The show has been in development, at least in theory, for over a decade, but the seeds were sown even earlier. Born Alicia Augello-Cook in the winter of 1981, Keys grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a 46-floor residential complex in Hell’s Kitchen, with her own single mother, Teresa “Terri” Augello, a struggling actress. (About two thirds of Manhattan Plaza’s units were earmarked for performing artists, and “rent, thankfully, was a percentage of residents’ feast-or-famine incomes,” Keys recalls in her 2020 memoir, More Myself.)
And so, she set out to find a collaborator. “The thing is, growing up at that time in the city really requires a certain mentality,” Keys says. “Like, you have to know what the city was, and you have to understand the rawness and the darkness of it too. And a lot of people couldn’t really say they related to that.” Diaz—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and, perhaps more importantly, a native of Yonkers, a city just north of the Bronx—was a different story. “When I connected with Kris, like, he knew what I knew, and I knew what he knew,” Keys says, clapping her hands for emphasis. “I remember just feeling so excited to be able to have that connection.”
Diaz remembers things the same way. The awesome surreality of being summoned to meet Keys—a major star by any standard—was quickly dispelled as the two began talking. “I’m pretty sure that the things we bonded over in that moment were the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. We had that same vibe right away.” They mused about structuring Hell’s Kitchen like Nas’s 2001 song “One Mic,” which doesn’t so much build to a single climax as shift back and forth between dense, eruptive verses and a notably quiet chorus. Similarly, they could have Ali’s story “exploding in these moments of big emotion, and maybe the end is her coming to some kind of peace with herself,” Diaz says. “Not to spoil it, but that’s kind of where weended up.”
Although their process involved many sprawling conversations about Keys’s life—and, as she told The New York Times this summer, “there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song” that she hasn’t signed off on—neither she nor Diaz was interested in the theater equivalent of a biopic. More germane to the show than the actual facts of Keys’s girlhood were the emotional beats: the intensity of her relationship with her mother; the nagging pain of her estrangement from her father, Craig Cook, a flight attendant (he’s reimagined in Hell’s Kitchen as a traveling instrumentalist); the splendor of finding herself through song; the head rush of young love (Keys’s first serious boyfriend, Kerry “Krucial” Brothers—with whom she eventually moved up to Harlem—would help produce her first four albums). All the same, at one early run-through, Augello leaned over to Clive Davis, eager to clarify that she’d never actually had any of her daughter’s boyfriends arrested. “She was like, I just want you to know that,” Keys reports, cackling.
In 2018, Keys and Diaz finally engaged a director for Hell’s Kitchen: Greif, a four-time Tony nominee, known for directing Rent and Dear Evan Hansen. “Michael is, like, one of the three or four reasons that I do theater,” says Diaz. “Rent is the show that changed my life.” To Greif, the story felt wonderfully alive by the time he came on board. “Ali was already interesting and unique and extraordinarily sympathetic and familiar all at the same time.”
Instantly, he seemed to understand something that neither Keys nor Diaz had fully latched on to themselves. “He said to us, ‘You’ve done something really smart here. You’ve written a show that looks like it’s a conventional love story, but it’s actually a love story between a mother and a daughter,’ ” Diaz continues. “And he said, ‘Not only is that a smart artistic idea, that’s a smart business idea, because that’s who goes to the theater—mothers and daughters.’ And from across the room, Alicia and I just looked at each other, like, Oh, yeah! That’s what we’re doing.”
For Keys, leaning into that dynamic has been among the most rewarding parts of getting Hell’s Kitchen off the ground. “I feel like this creative process has definitely made me understand my mother even more,” she says. “There is this thing that ties us all together as mothers—there’s no limit to what we’d sacrifice—and your kids will never know. Not until they finally have a family of their own or kids of their own, and then maybe they can understand what you had to do, what you had to give up.”
The question of a production’s economic viability would be important anywhere, but at the Public—which made headlines over the summer for slashing staff and putting its experimental Under the Radar Festival on indefinite hiatus—Hell’s Kitchen represents a genuine gamble: It’s reportedly the most expensive show the organization has ever put on. Yet to longtime artistic director Oskar Eustis, there’s a logic to its economics. “Hell’s Kitchen is a quintessential New York coming-of-age story,” he says in an email. While the show “requires substantial resources, it promises to be a net economic gain for The Public.” They weren’t staging it instead of another play or program, he argues, but indeed to help “support those other, vital activities.”
