Alicia Keys shaped the Broadway musical “Hell’s Kitchen” around her own songs, and her own adolescence. But Keys is also the show’s lead producer, charged with making the tough decisions about its future.
On Thursday, she announced her decision to close the show’s Broadway production on Feb. 22 after a nearly two-year run, saying that its investors will be best served by focusing attention on an ongoing North American tour and forthcoming productions in Australia, Germany and South Korea.
The Broadway run has not recouped its $22 million capitalization — vanishingly few new Broadway musicals have become profitable since the coronavirus pandemic — but Keys said “Hell’s Kitchen” has returned 60 percent of that amount to its investors, and she expects the touring productions to lead to eventual profitability.
“As a producer, I definitely have a fiduciary responsibility to our investors,” Keys, who has won 17 Grammy Awards as a singer and songwriter, said in an interview. “The hardest decisions are when to open and when to close, and I definitely strive to be a responsible producer for my investors.”
She added: “Broadway has given us such a launching pad. This national tour is going crazy — they’re selling out everywhere they’re going.”
“Hell’s Kitchen” tells the story of a 17-year-old girl being raised by a single mother in an artists’ housing development west of Times Square; the show, paralleling chapters of Keys’s own early life, tracks the girl’s sexual and musical awakening and the ups and downs of her relationship with her mother.
The musical, directed by Michael Greif and featuring a book by Kristoffer Diaz, began performances on Broadway in March 2024, following a well-received Off Broadway production at the nonprofit Public Theater. The show received generally positive reviews; it was nominated for 13 Tony Awards, and won two, for Maleah Joi Moon, who played Ali, and for Kecia Lewis, who played her first piano teacher. The show also won a Grammy Award for best musical theater album.
The Broadway production, as of Jan. 11, has been seen by 986,000 people and has sold $110 million worth of tickets, but even that was not enough to defray the expense of bringing the show to Broadway and covering its running costs. Weekly box office grosses peaked in June of 2024 at $1.8 million, and were strong through 2024, but they started to taper off last year, and last week (traditionally a slower stretch for Broadway) they were down to $828,000.
Keys, who previously co-produced a play, Lydia Diamond’s “Stick Fly,” called producing “Hell’s Kitchen” an “incredible experience” and said she feels “just so so so so proud of everything that we’ve accomplished.” She took every opportunity to promote the show, talking it up on late-night television and even performing with members of the cast at several post-curtain appearances in the theater.
“We’ve done an excellent job in a difficult industry,” Keys said. “Now that I know the landscape, I could have thought of a few different ways to really make sure that costs were down and things like that, but I also think about how many people were able to live their dream — 200 people are in that company and have had an opportunity of two years on Broadway living their dream and feeding their families.”
She said she was proud of the diverse audiences that the show attracted, saying, “We really did see a stronger turnout than traditional musicals specifically from Black audiences.”
Another priority was trying to ensure a diverse array of workers on the show, she said, adding that the most unexpected challenge she encountered was maintaining a group of musicians from a range of backgrounds. “It was really interesting to me, coming from a musical space and knowing there are so many unique people in the music scene,” she said. “Because Broadway is so heavily unionized, it sometimes cuts off the ability to find diverse people.” Keys noted the extra effort it took to “locate and make sure we were bringing into these spaces artists who have a diverse background.”
And will she work on Broadway again? “This is the just the beginning for me,” she said. “Watch me as I keep growing.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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