Debuting on Broadway in 2024, Hell’s Kitchen — the thinly veiled origin story of singer Alicia Keys, which is currently touring across the country — has collected two Tonys and a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, proving that its intention to showcase the power of urban dreams was totally fulfilled.
Keys first produced, wrote (with playwright Kristoffer Diaz) and previewed the play at NYC’s Public Theater in late 2023. Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, which closed out the Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan, takes viewers through the process of Keys’s first foray on the Great White Way.
Introduced by Tribeca founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal at the OKX Theater of BMCC, Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen captures Keys reminiscing on her childhood in the hardscrabble Hell’s Kitchen/New York City neighborhood of the 1990s, her journey from young piano prodigy to recording artist, and the translation of all that personal history into her Tony-winning Broadway play.
Director One9, the genuis behind the doc, Nas: Time Is Illmatic, makes exceptional use of archival footage from The Tunnel hip-hop nightclub, the seedy Times Square of pre-Giuliani midtown Manhattan transformation, and more to evoke the time in Keys’ youth.
“I was over there in that chair [in] tears like, ‘stop crying,’” Keys told moderator Mimi Valdés during the Q&A. “It’s so special when you can feel so moved by what you’re seeing, because it’s honesty and truth in there.”
Giving props to actress Maleah Joi Moon — winner of the 2024 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Ali in Hell’s Kitchen (a version of a young Alicia Keys) and star in the upcoming A Different World sequel — an ebullient Keys shared her admiration during an onstage Q&A following the screening.
“Maleah is a phenomenon. She is so special,” Keys said. “You literally watch her from the minute she walked in at 18 or 19 until she was about 22 in this film.”
Keys added, “And she’s fearless the whole time. These songs are [full of] big, massive, heartfelt belting. She is the leader of the entire show, so all of those people feed off her energy. That responsibility is huge, and I always felt very empathetic toward her. Her voice is outrageous and phenomenal.”
Though official distribution has yet to be announced, the suffocating political zeitgeist of the moment makes 2026 apropos for the exisitence of Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen. The film celebrates urban culture and its expression as an overwhelmingly positive force at a time when diversity and inclusion have become charged political buzzwords.
That sense of celebration carried over into the Tribeca Festival 25th Anniversary Closing Night Party, where invited guests, including Lena Waithe, Angela Simmons and Ben Vereen, watched the closing moments of the NBA championship’s Game 5 on screens in anticipation of a midnight performance by Alicia Keys.
Joined onstage by Nas, spitting his Illmatic classic “N.Y. State of Mind” over her piano tinkles, Keys sported a leather Pelle Pelle in orange and blue of the NY Knicks while taking a victory lap for her career, her doc and her acclaimed Broadway play. Tony-nominated Hell’s Kitchen actress Shoshana Bean later joined Keys onstage for a solo turn, in a night that included live renditions of the Prince cover “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” and “Fallin’.”
And then there was Keys, at the piano, singing “Empire State of Mind” on the night when, after a 53-year drought, the New York Knicks had just cinched the 2026 NBA champions title. The air buzzed as the crowd inside the venue, overjoyed, reveled over hearing an iconic NY song performed on an iconic New York night.
Audiences are bound to feel just as moved once Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen receives widespread release this year.