Warriors comes out tonight—and it has come to play. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first full-length musical since Hamilton is not to be found on Broadway, at least not yet. Instead, Miranda and his co-writer, Eisa Davis, are introducing the show in a very 1970s way: as a full-length concept album. Packed with thrilling numbers and killer performers—including major hip-hop stars—this wild ride through a dystopian New York stakes a strong claim to a place in the future of musicals and recordings alike.
Warriors is adapted from the 1979 cult film The Warriors—a touchstone of hip-hop culture—in which the titular street gang tries to make its way home after getting framed for the assassination of a charismatic leader named Cyrus, who had assembled the city’s major gangs in the Bronx to propose a truce. In this version, the Warriors are all women. So is Cyrus, who is voiced by no less a cultural eminence than Lauryn Hill. The movie’s seductive female gang the Lizzies is now the all-male Bizzies, and other parts are played by Marc Anthony, Colman Domingo and Billy Porter, among others; representing the five boroughs in the opening song are Busta Rhymes, Ghostface Killah, Chris Rivers, Cam’ron and Nas. (David Patrick Kelly, who played the creepy villain Luther in the film, makes a cameo.)
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Miranda and fellow writer-performer Davis have been friends since 2007, when they both starred in Off Broadway musicals that went to Broadway the following year: he in In the Heights, she in Passing Strange. When he chose to adapt The Warriors, he says, he thought right away about Davis, whose plays include the memoir Angela’s Mixtape and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Bulrusher. “I was like, Who’s smarter and cooler than me?” he says. “And I immediately thought of Eisa.” The two first met to discuss the project in the basement of the Drama Book Shop in January, 2022; two years later, they started recording the album.
We sat down with Miranda and Davis at the Public Theater, before one of Warriors’s two prerelease listening parties, to discuss the choices that went into their adaptation—and why the Warriors’ epic journey can be seen as “a hip-hop origin story.”
How did you first become interested in The Warriors?
Miranda: I saw the movie when I was four. My downstairs neighbor was my best friend, and his older brother had it on VHS. I remember David Patrick Kelly clinking the bottles being the first bogeyman in my life. I saw that movie many, many times, and that was sort of my first mental map of New York: [Gang member] Rembrandt tracing his finger up the subway map. I remember tracing that same route on the slightly different mid-Eighties map that I lived in. In 2009, after Heights had been running about a year, a college classmate of mine named Phil Westgren emailed me and said, “I’m working for producer Larry Gordon, and he had—or his wife, actually, or his ex-wife had—the idea for a Warriors musical. What do you think?” And I wrote him back, “Here’s why it could never work.” [They laugh.] “I love The Warriors and I’ve seen it more than maybe any other movie, but here’s why I don’t think you could translate an action movie successfully.” But my subconscious was like, “Challenge accepted.” Smash cut to 2016 or 2017: I’m on the other side of performing in Hamilton, and I’m thinking, What do I want to do next with my life as a writer? And there was a whole part of my brain that was like, “Warriors! Warriors! We are going to figure it out.” This was also around the time of Gamergate online. The 2010s was when I was extremely online; I’m not so much anymore. [He laughs ruefully.] I don’t know if you remember Gamergate, but these women who worked in video games were getting doxxed and getting their fucking lives ruined by guys for no particular reason other than to cause chaos and LOLs.
Davis: Just misogyny.
Miranda: Misogyny, but also something more pernicious—it was just, like, “Here’s her address and whatever happens, happens.” And that cruelty reminded me of Luther in The Warriors. I connected those two. And I went, Oh, what if the Warriors are women, and Luther shoots Cyrus and says it was the girls and goes on his merry way? And also, in getting together with Eisa, we found that every plot point was made more interesting if they’re a female gang. I love the movie and it exists on two stone tablets in my head. But in terms of writing our way through it and why it would sing, it was just infinitely more interesting to write these women trying to fight their way home. And that’s where you tag in and talk. [Laughs]
Davis: Lin is this 5’9” titan of musical theater and also just music, period, in our culture. I have always been this huge advocate of the marrying of hip-hop as a culture and theater as a culture, and Lin is in this lineage of all of these artists who have been doing this for so very long. That’s a huge part of what the aesthetic magnetism has been. And he’s also a buddy, right? So when Lin was like, “Do you wanna work on this?” I was like, Well, I’m not gonna say no! Like, of course. But I had to watch the movie, because I had not seen it all the way through. I’d only known it through hip-hop. As Lin said, it’s on tablets, and then the scripture from those tablets is sampled in hip-hop.
Miranda: It’s in Wu Tang songs, Common songs, music videos…
Davis: It’s everywhere—even now. LL Cool J just put out a new record, and the first track is called “Spirit of Cyrus.”
Miranda: They sample one of the people in Cyrus’s audience in the movie going, “Go on, Cyrus! We’re with you brother!”
Davis: Yes. It is deep in the bloodstream, in the DNA, of what hip-hop is and what New York is. I got to watch the movie knowing that it was on that pedestal, but also having the freshness of not being so reverent to it; I could just say, Oh, yeah, we don’t need this part, we don’t need that part. I just worked on [the TV miniseries] Justified: City Primeval, which was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard book. What Leonard said was: All you need to do is hang up the original text and strip it for parts. And I feel like that’s what we got to do with this. I could go in and now with this new version driven by women at the center. And I could also think about what that does in terms of just identity and representation throughout, so that we are really coming at it from the perspective of 2024 and not 1979—and not 1965 from the novel.
We are really coming at it from the perspective of 2024 and not 1979—and not 1965 from the novel.
Miranda: And not [fourth-century BC] like the story the novel is based on!
Davis: Exactly. But I think what this gets at is how mythic the work is. It gets at these very primal fears, these very primal needs that we have for crew, for family, for survival.
Miranda: I always say that The Warriors is like a visual guide to everything you are afraid of in New York City. Someone falls in the subway tracks, there’s a track fire, you get chased by the cops, you get chased by the wrong gang in the wrong neighborhood—everything you think is scary that will happen, there is an amazingly vivid image of it in this movie. It’s like a starter guide for New York fears.
