Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis's "Enthralling" Warriors Concept Album

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, and Screaming Phantoms roamed the streets, leading to harried communities and occasional deaths. Those monikers might now sound like an ill-fated alt-metal band’s name, but back then they were seen genuinely concerning signs of disorder and civil unrest.

But the 1970s also provided a huge moment for musical theater. Young whippersnappers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice decided to release a rock musical LP about that lil’ known guy from Bethlehem. It was the first splash of a 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’s new concept album Warriors, based on the aforementioned film and Sol Yurick‘s novel of the same title. The comparison, however, isn’t hard to pin down: both are examples of talented duos pushing the frontiers of the concept album form to try and nail a new type of storytelling.

That experimentalism that Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice pummelled into Jesus Christ Superstar is also on show here. Miranda (obviously of Hamilton) and Davis (a Pulitzer finalist playwright and actor) pour hulking brass bands, ska, salsa, thrash metal, K-Pop, reggae, soul, and more into their NYC melting pot. 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 in Coney Island after being wrongfully accused of murdering matriarch gang leader Cyrus (sung by eight-time Grammy winner Ms. Lauryn Hill) 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 rivals.

Miranda and Davis are faithful to their material’s relatively straightforward plot. 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 company 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 moments during the Warriors’ voyage. The unmistakeable Colman Domingo (who starred with Davis on Broadway in Passing Strange) brings a rasping melancholy to Gramercy Riffs’ number two, while Aussie screlter Kim 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. Cyrus, played with infectious verve by Hill, also gives oomph to the opening tracks (the highlight being “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-ca rhyme.

Though grounded in a 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 sequences 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 here. 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 chamelonic 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.