According to researchers, John Gay’s 1728 work The Beggar’s Opera can lay claim to being the first jukebox musical.
The opera contained musical and lyrical references to songs with which its audience would be familiar – songs from other operas, folk songs, popular numbers, all treated with greater or lesser degrees of derision. The show itself was a spoof based on Londoners’ then-current fascination with Italian opera. Imagine if THAT had caught on!
For our purposes, though, the first jukebox musical was Mamma Mia! Its song selection was focused on one performer and had not an ounce of satire. It had its own plot with no direct connection to ABBA, whose many hits made up the score.
Then there was Jersey Boys, which used the songs of the Four Seasons to tell the story of the Four Seasons. This is the format adopted for most jukebox musicals, telling a performer’s life story using songs relating, ideally anyway, to the events in the script.
Then there was Rock of Ages, a musical with its own story and a score focusing on a genre instead of a single performer. The genre was hair metal. Considering hair metal was itself a spoof, or seemed like one, at least, Rock of Ages was probably inevitable.
More recently, Moulin Rouge! The Musical featured a song list that stretched from Cab Calloway to T. Rex to Lorde – as you would for a musical set at the turn of the 20th Century.
These shows have proven extremely popular with audiences, Straz audiences included. Mamma Mia! has played here five times. Jersey Boys has played here four times (five times with its return in June 2027) and would be tied with Mamma Mia! if not for the pandemic.
Hell’s Kitchen, featuring the hits of Alicia Keys, is the second jukebox musical to come to Straz this season. It also features a storyline about Ali, a teenager growing up in that colorfully-named area of Manhattan, as did Keys. The story includes elements of Keys’ life but is primarily fiction. Hell’s Kitchen is in Straz’s Morsani Hall March 24-April 4.
Realtors may prefer Midtown West, but the area of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen got that name in the 1800s and shows no signs of surrendering it a couple of centuries on.
Located, in fact, on the west side of midtown Manhattan, the neighborhood earned its grim but colorful name when crime ran rampant and riots were regular occurrences.
It’s comparatively cleaned up these days, and Alicia Keys gave it a major shout-out by naming her Broadway musical after it.
The show is full of Keys’ hits – but not all of them. Our playlist has a few of those missing hits plus her solo take on “Empire State of Mind,” a seasonal number, a James Bond theme and Keys’ remake of a Gladys Knight and the Pips classic.
Regardless of the particulars, jukebox musicals are celebrations of songs and fans of those songs almost inevitably have a great time. And some people come to love the songs after seeing the musical.