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The Warriors is incredibly cinematic material. After all, the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick about a New York City street gang attempting to survive the night while traveling from the Bronx to Coney Island was turned into a great movie in 1979; a seedy cult classic directed by Walter Hill and which made phrases like, “Warriors, come out and play-yay,” into all-time bangers to a generation of moviegoers. Lin-Manuel Miranda would know, he grew up loving that line and the movie as a child.
So much so he adapted the material alongside playwright and musician Eisa Davis into the first (possibly) stage-bound musical Miranda has worked on since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Hamilton. And the first song of the piece, “Survive the Night,” is laced around the hook of “Warriors, come out and play-yay.” You can listen to that tune now, as well as 25 other tracks Miranda and Davis have worked on because the pair released the material—at least in its current form—as a concept album filled with starry friends and vocalists like Ghostface Killah, RZA, Nas, Colman Domingo, and Phillipa Soo. Yet at the moment, Miranda and Davis have remained a little circumspect about when, or if, we might see the material mounted on the stage, be it Broadway or otherwise. Miranda has even coyly suggested in the press he might be happy with it as a concept album.
So when we had the chance to catch up with the multi-Tony award winner to discuss his other new project out in 2024, Mufasa: The Lion King, for which he wrote all-new original songs for, we felt it prudent to note that Miranda has also proven himself to be a pretty adept film director of musical movies, as demonstrated in 2021’s tick, tick… BOOM! And, as mentioned, The Warriors is cinematic material. So why not a new Warriors film as a musical?
“Noooo,” Miranda says with a wry smile. “First of all, I don’t have film rights to Warriors. I have the rights to adapt it musically, and those can transfer to the stage. But it’s not even an option. But also, it’s a love letter to a movie. I kind of see it as my musical love letter to this movie that I think is pretty perfect as it is. I’d really be loath to step into those shoes.”
With that said, Miranda seemed to be a little more candid about how he’d like to see the material evolve: “I’m very interested in exploring in what it looks like on the stage,” he admits. “But yeah that movie is untouchable to me.”
Still, the concept album alone is the culmination of years of work for Miranda, which interestingly happened concurrently with his songwriting on Mufasa.
“I think writing the songs for this raised my standards for Warriors,” Miranda explains, “because the notion that every song has so much work to do that it has to really earn its place was really important in Mufasa. Whereas Warriors was sung through. It’s 26 songs, it’s an entire aural experience, so we’re doing the story from beginning to end, pretty much through music, Eisa Davis and I. So it just kind of raised my standards, I think. They’re pretty different. I could tell when I was writing one or the other.”
He adds, “Also I’m not a great multitasker, so the thing is if I have to work on things simultaneously, I need them to be really different. Like I never got my Encanto music confused with my tick, tick… BOOM! directing, and those were simultaneous.”
They were. But it sounds, like The Gramercy Riffs and the Turnball ACs before them, Miranda and Davis are not done with the Warriors just yet. In fact, if we had to guess, those Brooklyn bruisers better watch themselves when their train gets down to around 42nd and Broadway…
In the meantime, Mufasa: The Lion King opens only in theaters on Friday, Dec. 20.
The post Lin-Manuel Miranda Considers If He’d Make Warriors into a Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.
