THE FUSE

In April 2024, Alicia Keys sat in the Shubert Theatre on Broadway and watched a version of her own childhood unfold onstage. The musical was Hell's Kitchen, a semi-autobiographical story drawn from her songs and her upbringing in the Manhattan neighborhood of the same name, and its arrival marked a remarkable kind of homecoming. The girl who had grown up in a cramped apartment a few blocks away, raised by a single mother on the edge of the theater district, now had her life story playing in one of its grandest houses.