Alicia Keys gets ready to downsize

Alicia Keys certainly loves challenges.

After staying behind the piano and playing relatively intimate settings early in her singer-songwriter career, the young New Yorker surprised her fans last year by blossoming as a performer on an arena tour with Beyonce and Missy Elliott. The move seemed a major gamble, because who knew if Keys could compete with those flashy artists on such a high-energy, spectacle level? Yet she not only held her own but stole the show, according to some critics.

Now Keys, whose “The Diary of Alicia Keys” is nominated for album of the year in next month’s Grammy Awards competition, is going back to an intimate setting with a show she described Monday as “heavily stylized ... a story or concept based on songs from my first two albums, including some of the album tracks that I don’t often get a chance to do on stage.”

Keys said the two-month tour will begin Feb. 25 in Miami and include stops March 16 and 17 at a venue yet to be announced in Los Angeles. Tickets are expected to go on sale Jan. 22. “The idea,” she said, “is to take what I learned from the arena show and combine that energy and excitement with the intimacy of a theater setting.”