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 — and the award-winning actor and playwright will release “Warriors,” a musical concept album inspired by the film, with some notable departures. 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 mo.
