Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis Say Warriors Had to Be an Album First

After writing and originally starring in a once-in-a-generation, cultural touchstone project like Hamilton, you’d be correct to assume Lin-Manuel Miranda could do pretty much whatever he wanted next. For the most part, that’s been spending time in Hollywood. Miranda wrote songs for Disney’s Moana, Encanto, and The Little Mermaid; starred in Mary Poppins Returns; and directed a screen version of Jonathan Larson’s musical tick, tick…BOOM!

But, as Miranda has made clear so many times over his career, his heart still belongs to musical theatre, and he’ll never be far from it for long (last year, he wrote lyrics for the short-lived Broadway musical New York, New York). This year, he’s debuting a new project, with playwright Eisa Davis. The pair have co-written a musical version of The Warriors, a cult classic that hit movie theatres in 1979 and was based on a novel by Sol Yurick.

The story begins with a Bronx meeting that collects all the gangs of NYC. One gang leader wants to propose a citywide truce that would allow the groups to control their own neighborhoods free of violence and the police action that brings. But then, that leader is shot and killed, and Coney Island gang the Warriors gets falsely blamed for the crime. Unarmed and in the revenge sights of every other NYC gang, and running from law enforcement, the Warriors have to fight to return home.

The musical releases October 18, but you won’t be able to see it on Broadway, or any stage—yet, at least. Miranda and Davis decided to take a cue from musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The Who’s Tommy, and even Jekyll & Hyde; they are releasing the work first as a concept album. And that decision was not made haphazardly.

On a surface level, making the musical as an album opened up the opportunity to cast the piece with some very heavy hitters, and they have done that and then some. Ms. Lauryn Hill plays Cyrus, the peace-seeking gang leader whose murder kicks off the story. Busta Rhymes, Shenseea, Nas, Ghostface Killah, and RZA all have cameos, too. "I could never get all these people doing eight shows a week,” Miranda tells Playbill, “or even in the same room at the same time. But we could get them for an afternoon or a couple of days.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what making this musical an album unlocked for Miranda and Davis. “We got to free ourselves from thinking about how they’re going to stage it,” Miranda explains. “Not our problem. Our job was to just musicalize it to the best of our ability.”

Not having to worry about staging might be particularly helpful when it comes to Warriors (carrying on a grand Broadway tradition, Miranda and Davis have dropped the “the” from their musical’s title, albeit without the oft-seen exclamation point). The story sees the characters visit numerous locations on their journey, from subway stations to various neighborhoods, parks, and bars. There are fight sequences throughout that see the titular Warriors running, tussling, even being thrown in front of approaching subway trains. None of these are ideas that musicals, especially when confined to traditional proscenium stages, are known for doing particularly well. Miranda says he’s loved the film since he was a kid, and had the concept of musicalizing it pitched to him soon after In the Heights, his first musical, won Best Musical at the 2008 Tony Awards. But the film's action sequences made him reject the concept for years.

Beyond the difficulties with staging, Miranda says the real trouble is that action movies end up using action sequences kind of how musicals use songs. “I think that action movies, musicals, and porno movies are all fighting for the same storytelling real estate. When you can’t talk anymore, you sing, fight, or fuck,” Miranda declares with a wry smile.

Eisa Davis and Lin-Manuel Miranda Jimmy Fontaine

That meant that in Warriors the musical, Miranda and Davis had to figure out how to musicalize fights—and no Jerome Robbins ballets are on the docket this time. “We’ve kind of landed on throwing everything at the wall,” Miranda says. Some fights became musical montages, while others are instrumental, and some even have third-person descriptions of the action.

And it's not just done using Hamilton-esque rap and hip-hop. In Miranda and Davis’ Warriors, that wild landscape of New York City becomes a musical score that is not afraid to dip into the sound of punk rock, heavy metal, rap, Fania, and even contemporary musical theatre. And Miranda says that was due to Davis. Primarily known as a performer (Passing Strange) and playwright (the Pulitzer finalist Bulrusher and Angela’s Mixtape), Davis isn't just writing Warriors’ book. The musical credits both Miranda and Davis as its authors without further designation. When Davis joined Miranda on the project, she wanted to push Miranda into some new musical areas, and even use the album recording process to explore with their musicians and see what they found.

And Davis had some powerful support when it came to that idea. Miranda says Andrew Lloyd Webber echoed that advice when they spoke about the project, which eventually led to some complete numbers being written via group jam sessions with the album’s band (“the best musicians in the country,” Miranda says) at producer Mike Elizondo’s home studio in Tennessee.

And easter egg alert: Davis’s musical contributions were more specific than encouraging Miranda to jam with their band. Davis envisioned a specific trumpet line for the musical’s opening that ended up getting used in the orchestration. And the very first sung material heard on the album, six seconds into the first track, is the very voice memo Davis recorded to send to Miranda of that brass lick.

It's not just the songs—this version of The Warriors is considerably different from its source material. Most notably, the all-male Warriors gang has been transformed into a band of women, played by stage favorites Jasmine Cephas Jones, Julia K Harriman, Gizel Jiménez, Amber Gray, Aneesa Folds, Sasha Hutchings, Kenita Miller, and Phillipa Soo—all eight were originally brought in to sing scratch vocals as a demo, but Miranda and Davis loved the performances so much that they kept them all for the final album. "There is a really strong feminist impulse in this that comes from my politics and just walking around in New York City," says Davis.

But that’s not the only change. The Warriors on screen is, some might say, campy (Miranda prefers “stylized”). Sure, some of the gangs look like you’d expect a gang to look in the New York of the late ‘70s. But there is also a gang of mimes, a group that fights on roller skates, a gang that dresses up in baseball uniforms with wild face paint, an all-female possibly lesbian-coded group that tries to bring down the Warriors by seducing them, and more.

That all-female gang, the Lizzies, has become the Bizzies, a male group of dangerous himbos whose sound is straight out of ‘90s boy bands and even more modern k-pop groups. The roller skating bunch is, appropriately, now a group straight out of the ballroom scene, played on the album by Billy Porter, Michaela Jaé, and Mykal Kilgore.

But beneath the surface of all these changes is another shift, somehow both more subtle and incredibly impactful. The movie tends to play as a contemporary Odyssey-style adventure story—the violence of which inspired something of a moral panic over NYC’s supposed gang problem. But Davis, who hadn’t seen the film until Miranda asked her to collaborate with him on the musical, saw something different.

“The thing that really stood out for me was that there was this peace meeting and there is this possibility of a truce,” Davis says. “There is a possibility that we wouldn’t have to fight each other anymore.” Davis has underlined this in the musical adaptation, making Warriors about the dream of peace, why it’s worth fighting for, and how it can be achieved even when it seems the most unlikely. “There’s all these fears in it, of being falsely accused, of being lost, of not being able to get home. But there’s also this hope, that peace is possible,” Davis says.

Julia Harriman, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Gizel Jiménez, Amber Gray, Aneesa Folds, Sasha Hutchings, Kenita R. Miller, and Phillipa Soo Courtesy of Warner Music Group

Warriors doesn’t hit you over the head with that shift, but the effect is palpable. Miranda and Davis’ take on the story invites us to reconsider how we think of gangs, perhaps less as violent mobs out to terrorize locals and more as community groups seeking autonomy over their own neighborhoods. Davis says that feeling came from her own New York City experience, with groups like the Black Panthers or the Young Lords—a history that people often overlook. “A lot of these gangs became community organizations that were actually taking care of each other.”

So, your typical theatre fan is probably thinking, what’s next? Both Miranda and Davis swear that no Broadway run is yet in the works, nor is any staging. “We don’t have a director, we don’t have a producer, we just have an album,” Miranda says. But that doesn’t mean the possibility of a stage production isn’t on the mind.

The big question is what that might look like, and how the piece might continue to develop in that process. Listening to the album, one wonders if a stage version might have more dialogue, but Miranda says they’re not so sure. “We debate whether it’s going to be more or less, given that the album paints such a complete picture,” he says.

“We wrote this so that it would be sung through with these little skits,” Davis adds. “We wanted the narrative to be completely apparent and clear just from that. So I don't really know, is there any fat to add? I don't know!”

But come on. It’s safe to assume Hamilton has made people a few spare millions in its almost decade-long run so far. Surely, it wouldn’t be hard to find a producer who wants to see if they could repeat that wild success? In response, Miranda playfully invokes Annie’s plucky Star to Be: “Three bucks, two bags, one us!” he campily sings.

In other words, listen now, because the next iteration of Warriors might cost you a little bit more than a Spotify subscription.