Alisha Keys and her songs form the latest jukebox musical

 

The songs are good and the performances first rate, but as with so many biographical jukebox musicals the book for Hell’s Kitchen (by Kristoffer Diaz) is weak, making for another disappointing show in this genre, this one at The Public Theater, which has given us great musicals such as Hair, A Chorus Line and, most recently, Hamilton.  The difference is that those three shows were original musicals.

Jukebox musicals by their nature are contrived.  Instead of starting with a fresh story and having composers and lyricists write songs to further it, jukeboxes start with familiar songs and build a story around them.  The latest, Hell’s Kitchen, directed by Michael Greif, uses Alicia Keys’ songs to tell her story of growing up in that Manhattan neighborhood on the western edge of the Theatre District.

This works in the first act, which is the oft-told story of a teenage girl longing to break away from home and be heard.  It’s nothing great but it’s cute.  Its power to entertain is in Maleah Joi Moon’s performance as Ali, portraying Keys growing up with a single white mother (Jersey, played by Shoshana Bean) and an absent Black father.  Her voice is strong and clear, her dancing natural and rhythmic and her acting holds such presence and timing that I was shocked to learn from the program that this is her first professional performance.  She is completely at home onstage and in that role as a restless teenager rebelling against her mother.  She is a joy to watch.

A nice scene has Ali heading out minutes after her mother has left for work after telling her to eat dinner and finish her homework.  A typical boy-crazy 17-year-old, Ali wants to be partying on the street with her friends and checking out the boys who play buckets as drums. 

Riding down in the elevator, she addresses the audience to explain that she and her mother live in “a one-bedroom apartment on the 42^nd floor of a 44-story building on 43^rd Street. . .  Manhattan Plaza is affordable housing for artists, which means almost everyone who lives here is an artist, which means you never know what you’re going to hear when these elevator doors open up.”

To prove this, she announces what will be happening on each floor before the doors open.  The onstage band plays out each scenario, starting with a jazz trumpet.  It’s fun.

“That’s Mr. Gordone playing his trumpet.  Thirty-second floor.”

The doors close and she descends.

“And, ooh, I hope the Piniero sisters’ dance class is going on on 27.”

The doors open to an up-tempo merengue.  “There they go.”

Doors close.  “You’re gonna love 17.  Seventeen’s always good.”

The doors open on an operatic duet.  “I got no idea who that is or what they’re saying but I think they’re in love.”

Doors close.  “And then 9 is the poets, 8 is the painters, we got a whole string section on 7, 6, 5 and 4.  And then you hit that ground floor.”

Act One pretty much plays out in this lighthearted way until the end when it turns unexpectedly serious.  Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis) who has been teaching Ali to play the piano in the building’s community room discloses in the song “Perfect Way to Die” that her son was gunned down while walking to the corner store and another dream was lost.  It’s a somber ending that seems to be inserting a contemporary Black Lives Matter moment into a play set in the 1990s.  Yes, young men were gunned down then too – Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean student shot 19 times by 41 rounds fired by police officers, comes to mind – but the sensibility is different now that there have been so many Amadous.  We’re more aware so it would fit better in a play set in the present.

Then there’s Act Two, which is more or less a mess.  Ali’s father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), is suddenly in the plot, reminiscing about the good times he had with Jersey and Ali.  He and Jersey sing a duet of “Fallin’” that is followed by a duet of Davis and Ali singing “If I Ain’t Got You” and I thought, Where did that come from?  It’s sweet but appears to have been a manufactured way to use the songs.  There’s no indication in the first act that Jersey and Davis had a relationship beyond the night they met and “couldn’t put the brakes on,” resulting in Ali’s appearance nine months later.  I also had no inkling that Ali and her father had had a relationship.  I assumed that she never knew him and that he might never even have known he had a child.  Then suddenly warm memories of times together.

This is why these jukebox musicals are so lame.  The creators are determined to use good songs so the credibility or comprehensiveness of the story takes a back seat.

An Alisha Keys musical wouldn’t be complete without her biggest hit, “Empire State of Mind.”  Moon is the embodiment of Keys and presents a powerhouse finish, which unfortunately is spoiled by choreographer Camille A. Brown’s intrusive choice to send a troop of dancers to jump manically around the stage, taking away the focus on the song as an appropriate ending.

Keys has been developing this show for 12 years.  I wish she had had a better creative team.  She’s a gifted singer/songwriter.  She deserves a better reflection of her life and talent. 

Barry Manilow's 'Harmony' arrives on Broadway

 

When I left the Ethel Barrymore Theatre I felt touched by the story that had been presented and disappointed that it wasn’t better developed by book writer and lyricist Bruce Sussman.  Writing for Barry Manilow’s music, Sussman tells the little-known story of the Comedian Harmonists, an internationally successful singing group of six young men who were professionally obliterated during the Nazi’s reign of terror because three of them were Jewish.

Under the direction of Warren Carlyle (who also choreographs), the first act drags along until the final scenes as the threats of the new government become apparent.  You can always count on Nazi atrocities to liven up the action, which they do in the uneven second act as well.

What remains consistent are the lovely voices of the group – Bobby (Sean Bell), Rabbi (Danny Kornfeld), Harry (Zal Owen), Erich (Eric Peters), Chopin, his nickname because he’s the composer and pianist, (Blake Roman) and Lesh (Steven Telsey).

Originally known as the Harmonists, they were a diverse collection of young men -- a med student who can’t stand the sight of blood, a waiter, a rabbinical student until he left Poland -- whose love of singing brought them together in 1927 Germany and whose talent catapulted them to wealth and fame by 1934 when the Nazis seized all their recordings, movies and their passports, and froze their bank accounts, erasing them from history.

Their story is told by Rabbi, Chip Zien as the now elderly Rabbi who is the only remaining member of the group, living in California in 1988. 

Sharing the journey are the lovely voiced Sierra Boggess as Mary, a gentile who marries Rabbi, and Ruth (Julie Benko), a Jewish protestor against the new government, who marries non-Jewish Chopin.  I loved the number where the two women, in adjacent shabby hotel rooms with their husbands in 1935, sing “Where You Go,” drawing on the biblical Book of Ruth in which that Ruth pledges to go where her husband goes and take his family for her family.  It’s a moving scene.

I was sitting back in the theatre, not in my usual house seats, so I had trouble distinguishing the six young men, all dressed alike in tuxedos, from that distance since I couldn’t see their faces.  That made it difficult to follow at times.  I recommend avoiding tickets in the back or balcony. 

The musical numbers are easy to follow, though.  Toward the beginning I liked “This Is Our Time,” in which the singers display all the energy and hope of young people at the start of a new venture.

As the group catches on and starts getting bookings they add a lot of silliness to their act – too much silliness for me at times – and are then rechristened as the Comedian Harmonists. 

By the end of the first act they are starring at Carnegie Hall in December 1933.  Their fame and talent have brough two key figures into their lives, Josephine Baker (Allison Semmes) and Albert Einstein (Zien).  What they find out in the second act, when it is too late, is that they should have listened to both of these people.  Baker, who wanted them to remain in New York to perform with her, and Einstein, who visited them in their Carnegie Hall dressing room to congratulate them on their performance.  He tells them he is becoming an American.  They say they are considering returning to Germany, reassured by Ruth, who has called from Germany to tell them the situation there will blow over soon.  Eisenhower doesn’t share their optimism.

“After the current situation changes, I wonder if there will be a Germany,” he says.

They explain that they haven’t been home for more than a year because of their touring.

“Have you been reading,” he asks them incredulously before more gently telling them, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil but by those who watch them and do nothing.” 

They express their conflicted feelings in “Home.” “At home, where they know us . . . It’s our home . . . At home we can change it . . .”

Their song fades as they are overpowered by the elderly Rabbi, in a voice filled with anger and guilt, who addresses that ambiguity and decision to return.

“What were you thinking?  Wasn’t it clear?  Didn’t you know?  No!  Yes!  No! . . . It’s not home, fellas.  Home is not there.”

But then Act 2 opens with a lively samba number, “We’re Goin’ Loco!”, featuring some fabulous dancing by Semmes.  It’s the New Ziegfeld Follies in 1934 New York and you could think for a minute that the group changed its mind but the happy dream fades into the harsh reality of what home has become.

The second act is the now familiar accounting of life under the Nazis.  In Harmony it is lived by these people we have come to care about.

Two members of the creative team should be commended.  Beowulf Boritt’s minimalist sets allow the singers ample space to be the full focus of the production.  Linda Cho and Ricky Lurie have created costumes that nicely reflect the ups and downs of the performers’ fortunes.

Interestingly, Harmony, which has been in development for more than a decade, is the fulfillment of Manilow’s desire to write a Broadway musical.  Now 80, the creator of pop song after pop song in the 1970s and 80s has loved show music since he was a child growing up in Brooklyn.

It was Sussman who discovered the seed that would become that Broadway musical Manilow longed to create.  After seeing a documentary about the Harmonists in the early 1990s he left the theatre and called his friend and writing partner.  Manilow shared the enthusiasm and they got to work. 

Several productions were staged outside of New York over the last decade but the show never transferred to Broadway.  Then, during the pandemic with time to reconsider, the duo came up with the idea of including a narrator, one of the singers as an old man who could offer reflection and lead the audience through the various eras of the play.  That gave Harmony the focus it was lacking and proved to be their ticket to the Great White Way.

I hope it lasts for them.  I’m sure Manilow’s name will bring in tourists.  And, unfortunately, with the escalating anti-Semitism around the world the show is far more timely than it would have been 10 years ago.