Jackson McHenry for Vulture is mixed(-to-negative?) (Holdren reviewed it off-Broadway)
Hell’s Kitchen Is the WE❤NYC of Musicals
https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-alicia-keys-hells-kitchen-broadway.html
"In their book scenes, Greif directs Moon, Bean, and Dixon like they’re in a naturalistic serious musical drama, a Next to Normal or Dear Evan Hansen in A minor. Robert Brill’s set for Ali and her mother’s apartment resembles those shows’ Wayfair furniture interiors — plus some classic Greif scaffolding in the Rent vein. But that naturalism sits awkwardly with Keys’s songbook. She writes to her own impressive technique, and the actors follow suit. You can imagine the logic: If we’re going to be singing Alicia Keys, we better sing. The results tend toward showboating. It can work: When Jersey and Davis reminisce about their past by way of Keys’s early hit “Fallin,’” you get the sense of an entire relationship through Bean and Dixon’s vibrato alone — she’s tight as a sinew, and he sounds as if he’s trying to unwind her. But when songs force the story line to loop-de-loop around itself, things just get silly. Jersey storms into one scene and tries to get Davis’s musician friends to buy her jewelry because, according to Diaz’s thin justification, she’d be willing to pay them to get him out of her life. The real reason is that Shoshana Bean needs to set a torch to the number “Pawn It All,” which she does with a considerable armature of riffs and options. Keys herself advised the singers, alongside musical director Lily Ling, and the vocal performances keep stopping the show — the consequence of that being that it often feels as though it’s not moving at all."
Updated On: 4/21/24 at 12:06 AM