NEW YORK, NY.- Maleah Joi Moon has come a long way in a short time.

Just a few years ago, she was a theater kid in suburban New Jersey, listening to her dad’s Alicia Keys records, starring in a high school production of “Rent,” waiting outside a Broadway stage door hoping to meet the cast of “Waitress.”

Now, at 21, she’s a Tony nominee for her Broadway debut as the star of the new Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which opened last month. That means she is working alongside the people she had just been fangirling — getting vocal advice and the occasional breakfast with Keys; honing her acting instincts with the show’s director, Michael Greif, who directed “Rent” 28 years ago; and learning to manage an eight-show week from Shoshana Bean, the actress she stage-doored in “Waitress,” who has taken Moon under her wing while portraying her mother.

Moon’s confident performance — smoky voice, headstrong attitude, gestural dance moves — has caught the attention of critics. “Sensational,” Elisabeth Vincentelli declared in The New York Times. For Vulture, Jackson McHenry called her both “a great discovery” and “a virtuoso.” And Adam Feldman of Time Out went for wordplay: “With apologies to astronomers: Moon is a star.”

“It’s surreal and it’s ridiculous and crazy and insane and all the things,” Moon told me as we stood in Shubert Alley, just under a digital marquee featuring her atop a piano, not far from the stage door where she now signs autographs for her own fans. “But my inner child — the one that wanted to be Nala on Broadway — is like, this is aligned. It’s divine alignment. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t meant.”

Moon is dancing a delicate dance in “Hell’s Kitchen,” sort of playing Alicia Keys and sort of not. The show is about a few formative months in the life of Ali, a 17-year-old girl chafing under her mother’s vigilance, hooking up with a street musician and discovering a gift for piano. It is a fictionalized remix of Keys’ own childhood chapters, but it is partly Moon too — she has been with the show through developmental workshops and an off-Broadway production, and her personality and physicality, as well as her very recent adolescence, inform those of her character.

The musical is set at Manhattan Plaza, an affordable housing development where most units are subsidized for performing artists. Keys grew up there as the only child of a single mother who was an aspiring actress and dancer, although she wound up keeping food on the table by taking office jobs.

The complex’s two 46-floor towers are in Hell’s Kitchen — hence the musical’s name — a neighborhood just west of Times Square that was rougher during the 1990s, when Keys was an adolescent, than it is now.

So that’s where Moon and I met, in the Ellington Room, where a childhood Keys not only played piano recitals but also went bobbing for apples. Moon said that each time she visits, she sees the piano and the portraits and senses “soul.” “You can tell that life has been lived here,” she said. “This is not some made-up place — this is a staple place in New York that is full of art, and history, and life.”

Moon’s own upbringing took place about 45 miles southwest of Hell’s Kitchen, in Franklin Township, New Jersey.

She got off to a precarious start. She was born prematurely — her mother, Fabia Jeffries, was seven months pregnant when she gave birth, and Baby Jeffries, as Moon was known until her parents had time to come up with a name, weighed just 2 pounds 11 ounces.

“When I saw her she was this tiny, plastic-looking baby, and she had wires all over,” said Jeffries, who called her daughter “a miracle child” because she was told the baby had a 50-50 chance of survival. “It was scary,” Jeffries said, “but she had a fight in her from day one.” Moon spent two months in the neonatal intensive care unit, and required careful monitoring when she went home, but the family delights in the fact that her voice always had power, even if back then it was used for screaming.

Jeffries, a social worker, is from Belize, and Moon’s father, Steve Moon, a photographer, is African American; they chose the name Maleah because it sounded Afrocentric, and Joi as a variation on joy. The couple split up when their daughter was young, but continued to live near each other, and both homes were filled with music. “I purposely exposed her to any and everything you can imagine, from Louis Armstrong to Janis Joplin,” Steve Moon said. There was also always dance. “My mom is a Caribbean woman, so we would dance in the house,” Maleah Moon said. “I’m very comfortable expressing myself with my body.”

Moon was performing from an early age — in choir, in band (she played trumpet and French horn) — but sixth grade was a turning point. In some kind of karmic coincidence, her first stage role was playing Dorothy in a school production of “The Wizard of Oz,” which is the same role Keys first played as a child. Moon also got a taste of Broadway then — she auditioned for the role of young Nala in “The Lion King,” and although she didn’t get it, she did get a callback. “I remember feeling the flyest,” she said. “I was like, ‘I like this. Let’s keep doing it forever.’”

She threw herself into school productions, playing the title character in “Annie,” Princess Fiona in “Shrek,” a nun in “Sister Act,” Joanne in “Rent,” Little Red Riding Hood in “Into the Woods,” Peter in “Peter and the Starcatcher,” and Maria in “West Side Story.” She was set to play Deena in “Dreamgirls” when the pandemic hit.

“You knew she was destined for something,” said Timothy Walton, who was the director of productions at Franklin High School when Moon was a student there.

Moon graduated from high school in 2020, spending the final months of her senior year learning remotely. As her graduation approached, she was moved to join the unfolding protests against racial injustice spurred by the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by Minneapolis police officers.

“I was always someone who cared about social issues because I care about humans, but I wasn’t politically involved until I got to 2020 and I felt like I had no choice but to speak my piece about what was going on in our community,” she said. She petitioned her high school to add “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn often called the Black national anthem, to the program at the six-part commencement concocted to allow for social distancing; she was successful, and wound up performing the song six times. “I was angry; I was sad for my people,” she said. “I have an older brother who is a Black man, and it shook me to my core to know that he’s not safe driving down the road at night.”

College was a tough chapter for Moon. She enrolled at Pace University to study musical theater, but her first semester was online, and the second semester was hybrid, with social distancing and masks. “It was super-weird — very dystopian,” she said. She had been battling anxiety and depression since high school, and by midway through her sophomore year at college, it was more than she could manage.

“I wasn’t getting out of bed. I was missing class,” she said. “I had been dealing with depression for five years, and it got really bad.”

She moved in with her father and focused on “learning how to be a healthier person.”

“I did inpatient. I did outpatient and cognitive behavioral therapy. And I learned that my depression is chemical,” she said. “I left school, I started working, and fell in love with working.”

She participated in workshops for stage productions, and auditioned for the Broadway musical “Six.” After a Disney talent showcase, she had decided to focus on screen work but then, in late 2022, her agent suggested she audition for an Alicia Keys musical at the Public Theater, an off-Broadway powerhouse.

“It had already been in development for 10 years, and it was Alicia’s baby, and it was simultaneously the most nerve-wracking, because I didn’t want to do theater anymore and because I had quit school and because I felt so unequipped for something like that, and it was awesome,” she said. Her father picked her up after the audition, and she remembers bawling in the car, saying, “I’m tired, and I don’t want to do theater anymore.”

But that’s not how the “Hell’s Kitchen” team felt. “She very clearly emerged as the one,” said Greif, the show’s director. He put Moon through a series of tests — a reading, a movement workshop — and she aced them all.

Keys, who was also involved with the casting, said it was clear that Moon had “raw talent” — an ability to sing, dance and speak to the audience. “We workshopped for a considerable amount of time, and finally, I was like, ‘This is it,’” Keys said. “And man, were we right.”

Moon took it one chapter at a time. “I thought, we’ll do this project for four weeks, and then move on,” she said. “But then I thought, this feels good. My spirit felt like I was in the right place. And I was like, I need to do this for as long as they’ll let me.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” ran at the Public from October to January — it was sold out, and well-received. Moon is now relishing her Broadway moment.

“You know, I got scared that in the stress of all this, I would crumble, and I’m not going to lie — I’ve had my moments,” she said. “During tech I had a huge breakdown where everything hit me at once, and I fell apart during ‘Teenage Love Affair,’ ran offstage, came up into my dressing room, had people praying over me, got through it.”

But mostly, she’s good. “I’ve had little moments like that, but overall, this is the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life,” she said. “I love being here for the first time in a very long time.”

She’s getting lots of support. Keys, describing Moon as some combination of mentee, little sister and friend, is trying to give the advice she wished she had received. Older castmates are sharing tips on vocal health and endurance. Moon has become particularly close with Bean, who plays her mother, and who has put a lot of thought into how best to be helpful without being meddlesome. “We are bringing our own mother-daughter stuff,” Bean said. “There’s a lot of things in the soup, and that’s what gives it flavor.”

With the help of her castmates, Moon is learning how to manage the rigors of an eight-show week. “I stay home with my cat and my dog and I drink tea and I watch Netflix and I steam [my vocal cords],” she said. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I try to stay out of the streets.”

But certain aspects of her life are changing quickly: “Hell’s Kitchen,” with 13 Tony nominations, is a leading contender for best musical, and there’s now a lot of what she calls “sparkle.” In March, she made her first late-night talk-show appearance, on the “Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon. Last month, the show’s opening night audience included Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. And on Monday night, she was a guest at the Met Gala, dressed by Collina Strada.

She thinks carefully about how to present herself in the world, hoping she will be a model for other young women of color, and trying to introduce herself as an artist and not just a character that she loves, but also describes as “the dramatization of the angstiest part of myself.” One of the ways she announces herself is with her septum piercing; she keeps the jewelry flipped up, so it is not visible, when she’s onstage, but it is otherwise flipped down. “It’s a small little piece of me that distinguishes me from Ali,” she said. “Her mom would never let her get a septum piercing. This is my statement to the world that Maleah Moon is also a person.”

She is still figuring out some other things. Among them: pronouns. She uses she/they, which she explains this way: “I had a journey with nonbinaryism — I was nonbinary for a little bit, and now I am feeling more and more like a woman, if that makes sense. Gender is fluid, and I think that gender is a construct. I am in my womanhood moment right now, and feeling like a proud, confident, Black woman. But I use she/they pronouns because I am queer. That’s just my way of expressing myself, and making sure that I’m proud of who I am.”

As for her goals, Moon has lots of them — she wants to be a movie star, a mental health advocate and a singer-songwriter. “‘Hell’s Kitchen’ is this beautiful, beautiful starting point for me,” she said. “I want to be a songstress — I’ve been writing for a long time, but it has to come at the right time, and I don’t want to rush it. And I want to get back into film and TV. I want to do everything. That’s the hard part.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.