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    Bebe Neuwirth on the Part of a Stage That Feels Like Home

    “I love older theaters in particular,” said the actress, who is up for her third Tony for “Cabaret.” “The new ones don’t have as many ghosts.”Even when Bebe Neuwirth isn’t dancing, she’s dancing.“I am a dancer first,” she said in a phone interview from her apartment in Greenwich Village. “I’m a physical performer, and that impulse, that expression doesn’t go away even if I’m standing still and listening to someone.”Neuwirth, 65, is a Tony Award nominee for her performance as Fräulein Schneider in “Cabaret” and is already a two-time winner for her roles in “Sweet Charity” in 1986 and “Chicago” in 1997. She has also gained fans for her television work on the Julia Child dramedy “Julia” and the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” But it’s theater that keeps calling her back.“I’ve been onstage since I was 7,” she said. “It’s my home.”On a rainy afternoon, Neuwirth discussed her love for the city’s Art Deco buildings, why the Jersey Shore is magical in winter and where to find the best softball in Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Flea MarketsSome of my first flea markets were at the Rose Bowl, and now I seek them out wherever I am. I go down to the one under the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes. Most of my house is filled with things I’ve collected from flea markets, but I’m always looking.2Ceramics StudiosFor the last four years, off and on, I’ve been going to ceramics studios and throwing clay, hand building clay. I love spending time there. Friendships get made just like they do in ballet class.3Dog ParksI don’t have one — though I do have three cats — so I love walking through a dog park and watching them play and interact. I love big dogs — German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, huskies, Weimaraners. And I like small dogs who are really big dogs at heart. I love Pomeranians because those tiny little fluff balls are actually huge dogs on the inside — they crack me up!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Emcee Squared: Joel Grey and Eddie Redmayne on ‘Cabaret’

    Eddie Redmayne had never seen “Cabaret” when, as a 15-year-old student at Eton, he was first cast as the Emcee, the indecorous impresario of the bawdy Berlin nightclub where the musical is set. So Redmayne did what anyone wondering about the character would do: He watched the 1972 film, and studied Joel Grey’s performance.Redmayne, 42, has played the Emcee three more times — at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe following high school; in London’s West End, winning an Olivier Award in 2022; and now on Broadway, where he has just picked up a Tony nomination.“Cabaret,” set in 1929 and 1930, is about an American writer who has a relationship with a British singer working at the Kit Kat Club; the queerness of some of that nightclub’s habitués and the Jewishness of some of its neighbors become risk factors as the Nazis gain power.Redmayne had never met Grey, who originated the role on Broadway in 1966 and who went on to win both Tony and Academy Awards as the Emcee. So I asked them to lunch, to talk about a character both have played several times, and about a musical that has continued to move audiences.We met at Le Bernardin — Grey’s choice — and for two hours they shared stories, Redmayne reverential and thoughtful, Grey puckish and supportive. At times, when words seemed insufficient, Grey reached out to clasp Redmayne’s hand.Joel Grey won a Tony Award in 1967 for playing the Emcee in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tony Awards 2024: Who Will Win (and Who Should)

    Our chief theater critic names the shows and artists he thinks will win, should win and should have been nominated — and suggests a few new categories.The 2023-24 Broadway season was rich with new plays and, let’s say, crowded with new musicals. Revivals were rarer — not a bad thing, necessarily. But the combination of factors makes for quite a horse race as the Tony Awards presentation approaches. So take my annual Tonys “ballot” with the usual caveats, listed below, and with a grain of salt for my highly unscientific commentary within each category. As always, that includes a plea for the addition of new awards; if we can change, why can’t the Tonys?1. I’m not an oddsmaker. I don’t actually vote. Prizes for artistic merit are silly. You could probably do better by flipping a coin.2. The people and productions listed in the “Should Win” category are not necessarily more deserving than those in “Will Win.” There’s often little if any excellence gap between the two groups.3. The “Should Have Been Nominated” category obviously includes Broadway work that was eligible but spurned. Less obviously, it also includes work from Off Broadway and beyond (indicated by an *asterisk*) that’s totally ineligible for the Tonys, just because.Best PlayWILL WIN“Stereophonic”Should win“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”“Mary Jane”Should have been nominated“Primary Trust”*“Infinite Life”*“The Comeuppance”*“Jonah”*Four cheers for Off Broadway, where so many Broadway plays start — including this year’s “Stereophonic, “Mary Jane,” “Appropriate” and “Prayer for the French Republic.” And a fifth cheer for “Primary Trust,” which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tony Awards 2024: Print Your Ballot!

    Best New Play
    “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
    ☐ “Mary Jane”
    ☐ “Mother Play”
    ☐ “Prayer for the
    French Republic”
    ☐ “Stereophonic”
    Best New Musical
    “Hell’s Kitchen”
    “Illinoise”
    ☐ “The Outsiders”
    ☐ “Suffs”
    “Water for Elephants”
    Best Play Revival
    ☐ “Appropriate”
    ☐ “An Enemy of the People”
    “Purlie Victorious”
    Best Musical Revival
    ☐ “Cabaret”
    ☐ “Gutenberg! The Musical!”
    “Merrily We Roll Along”
    “The Who’s Tommy”
    Best Book
    of a Musical

    Bekah Brunstetter,
    “The Notebook”
    Kristoffer Diaz, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Rick Elice,
    “Water for Elephants”
    ☐ Adam Rapp and Justin
    Levine, “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Shaina Taub, “Suffs”
    Best Leading Actor
    in a Play
    ☐ William Jackson
    Harper, “Uncle Vanya”
    Leslie Odom Jr.,
    “Purlie Victorious”
    ☐ Liev Schreiber, “Doubt”
    Jeremy Strong,
    “An Enemy of the People”
    ☐ Michael Stuhlbarg, “Patriots”
    Best Leading Actress
    in a Play
    ☐ Betsy Aidem, “Prayer for
    the French Republic”
    0000
    Jessica Lange, “Mother Play”
    Rachel McAdams, “Mary Jane”
    Sarah Paulson, “Appropriate”
    ☐ Amy Ryan, “Doubt”
    Best Leading Actor
    in a Musical
    ☐ Brody Grant, “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Jonathan Groff, “Merrily
    We Roll Along”
    Dorian Harewood,
    “The Notebook”
    ☐ Brian d’Arcy James,
    “Days of Wine and Roses”
    ☐ Eddie Redmayne, “Cabaret”
    The New York Times
    2024 Tony Awards Ballot
    Best Leading Actress
    in a Musical
    Eden Espinosa, “Lempicka”
    ☐ Maleah Joi Moon,
    “Hell’s Kitchen”
    Kelli O’Hara,
    “Days of Wine and Roses”
    ☐ Maryann Plunkett,
    “The Notebook”
    ☐ Gayle Rankin, “Cabaret”
    Best Featured Actor
    in a Play
    ☐ Will Brill, “Stereophonic”
    Eli Gelb, “Stereophonic”
    ☐ Jim Parsons, “Mother Play”
    Tom Pecinka, “Stereophonic”
    Corey Stoll, “Appropriate”
    Best Featured Actor
    in a Musical
    ☐ Roger Bart,
    “Back to the Future”
    ☐ Joshua Boone, “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Brandon Victor Dixon,
    “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Sky Lakota-Lynch,
    “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Daniel Radcliffe,
    “Merrily We Roll Along”
    ☐ Steven Skybell, “Cabaret”
    Best Featured Actress
    in a Play
    ☐ Quincy Tyler Bernstine,
    “Doubt”
    ☐ Juliana Canfield,

    “Stereophonic”
    Celia Keenan-Bolger,
    “Mother Play”
    Best Direction
    of a Musical
    ☐ Maria Friedman,
    ㅁㅁㅁ ㅁ
    “Merrily We Roll Along”
    Best Lighting Design
    of a Musical
    ☐ Brandon Stirling
    Baker, “Illinoise”
    Michael Greif, “Hell’s Kitchen”

    Isabella Byrd, “Cabaret”
    Leigh Silverman, “Suffs”

    ☐ Jessica Stone,
    “Water for Elephants”
    ☐ Danya Taymor, “The Outsiders”
    Best Scenic Design
    of a Play
    Natasha Katz, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Bradley King and David
    Bengali, “Water for Elephants”
    ☐ Brian MacDevitt and Hana S.
    Kim, “The Outsiders”
    Best Sound Design
    dots, “An Enemy of the People” of a Play
    ☐ dots, “Appropriate”
    Derek McLane,
    “Purlie Victorious”
    David Zinn,
    “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
    David Zinn, “Stereophonic”
    Best Scenic Design
    of a Musical
    ☐ AMP featuring Tatiana
    Kahvegian, “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Robert Brill and Peter
    Nigrini, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Tim Hatley and Finn Ross,
    “Back to the Future”
    ☐ Riccardo Hernández and
    Peter Nigrini, “Lempicka”
    ☐ Takeshi Kata,
    “Water for Elephants”
    David Korins, “Here Lies Love”
    ☐ Tom Scutt, “Cabaret”
    Best Costume Design
    of a Play

    Dede Ayite, “Appropriate”

    Dede Ayite,
    “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
    ☐ Sarah Pidgeon, “Stereophonic” ☐ Enver Chakartash,
    ☐ Kara Young, “Purlie Victorious”
    Best Featured Actress
    in a Musical
    ☐ Shoshana Bean,
    “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Amber Iman, “Lempicka”
    Nikki M. James, “Suffs”


    Leslie Rodriguez
    Kritzer, “Spamalot”
    Kecia Lewis, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Lindsay Mendez,
    “Merrily We Roll Along”
    ☐ Bebe Neuwirth, “Cabaret”
    Best Direction of a Play
    Daniel Aukin, “Stereophonic”
    ☐ Anne Kauffman, “Mary Jane”
    Kenny Leon, “Purlie Victorious”
    Lila Neugebauer, “Appropriate”
    Whitney White,
    ☐ ☐ ☐ ☐ ☐
    “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
    ☐ ☐
    “Stereophonic”
    ☐ Justin Ellington and
    Stefania Bulbarella,
    “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
    ☐ Leah Gelpe, “Mary Jane”
    ☐ Tom Gibbons, “Grey House”
    ☐ Bray Poor and Will
    Pickens, “Appropriate”
    ☐ Ryan Rumery, “Stereophonic”
    Best Sound Design
    of a Musical
    ☐ M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer,
    “Here Lies Love”
    Kai Harada,
    “Merrily We Roll Along”

    Nick Lidster, “Cabaret”

    Gareth Owen, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Cody Spencer, “The Outsiders”
    Best Original Score
    Will Butler, “Stereophonic”
    ☐ Adam Guettel, “Days
    of Wine and Roses”
    ☐ Jamestown Revival and Justin
    Levine, “The Outsiders”
    ☐ David Byrne and Fatboy
    Slim, “Here Lies Love”
    ☐ Shaina Taub, “Suffs”
    Emilio Sosa, “Purlie Victorious” Best Choreography
    David Zinn,
    “An Enemy of the People”
    Best Costume Design
    of a Musical
    ☐ Dede Ayite, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Linda Cho, “The Great Gatsby”
    ☐ David Israel Reynoso,
    “Water for Elephants”
    Tom Scutt, “Cabaret”
    ☐ Paul Tazewell, “Suffs”
    Best Lighting Design
    of a Play
    ☐ Isabella Byrd,
    “An Enemy of the People”
    ☐ Amith Chandrashaker, “Prayer
    for the French Republic”
    Jiyoun Chang, “Stereophonic”
    Jane Cox, “Appropriate”
    ☐ Natasha Katz, “Grey House”
    ☐ Camille A. Brown,
    “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Shana Carroll and Jesse
    Robb, “Water for Elephants”
    ☐ Rick and Jeff Kuperman,
    “The Outsiders”
    ☐ Annie-B Parson,
    “Here Lies Love”
    Justin Peck, “Illinoise”
    Best Orchestrations
    ☐ Timo Andres, “Illinoise”
    ☐ Tom Kitt and Adam
    Blackstone, “Hell’s Kitchen”
    ☐ Will Butler and Justin
    Craig, “Stereophonic”
    ☐ Justin Levine, Matt
    Hinkley and Jamestown
    Revival, “The Outsiders”
    D Jonathan Tunick,
    “Merrily We Roll Along” More

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    The Tony Nominee Starring in Alicia Keys’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ on Broadway

    Maleah Joi Moon almost gave up on theater. Now, in her first professional role, the “Hell’s Kitchen” star is a Tony nominee.Maleah Joi Moon has come a long way in a short time.Just a few years ago, she was a theater kid in suburban New Jersey, listening to her dad’s Alicia Keys records, starring in a high school production of “Rent,” waiting outside a Broadway stage door hoping to meet the cast of “Waitress.”Now, at 21, she’s a Tony nominee for her Broadway debut as the star of the new Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which opened last month. That means she is working alongside the people she had just been fangirling — getting vocal advice and the occasional breakfast with Keys; honing her acting instincts with the show’s director, Michael Greif, who directed “Rent” 28 years ago; and learning to manage an eight-show week from Shoshana Bean, the actress she stage-doored in “Waitress,” who has taken Moon under her wing while portraying her mother.Moon’s confident performance — smoky voice, headstrong attitude, gestural dance moves — has caught the attention of critics. “Sensational,” Elisabeth Vincentelli declared in The New York Times. For Vulture, Jackson McHenry called her both “a great discovery” and “a virtuoso.” And Adam Feldman of Time Out went for wordplay: “With apologies to astronomers: Moon is a star.”“It’s surreal and it’s ridiculous and crazy and insane and all the things,” Moon told me as we stood in Shubert Alley, just under a digital marquee featuring her atop a piano, not far from the stage door where she now signs autographs for her own fans. “But my inner child — the one that wanted to be Nala on Broadway — is like, this is aligned. It’s divine alignment. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t meant.”Moon is dancing a delicate dance in “Hell’s Kitchen,” sort of playing Alicia Keys and sort of not. The show is about a few formative months in the life of Ali, a 17-year-old girl chafing under her mother’s vigilance, hooking up with a street musician and discovering a gift for piano. It is a fictionalized remix of Keys’s own childhood chapters, but it is partly Moon too — she has been with the show through developmental workshops and an Off Broadway production, and her personality and physicality, as well as her very recent adolescence, inform those of her character.“Hell’s Kitchen,” a semi-autobiographical Alicia Keys musical, was nominated for 13 Tony Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

    O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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    Tony Nominations 2024: Biggest Snubs and Surprises

    The day of the Tony Award nominations is like college acceptance day a bit earlier in the spring, but on the scarcity model: Of the dozens of artists eligible in each category, only five or so are “admitted.” That means some great work gets left by the wayside — but also, because the number of nominators is small enough to be idiosyncratic, that plenty of outcomes defy all prediction. Here are our thoughts on this season’s inadvertent (and possibly advertent) snubs, delightful (or mystifying) surprises and other notable anomalies. A melancholy morning for ‘Vanya.’Television stars are considered good box office but not always good Tony bait. This year’s crop, including Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper, complicates that wisdom. Paulson is a likely winner but the men are already canceling each other out. Though Carell, in his Broadway debut, and Harper both play characters competing for the love of a married woman in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Uncle Vanya,” only Harper, excellent in a role that is usually considered supporting, was nominated as best leading actor in a play. (The production, which featured many lovely performances, was otherwise shut out.) Note that Chekhov let neither man win.Deep cuts for ‘Stereophonic.’How the nominators handled the ensemble in David Adjmi’s recording-studio-set play was going to be one of the morning’s most interesting questions. The answer: Generously, as five members of the young cast were singled out for their supporting performances, including Tom Pecinka and Sarah Pidgeon as the fraying central couple, and Juliana Canfield and Will Brill as their bandmates. Without an instrument in hand, Eli Gelb got in, too, as the ’70s rock group’s frazzled sound engineer. Spreading all that love helped take the show to Number One with a Bullet — the most nominated play in Broadway history.Too many riches to go around.On the other hand, the superb ensemble casts of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and “Illinoise” were skunked. That’s no accident: As more works these days distribute the storytelling burden equally among many members of a cast, odd nomination outcomes — feast or famine — can result.That’s why we often argue here for a new category that honors ensembles. And Actors’ Equity, the national union representing actors and stage managers, goes further, with its annual award for Broadway choruses. Of the 23 musicals that opened this season, 21 are eligible; the winner will be notified on June 15 — pointedly, one day before the Tonys.Women lead in directing.In the history of the awards, only 10 women, beginning in 1998, have won prizes for directing. This year that number seems likely to rise, with seven of the 10 possible directing slots filled by women. Anne Kauffman, Lila Neugebauer and Whitney White have been nominated for best direction of a play, and Maria Friedman, Leigh Silverman, Jessica Stone and Danya Taymor (the niece of Julie Taymor, the first woman to win for direction of a musical) are in contention for best direction of a musical.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Alicia Keys on Nabbing 13 Tony Nominations for ‘Hell’s Kitchen’

    Alicia Keys has been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for 13 years, so she found it serendipitous — in addition to thrilling — that on Tuesday morning her musical picked up 13 Tony nominations.In an interview shortly after the nominations were announced, Keys was clearly heartened by the news. The show, featuring her songs and a book by Kristoffer Diaz, is personal for Keys. The show is about a 17-year-old girl whose life circumstances have enormous echoes of Keys’s own upbringing — the single mother, the hunger for independence, the passion for piano, even the same subsidized housing development.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations! What do you make of this?Whoa! I’m definitely in a deep state of freaking out in a really great, awesome, grateful way. I don’t know what’s happening to me — I’m a songwriter and I can’t put my words together, but I feel unbelievable. I’m so excited for everybody to be recognized.Did you ever have any doubts, or were you always confident about this one?I’ve always felt really good about it, and I know that we’ve put the work and the time into it, and so I do feel a sense of strength and joy around it, but you just never know how people receive things. You never know how it all goes. And ultimately you can’t create with that in mind — you have to create with your mission in mind.Do you really burn palo santo around the theater?Absolutely! Every crevice, every backstage place, every dressing room, on the stage itself, in the theater, in the seats. Just creating that good energy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More