NEW YORK — It’s fitting that Kecia Lewis had her most successful theater season playing a mentor.
The Broadway veteran – now celebrating 40 years in the business – plays the formidable piano teacher Miss. Liza Jane in “Hell’s Kitchen,” who inspires the show’s young heroine to embrace music.
“Sit down. Learn,” she tells her new teenage student, a role loosely based on Alicia Keys. The young girl looks at the older girl at the piano and says: “I see in her, for the first time in my life, what I could be one day: powerful.
Lewis is like that cool, wise head who radiates skill, warmth and professionalism, helping rising star Maleah Joi Moon make her Broadway debut in the title role.
“She is an earthy, real woman and brings a sense of powerful grounding to every room she walks into,” says Moon. “I knew from our first conversation that I wanted to learn as much as I could from her.”
Lewis is having a special spring. Her musical received 13 Tony nominations and she received her first Tony nomination. She has won awards from Outer Critics and Lucille Lortel.
“This is all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a kid. This is the only thing I’m really trained in,” she says. “I would be faking it in any other profession. I love what I do. It doesn’t feel like work to me.”
Lewis made her Broadway debut at age 18 in the original company of “Dreamgirls” in the mid-1980s and went on to appear in “The Gospel at Colonus” with Morgan Freeman, “Big River,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Once on This Island.
The theater world almost lost her. She left “Once on This Island” early to do a TV pilot that didn’t work out and was heartbroken. For six years, she taught fifth and sixth grade, worked at a magazine and at a shelter for pregnant and homeless youth.
Her love of acting tormented her until she decided to return to auditions in 1991. She knew she was rusty, so she auditioned for things she knew she would never book, like a role in “The Sound of Music” at Santa Barbara. Light Civic Opera.
“I thought, no one would ever cast me in ‘The Sound of Music.’ And I understood. I was chosen as Mother Abbess. And that helped me get started,” she says.
The Ventura County Star reviewer was impressed: “As Mother Abbess, Lewis opens the lobby doors with her ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ The break comes just in time: the song’s thunderous ending would be difficult to follow.
That role led to a series of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows — “South Pacific” and “The King and I” — and interesting plays. “And then I was clear: ‘OK, you should come back,’” she says.
Since her return, Lewis’ roles have included Broadway – “The Drowsy Chaperone”, “Chicago”, “Leap of Faith”, “Cinderella” and “Children of a Lesser God” – and Off-Broadway in “Mother Courage”, ” The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Marie and Rosetta”. Her TV parts include “The Blacklist”, “Madam Secretary”, “Royal Pains” and “Blue Bloods”.
“I feel like I have a whole encyclopedia that I could write about 40 years into this business,” she says.
Michael Greif, the director of “Hell’s Kitchen,” knew Lewis from their time on “Big River” and thought she would be perfect for Miss Liza Jane.
“Kecia is a great teacher on and off stage,” says Greif. “She brings her considerable experience, wisdom and generosity to every encounter with Maleah and to our incredible ensemble, many of whom are making their Broadway debuts.”
Lewis initially read the script without knowing that Keys’ songs would be used or that the teenager at the center shared connections with the Grammy winner.
The exhibition takes place at Manhattan Plaza, an apartment complex in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, where Keys grew up and which offers affordable housing for people involved in the arts. It has a multipurpose space with a piano — the Ellington Room — where, in the musical, the heroine discovers Miss Liza Jane, an amalgam of Keys’ mentors.
Lewis knows the complex and the room well. She went to school nearby and one of her closest friends lived in Manhattan Plaza. She even sang at a memorial for her friend’s father at the Ellington Room.
Keys worked personally with Lewis on her two big songs — “Perfect Way to Die” and “Author of Forever,” both out now — and the team paid for piano lessons so she could look the part.
On a deeper level, Lewis also connected to the musical coming-of-age story of a young woman with a single mother negotiating the tough streets of New York.
“I was a single father of one son. My son is 20 now and in New York. So I understood, on a very personal level, a lot of what was being said and what was trying to be conveyed. She allowed me to bring all of that together with what she gave me and let me fly on my own.”
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Mark Kennedy is in
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