AP Breakthrough Entertainer: Broadway star Maleah Joi Moon enjoys a 'cupcake' of a year

NEW YORK — As a young woman, Maleah Joi Moon used to join the crowds outside Broadway stage doors to cheer the stars and maybe get an autograph. Now she's the one that people line up to meet.

“It all feels like a very vivid dream, if that makes sense,” says the New Jersey-born theater star. “If I could give anybody the advice that I needed then: Just trust your heart and just go do it.”

Moon has had quite a 2024 — winning a best actress Tony Award, going to the Met Gala, appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Today” show, and leading her musical at a rainy Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Moon will add to her trophies this month — being named one of The Associated Press’ Breakthrough Entertainers of 2024.

She calls it “the most vibrant and and dynamic year I think I’ve ever had in my entire life.” The whirlwind events after her Tony win “were all such wonderful sprinkles on an already really good cupcake.”

“Hell's Kitchen” uses Alicia Keys songs to tell the semi-autobiographical story of 17-year-old Ali's coming of age in 1990s New York City. It has some of Keys’ best-known hits, like “Fallin’,” “No One” and “Girl on Fire,” as well as several new songs, including the terrific “Kaleidoscope.”

“Alicia was very kind and very giving and very generous about how much of my own individuality I was able to channel into Ali,” says Moon.

“The show’s just about love, to put it as simply as possible — the love story between a girl and her first love, the love story between a girl and her community, and, of course, to bring it all home, the love story between a mother and a daughter,” she adds.

Ali's mother is played by Tony nominee Shoshana Bean, whom Moon recalls asking for her autograph when she was a high school student watching Bean in “Waitress.” Now they're colleagues: “It’s really insane. There’s no words for it,” says Moon.

“Hell's Kitchen” remains a hot ticket and critics have been impressed, with The New York Times labeling Moon “sensational” and the AP calling her “a jaw-dropping vocalist who is funny, giggly, passionate and strident, a star turn.”

For the Tony win, Moon, then 21, beat out stage veterans Kelli O’Hara in “Days of Wine and Roses,” Maryann Plunkett in “The Notebook,” Eden Espinosa from “Lempicka” and Gayle Rankin from “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.”

Moon grew up not too far from the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood — in Franklin Township, New Jersey — with a burning ambition to be on stage and blessed with plenty of encouragement. She won the role of Dorothy for a school production of “The Wizard of Oz” at age 10 and auditioned for “The Lion King” and “Six” on Broadway. “I kind of just caught the bug,” she says.

A few frustrating years followed, ending when she went through the grueling audition process to earn the lead in “Hell's Kitchen” off-Broadway three years ago, her first professional role.

“I did lose sight, honestly, of what made me sparkle or what made me feel like I sparkled. But this process has been such a gift in the way that it has brought me back to what made me want to do theater to begin with,” she says.

What's next is anyone's guess. Moon says she'd love to do film, TV and more theater: “This process has kind of showed me just how much I can connect with people through art.”

“I want to continue to see where my heart leads me,” she says. “I think that’s what got me here in the first place. And I hope that it carries me far in the future.”