Vibrant, relentlessly electric, Hell’s Kitchen with music and lyrics by Alicia Keys and book by Kristoffer Diaz sends one out into the night elated and energized. In a sold out run at the Public Theater, Hell’s Kitchen is transferring to Broadway for five good reasons. These include award-winning Alicia Keys’ glorious music, Adam Blackstone’s music supervision, Camille A. Brown’s dynamic choreography, Michael Greif’s thoughtful direction and Alicia Keys and Adam Blackstone’s arrangements of key songs from her repertoire, and three new ones.

Integrating Keys’ playlist with an organic storyline rooted to a New York setting during a period of a few months, Greif, Keys and Diaz’s choices stir up the magic that makes this work sizzle beyond the bounds of the typical jukebox musical.

Clearly, the coming of age story about a seventeen-year old living in Manhattan Plaza takes its inspiration from Keys’ life. She lived in Manhattan Plaza with her mother, and then she took off, living independently after about a year, all before seventeen. Diaz’s book moderates Keyes’ exceptionalism, especially that she began to establish her musical prodigy at 7, and by seventeen was arguing with Columbia records about control of her music, image and songs for an album she already created.

Ali (Gianna Harris the night I saw it), dramatically casts herself as a Rapunzel in cargo pants and Tommy Hilfiger underwear and tops, locked away in the isolated “tower” of Manhattan Plaza by her mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean). Though mom intends for her to stay safe from the dangers of Hell’s Kitchen, which is gradually being cleaned up of its unsavory druggy characters by then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ali questions her mother’s judgment.

Narrating her story in the present, Ali flashes back to key events and key people she meets in her life at the large, subsidized housing arrangement for artists initiated by Estelle Parsons and others. Parsons and other fed up actors, musicians, dancers, etc., encouraged city fathers to create apartments where artists could live while working in the city whose rising costs have continued to this day.

Artists then and now bring in millions/billions of dollars to the second largest entertainment capitol of the world, yet, subsist on poverty level wages, plying their craft, despite being unable to maintain themselves even on welfare. As a former actress, Jersey is able to meet the requirements at the Plaza for a small living space with Ali, still working part-time as an actress when she can get jobs. However, forced to scramble to support them, Jersey, works the night shift with a steady job, having essentially given up her career to take care of Ali, who doesn’t understand or appreciate the sacrifices her mother has made.Instead, Ali focuses her complaints on her absent father who abandoned the family, and her lack of freedom to hang out with friends and strike out on her own to do what she wants.

The overriding conflict in Hell’s Kitchen is between mother and daughter in their story of reconciliation, which on another level writes a love letter to New York’s loudness, brashness, street people, and atmospheric social artistry in the 1990s.

Key to the arc of development is that Jersey doesn’t want Ali to follow in the shadow of her “mistakes” (she got pregnant and had to raise Ali), which she sings about in “Teenage Love Affair” as she affirms why Ali’s soulful father Davis (the smooth-sounding, seductive Brandon Victor Dixon) was not the type of man to settle down. Having heard this story before, the fun and juice of her mother’s passion for her father prod her emotions. She is seduced to walk the alluring tightrope of danger to replicate her mother’s forbidden experiences while trying to find her true purpose which will lift her up from identity disappointments and anger about her father’s neglect. But how can you tie down a crooning club singer who is always on the move and looking for excitement around each corner of life?

This background is presented in Act I (‘The Gospel,” “The River,” “Seventeen,” You Don’t Know My Name,”) as Ali seeks her identity and purpose apart from the family situation she rejects, spurred on by her friends to throw herself at Knuck (the adorable Lamont Walker II when I saw it). The twenty something is one of a three-person bucket drumming crew providing excitement and sexy currents busking in the courtyard of Ali’s residence. Ali’s attraction to him is so palpable, Jersey warns the doorman and her police friends to “watch out” for her daughter’s wiles with the “bucket drummer,” which miffs Ali. When tensions increase with her mother, Ali seeks comfort from Miss Liza Jane’s classical piano playing in the Ellington Room of the Plaza, which so inspires her, she realizes she’s found a part of herself, (“Kaleidoscope”).

Although Keyes’ own storyline is much more complicated, Diaz keeps it simple in order to integrate Keys’ repertoire which includes eleven numbers in Act I and twelve in Act II (according to the program). In Act I, the songs weave Knuck and Ali’s coupling in “Gramercy Park,” and “Un-thinkable (I’m Ready),” and gyrate into an amazing “Girl on Fire” in a heady, rigorous number that involves the entire company and ends in an explosion of emotions.

Unable to contain themselves, Knuck and Ali are intimate in Ali’s apartment. Is it any surprise that Jersey looses it when she finds the older Knuck and her underage daughter on the living room sofa in a rerun of Jersey’s life with Davis? Shocked that the precocious, sexually self-possessed Ali is seventeen (making him a rapist), Knuck is infuriated and races out. He is one step ahead of Jersey but is arrested, and humiliated in public, which Ali tries to prevent but can’t.

Because of her colliding impulses and emotions, Ali has recklessly endangered and effectively punished Knuck for his affections which he tried to resist. In a gender role reversal, she has exploited him as the “innocent,” while “getting off” on using her sexual power. Too late, she backtracks with empty apologies and remonstrances.

The event resolves in the Ellington Room where Ail seeks comfort, while Miss Liza Jane sings the instructive and heartfelt “Perfect Way to Die,” highlighting the culture’s racism, police brutality and discrimination as the daily portion of hatred and violence that communities of color still have to face and fear. Act I concludes powerfully with the song highlighted by Peter Nigrini’s projection design in black and white of victims of future police brutality. Miss Liza Jane and Ali conclude in hope with a focus on Ali’s lesson at the piano. The reveal is that art is the way out of the ghetto, the violence, the discrimination, the institutional racism that so often cuts down Black men and colored populations.

Act II (“Authors of Forever,” Heartburn,” “Love Looks Better,” “Work on It,” to name a few), follows with a lengthy resolution after Ali experiences a loss, ends her brief encounter with Knuck, and Jersey calls in Davis to help her daughter overcome her emotional depression and grief. Together, father and daughter sing a lovely duet with Davis at the piano. Mother and daughter have a new appreciation of one another and the musical ends on a celebratory bow to the city with Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.”

The covers, Gianna Harris, Lamont Walker II, and Crystal Monee Hall are spot-on marvelous, working seamlessly with Shoshana Bean’s powerhouse singing and emotionally riveting portrayal of Jersey. Bean’s Jersey is a tumbling cycle of love, fear, anger and confusion as she tries to negotiate the rebellious Ali. Likewise, Harris perfectly portrays her attempt to kindle a relationship with Davis. The smooth, relaxed portrayal by Brandon Victor Dixon, shines as the counterpart of Jersey. His mellow, and beautifully mellifluous singing is sensational. Dixonl clearly reveals why Bean’s Jersey fell hard for him and was so acutely disappointed and broken when they couldn’t make it as a family.

The musical, pegged as entertainment with the intent of heading for a Broadway audience avoids going as far as it could only inferring Knuck’s arrest might have ended up in a brutal attack against him. Instead, the death that occurs is a loss that is devastating, but not aligned with any cultural indictment. It is most felt by Ali and it triggers her feelings to be more supportive and loving of her mother which ends up in a satisfying and uplifting conclusion.

Nigrini’s colorful projections of New York City lighten up Robert Brill’s grid-scaffolding, dark scenic design and minimalist set pieces. Dede Ayite’s costume design is setting appropriate and dated for that period in time. Lighting design by Natasha Katz, sound design by Gareth Gwen, and hair and wig design by Mia Neal all are in concert with Greif’s vision of a Hell’s Kitchen which is undergoing transformation and hope, despite unresolved institutional racism and discrimination.

I was most drawn by Camille A. Brown’s choreography and the dancers amazing passion and athleticism incorporating a variety of hip hop dances from the period and then evolving into something totally different. Unusually, there is movement during times when least expected, but all correlated with the emotion and feeling of the characters making the dancers moves emotionally expressive and coherent.

Hell’s Kitchen is a winner. Look for it when it opens on Broadway or try your luck with tickets based on availability at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street, downtown. https://publictheater.org/