Story of the Week: Is Hell’s Kitchen Too Loud?

A border skirmish has erupted in Shubert Alley. Sound from the Alicia Keys musical, Hell’s Kitchen, has consistently penetrated the wall between the Shubert Theatre (home of Hell’s Kitchen) and the Booth Theatre, where Jen Silverman’s quiet two-woman comedy, The Roommate, is playing. And that has mightily displeased the latter’s notoriously pugnacious star, Patti LuPone, who convinced theater management to turn it down.

Apparently unwilling to let the matter drop, the Tony-winning star of Hell’s Kitchen, Kecia Lewis, posted an open letter to LuPone via her Instagram account, accusing the star of bullying, perpetrating racial microaggressions, and using her privilege in a way that has negatively impacted the cast of her show.

Story of the Week will examine this brewing war of the divas and what it says about major technological and cultural trends on Broadway — but first, a technical question:

How loud is Hell’s Kitchen?

It’s pretty loud, and that is one of the things I love about it. I’ll never forget the feeling of the opening number, “The Gospel,” dancing over my skull as the cast danced onstage. This is a musical you can feel in your bones — like being at a really good rock concert, but within the intimate confines of a Broadway theater.

“Broadway likes to think that it likes the idea of a rock and roll sound,” said sound designer Gareth Owen in a 2022 interview with TheaterMania, “but it’s always tamed down.” He was speaking about his work on MJ, for which he won his first Tony Award. He has since been nominated for his work on & Juliet and Hell’s Kitchen. Owen is Broadway’s great wizard of sound, somehow delivering that skeleton-shaking concert vibe while sacrificing nothing in terms of lyrical clarity. (I highly recommend you read the full interview to understand the cutting-edge technology he deploys to make that happen.)

But such innovation poses problems in the compact real estate of midtown, where theaters press up against one another like subway riders at rush hour. Most Broadway theaters were designed in the early 20^th century, when modern amplification technology was still in its infancy and the popular music of the United States originated on New York’s stages, rather than arriving there years later in the form of a jukebox musical.

Henry Beaumont Herts, the architect who designed the Shubert and Booth Theatres (both opened in 1913), probably never imagined the kind of shows that would grace those stages over a century later (this is an inherent problem in architecture, about which the architect and Tony-winning set designer David Rockwell writes compellingly in his book Drama). He certainly never calculated the possibility that a show in the Shubert would be able to produce a sound that could be easily heard in the back row of the Booth. And that’s where our drama begins.

How did this become a problem?

According to Lewis’s own account, LuPone was not happy about hearing Hell’s Kitchen while she was performing The Roommate, a relatively subdued comedy about two older women sharing a house in Iowa. Lewis cited video of LuPone refusing to sign a fan’s Playbill of Hell’s Kitchen and declaring the musical “too loud.” It’s not clear why the fan wanted LuPone’s signature on the program of a show she is not in, but perhaps there is an online market for that sort of thing. [“I have a Wicked Playbill signed by Al Pacino.” – TheaterMania Editor in Chief David Gordon]

LuPone has a long history of taking matters into her own hands when she’s dissatisfied, and that’s what she seems to have done here, contacting the “theater owner” (the Shubert Organization owns both the Shubert and the Booth) about adjusting the sound. She then sent flowers to the sound team after they acquiesced.

It likely would have ended there with the public none the wiser. But Lewis posted a six-minute-video open letter addressed to her fellow Tony winner and former union comrade expounding on her grievances. You can watch it here:

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A post shared by Kecia Lewis (@therealkecialewis)

What does race have to do with it?

As Lewis opines in the above video, LuPone’s actions “are bullying. They’re offensive, they are racially microaggressive, they’re rude, they’re rooted in privilege. And these actions also lack a sense of community and leadership for someone as yourself, who has been in the business as long as you have.” Pointing out a lady’s age — blood drawn.

Having demonstrated what an agist microaggression looks like, she further explains, “Referring to a predominantly Black Broadway show as ‘loud’ can unintentionally reinforce harmful stereotypes.” She also takes umbrage with LuPone’s decision to send flowers, seeing it as a passive-aggressive move meant to paper over the harm caused to the cast and crew of Hell’s Kitchen.

Lewis’s narrative of events seems to cast LuPone as the white woman who moves into a mostly Black neighborhood and immediately lodges a 311 noise complaint. It’s a situation that was recently portrayed in James Ijames’s Good Bones, although, to the playwright’s credit, not along the neat racial lines one might expect.

But is that what’s really happening here? Or is this the case of new technology breaking through the old bricks Broadway, without sufficient protocols in place to manage the spillover? Why should the ticket-buyers at The Roommate have to listen to the score of a neighboring show?

The history of the 21^st century is a demonstration of how policy always lags behind technology, and without a clear policy on sound, LuPone used her power as a box office draw with Bob Wankel on speed dial to achieve the resolution she desired. I have serious doubts that race played any part in her calculations. Then again, Lewis might argue that that is exactly the problem.

Why did this become public?

It might seem baffling that Lewis would choose to put any of this on Instagram, but one must consider her actions in the context of the last decade of social media-fueled outrage — especially since the racial reckoning of 2020. With theaters closed due to the Covid pandemic and jobs scarce, theater workers applied their pent-up energy to the George Floyd protests and the larger movement for racial equity. The following year saw a wave of denunciations, resignations, and protests targeting theater leadership for its complicity in all manner of abuse, but most specifically white supremacy.

This movement took its most concentrated form in the “We See You, White American Theater” letter, a 30-page list of “BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] demands for white American theatre,” including “ongoing mandatory EDI and anti-racism training” and “that BIPOC comprise the majority of leadership positions…across your organization.” You can click here to read the whole thing, which was signed by the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Viola Davis, and David Henry Hwang.

In response, theater leaders, who are overwhelmingly liberal and certainly do not want to be thought of as racist, did indeed hire non-white candidates into leadership roles. They also invited anti-racist coordinators to participate in the creative process and instituted a regime of racial equity workshops — all at a time when theaters were struggling financially.

Lewis must have assumed, quite rationally, that a public call-out, which has been so effective at garnering results in the past, would be a good way to press her case and rally the public to her side. But 2024 is not 2020, judging by the mostly negative comments under Lewis’s video (an admittedly unscientific poll). I suspect she did herself no favors by adopting the stilted, mildly condescending tone of a racial sensitivity training video — perhaps conjuring memories for the viewer of hours sacrificed to the HR department.

Cynthia Erivo has reacted to viral edits of the ‘WICKED’ poster:

“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting… Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face & hide my eyes is to erase me. That is just deeply hurtful” pic.twitter.com/y3P1Qh379S

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) October 16, 2024

It’s hard not to connect this story to Cynthia Erivo’s recent reaction to a fan-generated variation on the Wicked poster, which she described as “the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen” and “deeply hurtful.” Following a wave of entirely predictable criticism directed at the star (we should only be so lucky to live in a world in which Wicked-inspired fan art is the most offensive thing), Erivo seemed to express regret for airing her grievances on Instagram. “I probably should have called my friends,” she told Entertainment Tonight.

These two stories speak to the diminishing returns of social media outrage and the hyperbolic, pseudo-academic rhetoric it has fostered. The taboo of being called a bigot is not as powerful as it once was, depleted from overuse in low-stakes situations. Call-outs are no longer greeted with unquestioning assent and a promise to “do better,” but a shrug and a laugh.

LuPone has not even acknowledged Lewis’s letter, although the producers of The Roommate did issue a statement thanking the Hell’s Kitchen team for adjusting the volume and wishing them continued success. It’s the kind of neighborly sentiment that will need to be heard above the din as shows grow ever louder.

I suspect Broadway has not yet reached its apex decibel level — but it appears as though we have passed peak woke.