BIG LIGHTS

This month, Hell’s Kitchen, a new musical based on Alicia Keys’s years growing up in that vibrant but rough Manhattan neighborhood, arrives at the Public Theater. It’s a New York story, for everyone.

- Marley Marius

An empty arena is an eerie place. I feel this distinctly on a Tuesday in early August as I hasten across an enormous parking lot to the dark entrance of the Oakland Arena, a 19,200-seat venue just east of the San Francisco Bay. Near the checkpoint where I wait, a metal detector blinks and beeps indiscriminately.

I am here to meet Alicia Keys, who later that day will play the penultimate set in her five-week-long, 22-city Keys to the Summer Tour, concluding at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, the following evening. But hours before she strides onstage to an incantatory arrangement of “Fallin’ ” (the chart-topping lead single from her debut album, Songs in A Minor, now a shocking 22 years old), wearing a coruscating green bodysuit and matching coat from Self-Portrait, a friendly assistant leads me down a flight of stairs, through a warren of passageways, and into the tranquilizing quiet of her dimly lit dressing room.

Keys, seated at a large vanity, is swathed in a white terrycloth robe, bare-faced, as a stylist dutifully brushes her hair and she applies her own makeup—lightly, and mostly with her fingers. (Since the summer of 2016, when she famously eschewed any obvious maquillage at a string of public events, including that year’s Democratic National Convention and MTV Video Music Awards, Keys has transitioned to more of a no-makeup makeup look: “I just have to kind of focus on the skin and little accents,” she says.) As we chat a bit about the tour, she speaks very softly—probably, I figure, to protect her voice.