Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis on their 'Warriors' musical concept album with Lauryn Hill
NEW YORK (AP) — Most New Yorkers, Lin-Manuel Miranda argues, have an answer to the following question: When did you first see “The Warriors”?
“I saw it when I was 4 years old, an unsupervised youth was I. A friend’s older brother had the VHS. There were no adults around,” he told The Associated Press. “Everything you’re scared of as a New Yorker, growing up in the city, is in that movie.”
The 1979 cult classic follows a street gang as they make their way from the Bronx to their home turf of Coney Island amid an all-out blitz. The group is wrongly accused of murdering another gang's leader, the peace-seeking Cyrus of the Gramercy Riffs.
On Oct. 18, Miranda — in his first full post-"Hamilton" musical — and the award-winning actor and playwright Eisa Davis will release “Warriors,” a musical concept album inspired by the film, with some notable departures.
Lauryn Hill is their Cyrus, and their Warriors gang are all women, played by Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Phillipa Soo, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Julia Harriman.
This isn't a one-to-one retelling, and it certainly isn't a simple gender-swapping. “My sense of New York that I think really comes out in this album and is sparked in the film of ‘The Warriors,’ is this real dream of unity and peace,” says Davis. “And so that was something I really felt that we could lean into.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How did this project come together?
MIRANDA: It was a movie that lived kind of in my brain before I was even really forming memory. And then a college classmate sent me an email in 2009 after “In the Heights” came out. He was working as an assistant to one of the producers of the film, Larry Gordon, and said, “'Warriors' the musical, what do you think?” And I wrote him a detailed email about how it would never work. But he incepted me, in just asking the question. And so, you know, cut to many years later and I’ve just finished my first run of performing in “Hamilton,” and I kind of thought, “What do I want to do next?” And “Warriors” was in there already, kind of raising its hand and being like, “You've lowkey been thinking about me since 2009.”
I very quickly realized I wanted to write this with someone, and I wanted to write with someone smarter and cooler than me. I thought of Eisa. Eisa and I have been friends since “Passing Strange” and “In the Heights” were on Broadway the same season, in 2009, but we never really worked together on anything before. And so at the top of 2022, I brought her into the basement of The Drama Book Shop and said, “Warriors? The musical?”
She had never seen the movie and I had seen it too many times. So, we kind of met in the middle at that point and just started writing in earnest.
AP: Why an album?
MIRANDA: The fact that it’s so intensely visual to you, while you’re listening to it, is “Why an album?” Most of us, we can’t afford to see that much theater when we’re growing up. ... And so even the cast albums that I grew up loving, I never saw those shows. ... But I would listen to those cast albums and connect the dots and create the show in my head. ... There's a wonderful tradition of musicals that began as concept albums. I think about “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which I think is the gold standard. “Evita,” even as recently as “Hadestown,” which is one of my favorite new shows, began its life as this series of songs.
And so, I was really interested in seeing if you could even tell the story. Because I think that to me, what’s trickiest about adapting an action movie into a musical is that action sequences and songs are fighting for the same real estate. So, what do you do? By doing it as an album, you can musicalize those (things) in any variety of ways. There are times where we dilate time and isolate a moment, and there are times when you hear the music playing and, like, punching sound effects.
The other thing that was really exciting about it was getting to explore writing a score by being in a studio with talented musicians and working with a producer. Musical theater writers work in a really specific way where we sit alone in a room, and then we try it on actors, and we get it back again and we try again. And I wanted to jam with musicians.
DAVIS: I also feel like it has to do with our aesthetics of being closer to pop — like having this hybrid of pop and musical theater. ... With something that is as iconic as this film, it’s a shorter road, to make it an album.
It's also a really exciting challenge, narratively, to see how it is that we can really tell the entire story in this kind of sung-through fashion with our little scenes.
AP: What did flipping the genders of some of these principal characters unlock?
MIRANDA: That was the coin flip that made me go, “I think I understand how this could be interesting to write.”
Around the time I had just gotten out of “Hamilton,” Gamergate was happening online. ... Anonymous online trolls were just like, “I don’t think that women should be in video games. Here’s her f——— home address.” And that kind of act, the chaos of deciding to destabilize someone’s life and then just going back to your computer, the first thing that I thought of was Luther shooting Cyrus, pointing to Warriors and going, “They did it.” And now the Warriors have the rest of the night with every gang thinking they’ve broken the truce and they’re fighting for their lives over the act of one person with a gun. I made that connection and then thought, “Well, if the Warriors are women, how does that change the narrative?” At every point, it complicates it in a really compelling way.
DAVIS: I think that it’s just so crucial to think about this — it's a group of women that no one believes. Everyone is accusing you falsely, as Lin is saying, and what is it that you do? What is it that you try?
And of course, the way that we split it up is that there’s both this rush toward home, but then there’s also still a possibility (of peace). And so going back to this dream of peace is so crucial.
But also, I think it was really important to keep going along the way and making sure that we didn’t actually just have the women step in and still just be doing male things.
AP: How did you get Lauryn Hill on board? She's a very fitting Cyrus.
DAVIS: She symbolizes that, right? If she wanted, she could go out in the streets and tell everybody to stop fighting and people would listen because that’s exactly what Ms. Lauryn Hill has done with her artistry and with her authority over all of these many years. And so, it was her way. We just had to have her, you know what I mean? There was no plan B, whatsoever.
MIRANDA: I reached out to her manager, a little over a year ago, and said, “I’m working on this thing.” She said, “Lauren’s a big admirer of ‘Hamilton,’ so send us what you have in mind.” Eisa and I crafted our letter with care and just stayed in touch with her manager over the course of the year, never having a plan B, texting back and forth until one day we had a Dropbox file with all of these harmonies.
AP: Are there ambitions for a theatrical adaptation? Or a film?
MIRANDA: We have no film ambitions for this. ... We made our musical love letter to the movie that already exists. The hope is as you listen to this album, picture the storytelling and how that happens.
If there’s a world for a stage life, like a stage adaptation of this album, that would be very exciting to explore. And if you're picturing something really fantastic, we've created a very difficult problem for ourselves.
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‘Warriors’ cast
CYRUS: Lauryn Hill
COCHISE: Kenita Miller
COWGIRL: Sasha Hutchings
FOX: Phillipa Soo
CLEON: Aneesa Folds
AJAZ: Amber Gray
REMBRANDT: Gizel Jiménez
SWAN: Jasmine Cephas Jones
MERCY: Julia Harriman