Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Warriors Musical Pulls Too Many Punches
After nine years, the Broadway virtuoso’s Hamilton follow-up is finally here. I did not dig it.
“History has its eyes on you,” George Washington sings to Alexander Hamilton midway through Hamilton the musical. That’s a blessing and a curse for those characters, and for an artist too.
History was definitely watching, and maybe winking, when director Walter Hill put out the fast-and-dirty action film The Warriors in 1979. New York City was famously recently blacked-out, near-bankrupted, and ablaze with chronic arson that left whole blocks in war zone–esque rubble piles. Muggings and murder were endemic, but the city had also just birthed disco, punk rock, hip-hop, and more. The beautiful (rich) people—Liz Taylor, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, and even Donald Trump—shook their booties at Studio 54 as those city blocks burned. The Warriors reflected all those facets as an inventive escapist fantasy about fabulously attractive street gangs. In the era’s minigenre of movies about New York under siege, it falls halfway between Taxi Driver and Ghostbusters both by date and in style. That Hill had barely visited New York before he shot it didn’t deter him, just as the (oft-exaggerated) press reports of gang brawls breaking out at screenings may have hurt its box office but helped establish it as a cult favorite, with its own video games, comics, and other spinoffs, for nearly half a century now.
History’s eye was just as keen in the late 2000s, as the glow of the election of the country’s first Black president pierced the dust and smoke of the 2008 financial crisis, and in the same moment Lin-Manuel Miranda was conceiving and drafting his smash musical that portrayed the founder of the federal banking system as a scrappy rapper on the come up. Miranda performed the opening song of Hamilton at an Obama White House event in 2009. By the time his planned “mixtape” became a fully staged show in 2015, it served to memorialize the so-called post-racial optimism of the early Obama era, even as a certain bloated orange asteroid would soon be hurtling down to smash its remains. Recasting the Founding Fathers and friends as people of color raised some awkward issues about slavery that the musical unfortunately attempted to sidestep, but it was Hamilton’s starry-eyed perspective on America’s potential that rendered the blockbuster a kind of instant historical artifact after the 2016 election.
Since then, Miranda has remained ubiquitous with his contributions to Moana, Encanto, and the In the Heights and Tick, Tick … Boom! movies, among many other projects. But there’s conspicuously been no proper Hamilton follow-up, no new musical with Miranda as auteur. That changes today with the release of Warriors, which like Jesus Christ Superstar or Hadestown before it, is a concept album as a dry run for a stage production. Miranda created it with playwright-actress-songwriter Eisa Davis and cast several Hamilton vets and Broadway ringers as its all-female Warriors, as well as music legends like Lauryn Hill and Marc Anthony as rival gang leaders. A fistful of rap giants including Nas, Cam’ron, Busta Rhymes, RZA, and Ghostface Killah also cameo as the voices of the New York boroughs on the opening track, “Survive the Night.”
It’s a fitting way to point out that the Warriors storyline, like early rap as a genre, traces a route from the Boogie Down Bronx through Manhattan down to deepest Brooklyn. But then those rappers disappear for the rest of the album, so this literalization of the old chestnut “the city is almost another character in the story” risks looking more like an excuse to get those names on the marquee. Miranda can always use such secondhand street cred, since his version of hip-hop is so wedded to his background in showtunes that it inevitably smacks of corniness to those who aren’t already musical-theater fans. After the project was announced, half the denizens of the Warriors subreddit recoiled in disgust, unsure what bothered them more, Miranda’s involvement, the idea of musicalizing the movie at all, or Miranda and Davis’ decision to cast the Warriors gang members as young women. (Shades of Ghostbusters again, not to mention Gamergate, which is exactly the kind of targeting of young women that inspired the creators to make the gender shift.)
Depending how jaded an ear a listener brings to it, the result does offer plenty of chances to cringe. It’s loaded with Miranda’s sonic signatures—fast-talking recitatives, nasally drawls, quick tonal jumps within lines to signify nerves and high emotion, and light lyrical motifs that grow more weighted with every callback (often a couple too many). But this one doesn’t feature a gallery of high-flown rhetoricians like Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson making a revolution; it’s about a bunch of mumbly street kids trying to hustle home on the subway without getting knifed. Their struggles certainly deserve the same essential human dignity, but the scenario offers Miranda and Davis far less leeway to wax eloquent in the way that delighted Hamilton-goers, and so mostly they don’t.
You might say that’s apt enough, as The Warriors’ own corniness has always been inherent to its greatness. The critic Andrew Sarris described it as looking like Fritz Lang (Metropolis) directing The Wiz, with its figments of supposed street gangs pursuing each other through the streets and subway tunnels dressed as baseball players in Kiss makeup, or in overalls with roller skates, or in gold lamé, or even as goddamn mimes. And aside from the speechifying of its doomed gangland-MLK figure Cyrus (voiced here by Lauryn Hill) in the opening mass “truce” assembly in Van Cortlandt Park, the dialogue is infamously stiff. As a whole it’s more balletic than poetic.
It was also already the outcome of adaptation on top of adaptation. It was based on a grisly 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, based on his experiences working in youth services, in part as a more realistic and politicized counterpoint to West Side Story and the more exploitative and moralistic “juvenile delinquent” dramas of the day. By all reports, the book is much darker than Hill’s deliberately cartoonish film, which the Marxist Yurick didn’t think much of. The novel’s protagonists are younger, more brutalized and racialized, and its violence is much bloodier, including an explicit gang rape.
But for its structure, Yurick also drew on the ancient Greek epic Xenophon’s Anabasis, in which a battalion of Greek soldiers fights its way thousands of miles home from Persia after the defeat of their general Cyrus, until they can finally exclaim together, “The sea! The sea!” In The Warriors, that becomes reaching the Coney Island beach. I’m surprised Miranda and Davis didn’t find ways to expand their vistas by pulling more from that classical source.
Miranda has said in interviews that a Warriors musical was suggested to him back in the 2000s, but he was skeptical because the dynamics of action movies and musicals overlap in conflicting ways: “I think that action movies, musicals, and porno movies are all fighting for the same storytelling real estate,” he told Playbill this week. “When you can’t talk anymore, you sing, fight, or fuck.” It seems a better idea never came along, though, as this version decidedly retains that problem: Most of the songs build to a showdown with one gang of antagonists or another (the Warriors have been framed for Cyrus’ assassination at the big peace meeting), but there’s only occasionally any palpable sense of menace, let alone actual mayhem. It’s kind of the reverse of the movie, in fact, in that the character interactions often land with a satisfying smack, while the action doesn’t.
But the bigger question is where and how history’s gaze moves through this new Warriors. What’s been done to make this story worth retelling in 2024? I did find myself won over by several plot changes that keep Cyrus’ dream of intergang peace central throughout, whereas in the film it nearly fades from consciousness after serving as a prime mover. This is partly corny Broadway idealism at work, but it’s effective corny idealism. You can take it literally as being about gang violence—the show makes it clear it considers the cops the most heinous gang of all—or more symbolically as a hope for healing the rifts in the country at large. The album’s final words are, “This is the sound of something being born.” That’s stirring to hear three weeks before another presidential election, even as it’s also fairly generic.
Miranda and Davis (the niece of the radical author and activist Angela Davis) don’t quite restore the Blackness of the story that the 1970s studio forced Hill to recast with an unrealistic level of integration. But they do ground the gangs’ profiles more in neighborhood realities as well as musical vocabularies—making the leading Bronx gang salsa-singing Nuyoricans rather than skinheads, for instance. Main villain Luther becomes a sociopathic white incel type who howls out his Joker-style fantasies in screamo music, sung by the nonbinary Tasmanian alt-metal artist Kim Dracula with an intensity I loved at first but found a bit wearying after an hour. In Harlem, the movie’s roller-skating Punks and fedora-sporting Hurricanes are combined into the House of Hurricane, a ballroom crew, led by none other than Billy Porter, who are the only potential foes to immediately believe the Warriors’ protestations of innocence.
Again, all pleasing enough, but basic to Miranda’s familiar brand. It could have been taken dazzlingly further, as hinted by the brief interlude when one of the Bizzies, the parody-boy-band gang, breaks out into K-pop-style rapping in Korean and makes their previous Backstreet/NSYNC-style crooning seem like cheap dated shtick. The Bizzies scenes are also an element that makes one question how well the gender reversal here has been thought through. In the movie, the gang is called the Lizzies, and heavily implied to be a group of lesbians playing straight in order to lure the Warriors into a honeytrap. It’s one of the movie’s slipperiest, most subversive scenes. But here we’re supposed to believe that a gang of young women running for their lives would be equally susceptible to such a transparently phony seduction? Sorry, not even with fuzzy sweaters and four-part harmonies.
Overall, inexplicably little weight seems to be given to this being a band of women pursued through the night mostly by men. The album’s broadest attempt to do so is also its most ludicrous. In the movie, the hotheaded Warrior named Ajax gets arrested for hitting on and nearly sexually assaulting a woman on a park bench, who turns out to be an undercover cop hunting a park rapist. Here, the female Ajax picks a fight with a male undercover cop who is apparently pretending to be a creep harassing women in the park—in order to goad them into punching him, and then arrest them? It makes absolutely no sense.
The part of the gender switch that does work is that it sweetens and enriches the love story between stand-in Warriors leader Swan (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and Mercy (Julia Harriman), the around-the-way girl who gloms onto the gang partway through their odyssey. Their romantic duet “A Light or Somethin’ ” is one of the few tracks here that jumps out from the general busyness to stand alone as a song, the way every third or fourth Hamilton tune did. (And at least every second song on Jesus Christ Superstar. I deplore Baron Andrew Lloyd-Webber as much as the next commoner, but come on.) That may be the most damning charge against this Warriors on its own terms. When I’m immersed, its momentum sweeps me along, but even after four or five listens, there’s not much left humming through my head later.
But still I have to ask, wouldn’t it be more interesting if all the other Warriors were less easily accepting of Swan and Mercy’s queer love, since that theme never arises among the members earlier? Otherwise, doesn’t the show seem sealed inside a nicey-nice musical-theater bubble, where only the monstrous Luther has any distasteful beliefs? This also leads me to asking when this Warriors is supposed to be set: Is it in the movie’s 1979, or is it an alternate version of today? Maybe in 1979 you could get by in a gang story with only seeing one gun ever in play, but even given Cyrus’ initial no-weapons rule, the ongoing dearth of firearms doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with gang life now, for even the most naive among the audience. Or with American life overall, unfortunately. Sure, this is a fantasy, but how farfetched a fantasy can it be and still presume to draw any energy from reality?
The film of The Warriors came out before we had decades worth of gangsta rap and then trap and drill, genres that chronicle gang experiences from the pavement up, often in their own fantastical ways but also often from the mouths of some who’ve lived it. (RIP Pop Smoke and Ka, among far too many others.) Is it harmless fun or plain shirking to make a Brooklyn-gang-themed rap musical in 2024 that barely references (except by way of a few beats) that more recent body of music and stories? There’s corny, and then there’s sheer erasure.
Still, if filmmakers circa 1979 found entertainment in spinning the news from New York City into nightmare fodder, the person in 2024 who’s doing the same is Donald Trump with his “American carnage” hallucinations—a man for whom, as my colleague Stephen Metcalf once argued, it has never stopped being 1979. Miranda and Davis’ Warriors feels hemmed in by that ongoing sideshow, as if there’s so much they cannot say, so much that many people really feel we can’t discuss right now lest it be seized on and misused in bad faith. The album’s hodgepodge of ideas still has pleasures to offer, and maybe a future production will have more yet. But for now this Warriors leaves me at one with Swan near the end of the movie when he asks, surveying the Coney landscape, “This is what we fought all night to get back to?”—when what he really needed was a world turned upside down.
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