‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Off Broadway Review: Alicia Keys Celebrates a Big Apartment Complex

As monikers go, “Hell’s Kitchen” is much sexier than “Manhattan Plaza” — which is probably why Alicia Keys’ new stage musical, with a book by Kristoffer Diaz, goes for the much hotter title. “Hell’s Kitchen” opened Sunday at the Public Theater.

The musical is reportedly semi-autobiographical in its details of the singer-songwriter’s life in her late teens, growing up with a single mother in the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex, located in the southern end of Hell’s Kitchen between 42^nd and 43^rd Streets. Nothing could be more different from the old tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, once home to Irish immigrants, than the relatively new complex of 44-story apartment towers that were built in the 1970s to house upper-middle-class tenants.