Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ ‘Warriors’ will be a concept album, not a stage musical
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis have co-written “Warriors,” a concept album inspired by the 1979 cult hit “The Warriors,” based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel of the same name.
The 26-song album — executive produced by Nas, produced by Mike Elizondo and featuring a star-studded cast of artists — will be released Oct. 18 by Atlantic Records.
“We’ve spent the past three years musicalizing the Warriors’ journey home, from the South Bronx to Coney Island,” Miranda and Davis said in a joint statement. “Along the way we’ve gotten to work with a lot of our favorite artists, and we’ll be announcing their roles on the album in the weeks ahead.”
Headlines of Miranda’s involvement in a “Warriors” adaptation first surfaced last year, with speculation that the project was a stage show. That “Warriors” is in fact a concept album, as first reported last month, is actually a return to form for Miranda, who initially envisioned his Broadway blockbuster “Hamilton” as a concept album.
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“Warriors” follows a fictitious New York City gang from Coney Island to the Bronx and back when they are framed for the murder of a respected gang leader.
Yurick wrote the novel as a contemporary take on Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” the famed war expedition of 10,000 soldiers in ancient Greece. The novelist had said he wanted to counter the romanticized portrayals of gang life in popular titles like “West Side Story,” and instead based his writings on his experiences meeting young gang members while working as a social investigator in New York City’s welfare department.
“He wanted to show that street gangs, universally seen as a symptom of social dysfunctionality, gave to the poor a structure of loyalty and a sense of community,” wrote the Guardian’s Eric Homberger in Yurick’s obituary in 2013. “They were neither sick, nor bad, only poor.”
While the Paramount Pictures movie, adapted by David Shaber and director Walter Hill, received negative reviews during its release — The Times’ review called it “an insightful, stylized and shallow portrayal of gang warfare that panders to angry youthful audiences” — the movie has since become a cult classic (it’s even been quoted by the Wu-Tang Clan and adapted into a video game).
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Publications have revisited the film with more positive takes: “The movie is like visual rock, and it’s bursting with energy,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker in 2014. “Mixing ironic humour, good music, and beautifully photographed suspense, it’s one of the best of 1979,” wrote Time Out in 2015.
In addition to “Hamilton,” Miranda created the stage musical “In the Heights,” and has contributed to Broadway productions of “New York, New York” and “West Side Story.” He also wrote original songs for the Disney movies “Moana,” “Encanto” and the upcoming “Mufasa: The Lion King.”
Davis penned the plays “Angela’s Mixtape,” “The History of Light” and “Bulrusher,” the latter of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. She is also a television writer (Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It”) and an actor (Broadway’s “Passing Strange”).
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