Warriors musical album review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis battle through New York (2024)

The 1970s must’ve been a wild time.

Walter Hill’s cult classic film The Warriors emerged from a New York where gangs like the Devil Rebels, The Outlaws, Satan Souls or Screaming Phantoms roamed the streets, leading to harried communities and occasional deaths. Those gangs’ monikers might now sound like your ill-fated alt-metal band’s name, but back then they were seen genuinely concerning signs of disorder and civil unease.

But the 1970s also provided a huge moment for musical theatre – young whippersnapper composing team Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice decided to release a rock musical LP about that lil’ known guy from Bethlehem, Jesus Christ. It was the first splash of a musical theatre wave that, to some extent, we’re still riding.

Citing Lloyd Webber wasn’t what I expected before listening through the 26 tracks of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ new musical album Warriors, based on the aforementioned Hill film (in turn based on Sol Yurick‘s novel of the same name). The comparison, however, isn’t hard to pin down: both are examples of talented duos demoing material, pushing the frontiers of the concept album form to try and nail a new type of storytelling.

That 1970s experimentalism that Lloyd Webber and Rice pummelled into Superstar is also on show here: Miranda and Davis pour hulking brass bands, thrash metal, K-Pop, reggae, soul and more into their NYC melting pot. Case in point: where Superstar had Alice Cooper, Warriors has Kim Dracula.

That’s not where the similarities end: just as Jesus was forced to plough through a bureaucratic horror show in order to be ultimately sentenced, here the title gang are forced to trek their way back from the Bronx to home turf Brooklyn after being wrongfully accused of murdering matriarch gang leader Cyrus of the Gramercy Riffs. The problem is – the subway’s broken – they’re going to have to flee on foot, battling their way through group after group of rival gang members.

Miranda and Davis are faithful to their material’s relatively straightforward plot – in fact it’s fairly easy to listen along to without prior knowledge of the movie. Most adversaries pop up for a single number, provide a bit of friction and then exit subway station left. Key events are muddled around a bit, certain characters are spared their fates. Perhaps the biggest alteration is changing up the genders of the Warriors themselves: Swan, Fox, Ajax and co are no longer men, adding some much-needed diversity to what is, for most of the film, a relentlessly masculine affair.

Headlines were dedicated to the raft of big names that have brief audio cameos in the musical: many of whom are jettisoned after a brief few lines during the opening number. Remaining to carry the bulk of the show is the core cast of Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Phillipa Soo and Julia Harriman, many having previously collaborated with the writers. It is they who wade through the various boroughs, beating off hoodlums, bruisers and leches through skill, aggression or canny manipulation.

Other stars appear for more memorable sequences during the Warriors’ voyage: the unmistakeable Colman Domingo brings a rasping melancholy to Gramercy Riffs’ number two Masai, while Dracula and Alex Boniello chew up the phonetic scenery as the ultimate bloodthirsty baddies Luther and Cropsy. Their first number, “Going Down”, is worlds away from you’d expect Miranda to pen – and all the better for it. The character of Cyrus, played with infectious verve by Lauryn Hill, also gives oomph to early track “If You Can Count”.

Despite cycling through every musical style you can think of, Miranda and Davis add recurring refrains to stop it falling into a disjointed mélange: the Warriors’ recurring roll call draws the story back to this flawed, often foul-mouthed gang, as does their a cappella ah-she-cha rhyme.

Though grounded in a 1970s, pseudo-anarchic sense of free-wheeling adventure, there’s contemporary nods along the way – the NYPD are the “baddest gang in the city” in “f**king powder blue”. Switching the Warriors’ genders also coats another layer of thematic richness to the material – uneasy moments from the film are reconfigured to add further pertinence, as do the stirring calls for unity in penultimate number “Same Train Home” and the closing bars of finale “When We All Come Home Alive.”

It’s striking so few shows with the star-power of Miranda and Davis opt for album over try-out run or concert production. It’s a canny decision – with so much of Warriors set in or around subway stations (including some rather dramatic altercations and fist fights) – there’s no way it could be done without enormous expense or time. Means-testing the material before it goes in front of a live audience is no bad thing.

That said, presenting the words and lyrics without set, direction or costume, where vocalists can have as many takes as they’d like to get it right, is incredibly exposing – all you have left as a listener are the numbers themselves: there are no visual distractions.

Miranda has long been fascinated by the chameleon-esque identity of New York: “the greatest city in the world” in Hamilton, or a “mad expensive” town slowly swallowed under the weight of gentrification in In the Heights. He and Davis here play up the sense of a patch-work personality to conjure up some modern-day Odyssey – New York is all things to all people – for better and for worse. Warriors is a fascinating, enthralling novelty – and naturally a resounding success.

Warriors musical album review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis battle through New York (2024)

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