (and counting) - but I’d invite them all to give this touring cast a hearing.

All except Drake are sensational, whose vocals are lithe enough – almost on par with Keys’ – with a quality that might actually be a notch above when she’s not emulating her model. The real problem with Drake on opening night was that, even when she wasn’t tethered to the tempo of Keys’ raps, she still delivered her dialogue at a panicked pace that would have likely remained problematic even if the sound system were optimal.

Disagreements between Drake and Caughell as her white mom, Jersey, looked heated enough, but what they were about was mostly conveyed by listening to mom’s paranoia rather than Ali’s teenage angst. The contours of Kristoffer Diaz’s book never gave me a feeling that its ambitions rose far above furnishing Keys’ songlist with a recognizable framework.

Ali has fallen hard for Knuck, a construction worker by day and a mean street percussionist after dark when the whole Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood seems to pulsate to a driving beat. She takes to following him to work, shedding the company of her pals after introducing herself, verging on stalking as she wears down his resistance – enough that Mom comes home to her apartment and finds them in heat. Poor Knuck is under the impression that Ali is of age.

It’s possible to come away thinking Worrell brings more individuality to Knuck than Caughell brings to Jersey – but only if you manage to ignore the force of nature that Caughell becomes when she sings, evolving into one of Miss Liza Jane’s acolytes. White is even more stately than she is bluesy as Liza, the calm and grounded antithesis of both Jersey and Ali. She presumably teaches Jersey less about parenting than she teaches Ali about music.

White’s regal bearing is a wonderful prelude to her anthemic “Authors of Forever,” making Act 2 as much of an ascent from Act 1 as it is a continuation. For it’s obvious we are on a loftier plane when Ellington, as Jersey’s wayward husband, follows with “Fallin’” and – as Ali’s dad, Davis – the imposing architecture of his fatherly “If I Ain’t Got You.” Musically, then, Liza and Davis are Ali’s artistic parents, both as pianists as well as singers.

The brief or near-reconciliation between Jersey and Davis, until he has to hit the road for his livelihood, humbles Mom a bit, reminding her of what it is to be young and in love. Her epiphany, “Pawn It All,” enabled Caughell to rock the Richter Scale almost as much as White had before.

So Jersey seeks reconciliation with Ali, but the blossoming teen isn’t having it right away. One of Drake’s very best moments comes with the concluding “Empire State,” done up by director Michael Grief, choreographer Camille A. Brown, projection designer Peter Nigrini, lighting designer Natasha Katz, the orchestrators, and the arrangers with enough epic flair to remind Keys’ fans of the “Empire State” video sung with JAŸ-Z. Judge for yourselves which is better.

The live version is a tough act to follow. Tempo helps slow Drake down; repetition helps us understand her.

As for any frustrations that came with not hearing Keys’ words clearly, these were later allayed by looking past the frontispiece of the playbill to the back of the program booklet. There, in small print taking up more than a column with no indentations, the listing of music credits voluminously belies the idea that all the melodies and words are Keys’. For “Empire State (Part II)” alone, six other writers join Keys in the byline.

Roll those credits down with all the black space of Hollywood film credits, and you realize that a whole community wrote and produced this quasi-bio without ever having Hell’s Kitchen in mind. Another village did envision this show and did a damn good job. Too bad a sound system let them all down.

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