CLEVELAND, Ohio — The autobiographical jukebox musical can be a tricky needle to thread, trying to shoehorn a recording artist’s catalog into their life story. “Hell’s Kitchen,” the Broadway smash that launched its national tour at Playhouse Square on Oct. 10 and runs through Nov. 1, is different. That’s because the subject is Alicia Keys, one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of her generation. Her lyrics have always told stories — full of vivid imagery, poetry and universality. Seventeen Grammys don’t lie.

But how exactly do you pull it off when the artist is just 44 years old and, in her own words, still has “so much more to do”? For Keys and book writer Kristoffer Diaz, the answer was to focus on a few months in the life of Ali (Maya Drake), a fictionalized version of Keys at 17.

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