Lin-Manuel Miranda was only four years old when he first saw “The Warriors,” a movie about warring gangs in New York City. Despite its intensity — or, perhaps, because of it — Miranda was captivated by the story. “The Warriors” begins when Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs, calls the city’s gangs to a truce summit in the Bronx. But when Cyrus is gunned down, the Warriors are pinned for his murder and must race to the safety of their home turf in Coney Island. Miranda has been watching the Walter Hill film on repeat for decades. Yet, when a friend reached out to him (during his run in “In the Heights”) with the idea to adapt “The Warriors” into a musical, Miranda decisively said it would never work.
“The biggest challenge I saw was: Action movies and musicals fight for the same real estate,” Miranda said. “[When] you can’t talk anymore in a musical, you sing and dance. In an action movie you fight. I couldn’t get my head around how to stage it.” (Miranda noted that this was before he saw ‘The Outsiders’ in which, he said “those choreographers cracked it.”)
“To quote the kids: ‘Warriors’ is my Roman Empire,” Miranda told Broadway News. “I saw it too early, and I’ve been thinking about it for too long.”
But he was thinking about it. In fact, the unsolvable adaptation nagged at him. So he approached award-winning writer Eisa Davis, who, until Miranda approached her about it, had never seen “The Warriors.” Davis also saw problems. She wasn’t interested in a project that is “just an action musical,” and “the sexism and homophobia in the film” would need to be countered.
That’s when the duo came up with the idea of a gender-swap. Cyrus as well a the Warrior would be women. For Davis, that opened up the story to newness and possibility. And then Miranda and Davis freed themselves from the constraints of a stage musical.
“By exploring this as an album first, we were like, ‘Let’s not worry about what this looks like,’” Miranda said. “Let’s just write these songs and tell this story as beautifully and as clearly as a listening experience as possible.”
“Warriors” dropped in full as a concept album on Oct. 18. Miranda and Davis didn’t release any of the 26 tracks as singles, intending for listeners to hear the record — and its story — as a whole. Here’s how they made it:
