Warriors is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Latest Masterpiece
Image courtesy of Playbill.
By Griffin Cappiello
Lin did it again! After a nearly eight year hiatus from Broadway, superstar songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda has released his latest ingenious contribution to the theatrical world – and he picks up right where he left off.
Miranda, most known for his Tony Award-winning musicals Hamilton and In the Heights, released a concept album titled Warriors on October 18. Warriors is a collaboration with Eisa Davis, niece of Angela Davis, and it is inspired by the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors.
The movie follows the members of a New York gang who, after being framed for the murder of the leader of another gang, must navigate their way from the Bronx back to their home turf in Coney Island.
Miranda and Davis, taking inspiration from both the film and the novel of the same name, collaborated with some of the biggest names in the worlds of Broadway and popular music to create their concept album – part of the reason why they chose to present their adaptation as an album and not a show.
“I could never get these people doing eight shows a week,” Miranda said in an interview with Playbill.
With the star-studded voices featured on the album, Miranda certainly had a point. Legendary hip-hop artists such as Ms. Lauryn Hill, Nas, Ghostface Killah, RZA, and Busta Rhymes, Broadway performers like Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Amber Gray, as well as pop stars Marc Anthony and Stephen Sanchez were all featured together on this project.
With such a range of talented contributors, Miranda and Davis were able to display a wide variety of musical genres on their album. Miranda, obviously well-known for his use of hip-hop in his previous Broadway work, continued in the same vein, while Davis, more known for her work as an actress and playwright, including her Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Bulrusher, helped him in experimenting with new genres.
The final product? A beautiful blend of musical styles from Miranda’s typical rap and R&B influences to more exotic genres like K-pop and heavy metal.
The opening track, “Survive the Night,” features Shenseea as DJ Lynne Pen, who acts as the story’s narrator, as well as several hip-hop legends as the personifications of each of the five New York City boroughs.
“If You Can Count” is simply a talent show for Ms. Lauryn Hill. Miranda claims to have spent a year persuading her to lend her voice to the album, and his efforts certainly paid off.
“Leave the Bronx Alive” is a personal favorite of mine. This Latin-inspired track features Marc Anthony, and blends salsa and merengue to display an intense chase sequence.
While Miranda and Davis were inspired by the original Warriors film, they certainly took their own artistic liberties–namely, in gender-swapping the members of the title gang from men to women.
“There is a really strong feminist impulse in this,” Davis told Playbill.
This impulse is present throughout the album but particularly in the tracks “Warriors’ Cypher,” which introduces each of the members of the Warrirors gang, giving each woman her own moment to shine, and “Quiet Girls,” which alludes to sexual violence against women.
Given the immediate success of the concept album, both critics and audiences are clamoring for a stage production, but Miranda and Davis claim there are no plans for a staging any time in the near future.
“We don’t have a director, we don’t have a producer, we just have an album,” Miranda told Playbill.
Still, it would be hard to deny that a potential staging would share in the same success as the album, as well as that of Miranda’s previous works. Only time will tell of the future of the Warriors, but while waiting–and quietly praying–for a stage adaptation, this star-studded masterpiece of a concept album is more than enough.
Rating: 4.5/5.
