‘The Warriors’ Hooked Lin-Manuel Miranda at 4. Now Comes the Album.
The New York Times
He collaborated with Eisa Davis to make a concept album inspired by the 1979 movie. One big change: the main gang is made up of women.
“The Warriors,” a 1979 film about a group of gang members fighting their way home to Brooklyn from the Bronx, isn’t the most brutal movie ever made, but it’s not exactly Sesame Street either — when it was first released, it was blamed (on pretty flimsy evidence) for inciting violence. And yet, somehow, Lin-Manuel Miranda found himself watching the movie when he was 4, thanks to a friend’s older brother.
Sure, the experience was a little scary. But the film also stuck with him. Miranda, like any number of New Yorkers raised in the ’80s, treasures the sights and sounds of a bygone city preserved in the film, as well as its empathy for its characters. (If some of the gang members seem heroic, well, the story, from a novel by Sol Yurick, is based on an ancient Greek military narrative by Xenophon, “Anabasis.”)
Now, after a pivot to television and film, the “Hamilton” creator has spent the last two-plus years working with the playwright and performer Eisa Davis to create a “Warriors” concept album.
“You write the things that won’t leave you alone, and this won’t leave me alone,” Miranda said in a joint interview with Davis, conducted at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
The album was released on Friday by Atlantic Records. You can listen here.
Miranda offers a succinct plot summary: “All the gangs of New York are meeting in the South Bronx for this unprecedented peace summit. Cyrus, the charismatic leader who has called the summit, is assassinated. The assassin blames the Warriors, and the Warriors have to fight their way home to Coney [Island], while every other gang in the city is trying to kill them.”
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