It’s fun to go to the theater and hear R&B in a musical. The knockout singers in the North American tour of “Hell’s Kitchen” now onstage in San Francisco thrillingly bring Alicia Keys’ solid songbook to life.
It’s no surprise that the show, which premiered at New York’s Public Theater in 2023 and went to Broadway in 2024, is a multi-Tony Award nominee and winner of a Grammy Award for best musical theater album.
San Jose native Maya Drake is terrific as the lead character Ali, a 17-year-old living in the titular gritty New York neighborhood in the 1990s, where she struggles with her overprotective white mother, hangs out in the street with pals, and crushes on an older guy, to mom’s dismay. Her sporadic contact with her Black father, a musician, contrasts with the deep friendship she strikes up with a wise, older pianist who teaches her to play (and much more) on an instrument in the high-rise where she lives…