NEW YORK (AP): Most New Yorkers, Lin-Manuel Miranda argues, have an answer to the following question: When did you first see The Warriors ? 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 October 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.
1. 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 .