Serena Williams was telling people to buy tickets to Alicia Keys’ Broadway show a year before her own name showed up in its production credits. In September 2024, after attending the US Open with Keys, she posted about it and told her followers to go see Hell’s Kitchen, calling it “a MUST.” Keys replied in the comments, “pure sister energy.”
A year later, in September 2025, Williams officially joined the show’s producing team. It was her first credit on Broadway.
That sequence is why the Broadway credit reads as something that grew out of an actual friendship, not a business arrangement dressed up as one afterward. Williams made the recommendation before she had any professional stake in the show succeeding.
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A friendship with some history
The earliest documented photo of the two together is from September 2004, on a red carpet at a New York event called Fashion Rocks. Keys was 23. Williams was 22, and her sister Venus was there too. The Williams sisters introduced Keys on stage that night. They also appeared together at a Gucci-hosted party in 2009, where Mary J. Blige was also a guest, and at a pre-Grammy party in 2012. None of that proves much on its own. Famous people end up in the same rooms all the time.
In 2019, years before any business connection between them existed, Keys was asked directly about their friendship on BBC Sport. She described Williams as being like a sister to her, and talked about what it meant to watch Williams and Venus succeed in a sport that historically has not made much room for women who look like them. “There is,” she said, “no space we don’t belong.”
The Broadway partnership
Hell’s Kitchen is the musical Keys spent more than a decade writing, loosely based on her own teenage years in New York. It follows a 17-year-old girl finding her way through the city. Williams saw it early, before signing on, and told Keys it moved her enough to cry. Keys has since retold the moment: “Alicia, you made this young thug cry.”
What her role on the production involves has not been made public. What’s confirmed is the title itself: co-producer.
The Baby2Baby gala
Two months after Williams joined the show, Keys introduced her at the Baby2Baby Gala in West Hollywood as a global icon and a close friend. Williams was there to accept the charity’s Giving Tree Award, honoring her work with the organization. In her speech, she said, “Giving back isn’t just charity, it’s justice.”
