Photo: Mat Hayward/Getty Images for The Latinx House
How do you write like you’re running out of time? After the success of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda went on a songwriting streak, contributing to the soundtracks of movies like Moana, Encanto, and The Little Mermaid. He did write lyrics for this year’s production of New York, New York, so it’s not like he stayed completely away from Broadway, of course. And now he’s making his way back to the stage … almost. On October 18, Miranda’s new concept album, Warriors, written in collaboration with Eisa Davis and featuring a star-studded cast, officially came out. An album? Yes, just an album. Below, find all the details about this project, which is right now only music.
What is this?
The album is a musical adaptation of the 1979 cult-classic film Warriors, itself based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel. Musicals in the ’70s used to regularly put out concept albums prior to be staged — Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, etc. — so this choice is kind of throwback-y. The story follows a gang known as the Warriors who are on the run after they are falsely accused of killing a leader in the community who was attempting to broker piece between all the gangs of New York. Notably, in Miranda and Davis’s version of the story, the gang members are gender swapped to be all women. “The gender flipping allowed us to angle in on the sexism and homophobia in the film and make sure that we left that in ’79,” Davis told NPR. “We’re in 2024 here.”
Who performs it?
The cast of singers on the album is wide and varied in profession. The most notable name is Ms. Lauryn Hill, who sings “If You Can Count,” her first solo performance on a new song since 2019’s “Guarding the Gates,” off the Queen & Slim soundtrack. Other big names from the mainstream include Oscar nominee Colman Domingo; rappers Nas, Cam’ron, and Ghostface Killah; Jamaican pop star Shenseea; Latin pop stars Marc Anthony and Luis Figueroa; Pose’s Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Billy Porter; and Ghosts’s Utkarsh Ambudkar. Notable cast members from the theater world include Hamilton alumni Jasmine Cephas Jones and Phillipa Soo, double Tony nominee (from Natasha Pierre and Hadestown) Amber Gray, Back to the Future’s twink-at-large Casey Likes, and Joshua “Voice That Makes You Melt in Your Seat” Henry.
When can I see it live?
As of right now, there are no official plans to stage the album as a musical. Will that change? We are going to assume so. Although, it would likely have to change in some ways, as the album was not created specifically with stage in mind. “We got to free ourselves from thinking about how they’re going to stage it,” Miranda told Playbill. “Not our problem. Our job was to just musicalize it to the best of our ability.” It seems unlikely that much of the mainstream-known cast will ever perform these songs eight shows a week. Still, if they can get Lauryn Hill to appear on time, we’ll be seated.
This post has been updated.
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