Lin-Manuel Miranda and playwright Eisa Davis talk to Lauryn Hill about their concept music album, Warriors

NEW YORK (AP) — Most New Yorkers, Lin Manuel Miranda argues, answer the next query: When was the primary time you watched “Warriors”?

“I saw it when I was 4, an unsupervised teenager. My friend’s older brother had a VHS tape. There were no adults around,” he told the Associated Press. “Everything you’re afraid of as a New Yorker, growing up in the city, is in that movie.”

The 1979 cult classic follows a street gang that moves from the Bronx to their Coney Island turf on an all-out assault. The group is wrongly accused of murdering one other gang leader, Cyrus of the Gramercy Riffs, who’s in search of peace.

October 18 Miranda — in her first full musical after “Hamilton” — and award-winning actor and playwright Eisa Davis will release “Warriors”, a musical concept album inspired by the film, with some significant changes.

Lauryn Hill is their Cyrus, and their Warriors gang is made up entirely of ladies, played by Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Phillipa Soo, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Julia Harriman.

It’s not a one-to-one story, and it’s definitely not an easy gender swap. “My sense of New York, which I think really comes out in this album and was sparked in the movie Warriors, is a real dream of unity and peace,” Davis says. “And that was something I really felt we could relate to.”

The interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

AP: How did this project come about?

MIRANDA: It was a movie that lived in my brain before I even began forming memories. And then a friend from college sent me an email in 2009 after “On the Heights” got here out. He was working as an assistant to one in every of the producers of the movie, Larry Gordon, and he said, “‘Warriors’ the musical, what do you think about that?” And I wrote him an in depth email about how that may never work. But he got me in, just by asking the query. And so, , years had passed and I had just finished my first show on “Hamilton,” and I believed, “What do I want to do next?” And “Warriors” was already there, like he raised his hand and said, “You’ve been thinking lowly of me since 2009.”

I noticed in a short time that I wanted to write this with someone, and someone smarter and cooler than me. I believed of Eisa. Eisa and I actually have been friends for “Passing Strangely” and “In the Heights” were on Broadway the identical season in 2009, but we had never really worked on anything together before. And so in early 2022, I took her to the basement Drama Book Store and he said, “Warriors? A musical?”

She had never seen the movie, and I had seen it too over and over. So we form of met one another halfway and began writing seriously.

AP: Why an album?

MIRANDA: The proven fact that it is so intensely visual for you, once you listen to it, it’s like, “Why an album?” Most of us cannot afford to watch that much theater growing up. … And even the forged albums that I loved growing up, I never saw those shows. … But I listened to those forged albums and connected the dots and created the show in my head. … There’s an important tradition of musicals that started off as concept albums. I believe of “Jesus Christ Superstar” what I consider to be the gold standard. “Evita” even recently “Hadestown” which is one in every of my favorite recent shows, began its life as a song series.

And I used to be really curious should you could even tell that story. Because I believe the toughest thing for me about adapting an motion movie right into a musical is that the motion sequences and the songs are fighting for a similar space. So what do you do? Doing it as an album, you’ll be able to musicalize those things in loads of ways. There are times once we’re stretching out time and isolating a moment, and there are occasions once you hear the music and, like, you are hitting the sound effects.

The second thing that was really exciting was the chance to delve into the secrets of writing music by being within the studio with talented musicians and working with a producer. Musical theatre writers work in a extremely specific way, where we sit in a room by ourselves and then we try it on actors and we get it back and we try it again. And I wanted to improvise with musicians.

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DAVIS: I also think it has to do with our aesthetic being more pop—a hybrid of pop and musical theater. … For something as iconic as that movie, it is a shorter path to making an album.

It’s also a extremely exciting narrative challenge to see how we are able to actually tell a complete story on this sung way, with these small scenes.

AP: What did the gender swap of a number of the principal characters make possible?

MIRANDA: It was a coin flip that made me think, “I think I understand why this might be interesting to write about.”

I just got out of “Hamilton”, Gamergate took place online. … The anonymous web trolls were just saying, “I don’t think women should be in video games. Here’s her f—— home address.” And that form of act, the chaos of deciding to destabilize someone’s life and then going back to the pc, the very first thing that went through my mind was Luther shooting Cyrus and pointing on the Warriors and saying, “They did this.” And now the Warriors have the remainder of the night where every gang thinks they broke the truce and are fighting for their lives due to actions of 1 person with a gun. I made that connection and I believed, “Well, if the Warriors are women, how does that change the narrative?” It complicates it in a extremely compelling way at every point.

DAVIS: I believe it is so necessary to think about this – this can be a group of ladies that nobody believes. Everyone is accusing you falsely, as Lin says, and what are you doing? What are you trying to do?

And after all, the best way we divide it’s that there’s each this drive home, but there’s also still the likelihood (of peace). And so getting back to that dream of peace is so crucial.

But I also think it was really necessary to proceed down that path and make certain that ladies didn’t just step in and do the male stuff.

AP: How did you get there? Lauryn Hill on board? She’s a really fitting Cyrus.

DAVIS: She symbolizes that, right? If she wanted to, she could exit and tell everybody to stop fighting, and people would listen, because that is what Ms. Lauryn Hill has done along with her artistry and authority for all these years. And it was her way. We had to have her, what I mean? There was no plan B, no plan B in any respect.

MIRANDA: I contacted her manager a little bit over a 12 months ago and said, “I’m working on it.” She said, “Lauren is a huge fan of Hamilton, so send us what you have in mind.” Eisa and I rigorously wrote our letter and just stayed in contact along with her manager for a complete 12 months, never having a plan B, texting one another, until in the future we had a Dropbox file with all these harmonies.

AP: Are there any ambitions for theatrical adaptation? Or a movie?

MIRANDA: We haven’t any cinematic ambitions on this regard. … We created our musical love letter to a movie that already exists. We hope that once you listen to this album, you imagine the story and the way it happens.

If there’s a world for stage life, like a stage adaptation of this album, that may be very exciting to explore. And should you imagine something really unbelievable, we now have created a really difficult problem for ourselves.

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The Cast of “Warriors”

CYRUS: Lauryn Hill

COCHISE: Kenita Miller

COWGIRL: Sasha Hutchings

FOX: Phillipa Soo

CLEON: Aneesa is folding

AJAZ: Amber Grey

REMBRANDT: Gizel Jiménez

SWAN: Jasmine Cephas Jones

MERCY: Julia Harriman