The Tony-winning Broadway play Hell’s Kitchen isn’t about Alicia Keys. Though incorporating much of her life story and discography into its narrative, the coming-of-age jukebox musical is somewhat analogous to the girl-group epic Dreamgirls: Objectively not about The Supremes, but guided enough by the trio’s biography to court conjecture about which narrative elements match and which methodically stray, for dramatic purposes, from the record.

Keys’ equivalent in Hell’s Kitchen, which is currently touring North America and began a six-day engagement at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, is named Ali (Maya Drake). Seventeen when we first meet her, she is not the laser-focused prodigy we know Keys to be — the woman who was trained in classical piano from 6-18, built a recording studio in her first apartment, and once called Chopin “my dawg.” She’s what most 17-year-olds are: hopelessly distracted by schoolkid crushes, sick of parental authority, uncertain of their futures.

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Photo: Marc J. Franklin