Lauryn Hill to star in ‘Warriors’ musical album

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 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 realised I wanted to write this with someone, and I wanted to write with someone smarter and cooler than me. I thought of Eisa. She and I have been friends since Passing Strange and I n 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?’

2. Why an album?

Miranda: Most of us, we can’t afford to see that much theatre 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 favourite 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 musicalise those (things) in any variety of ways. 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 theatre 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.

3. How did you get Lauryn Hill on board? She’s a very fitting Cyrus.

Davis: She symbolises 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. 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, ‘Lauryn’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.