The bravura title sequence of the 1979 thriller The Warriors builds up a head of steam by following waves of gangs as they hit the streets of New York. There’s a posse of dandies sporting pink waistcoats, an army in fatigues, even a bunch dressed as mimes. Like Coney Island’s leather vest-wearing Warriors, each leaves their home turf for a midnight meeting in the Bronx to unite every crew in the city through a truce. Within minutes, director Walter Hill has set out his stall: the film’s turnstile-vaulting energy, grimy vistas, jangling tension and puckish comedy are all here.
In their adaptation, a concept album that raises the tantalising prospect of a future staging, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis achieve something similar. The blistering, kaleidoscopic opener is presided over by dancehall dynamo Shenseea as a DJ introducing MCs for each borough. Amid punchy fanfares, they are deftly delineated: Chris Rivers as a raspy Bronx, Nas cranking up intrigue as Queens, Cam’ron smoothly humorous as Manhattan (“when you say New York, we’re actually what you mean”), Busta Rhymes’ explosively gruff Brooklyn and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah and RZA spinning ethereal suspense for Staten Island, repeating the detail of their arduous route to the Bronx, “taking a train to a boat to another train”.
When it is followed by a roll call of all seven Warriors, you fear for the clarity of characterisation on the journey ahead – and it is a long trek, depicting their way back home after being framed for the murder of Cyrus, leader of the city’s biggest gang. But this large cast is marshalled with the same brio Miranda showed in Hamilton. While its action is confined to one night, this mini-epic about the young, scrappy and hungry of Coney Island echoes that historical masterpiece’s bloody battles for territory and underlying dream of unity. Hamilton’s blend of combative rap, beatboxing, melodic sweep and plangent balladry is here spiked with ska, metal and salsa in a sprawling set of 26 songs.
Miranda and Davis deliver the same lurid pulp jolts as the movie, finding equivalents for Hill’s arsenal of whip pans, wipes and slo-mo violence, yet they also share the more sociological perspective of Sol Yurick’s original 1965 novel and in particular his interest in what gangs offer the alienated and alone. (Yurick drew on his experience working for the city’s welfare department.) A majestic-sounding Lauryn Hill’s solo as Cyrus, If You Can Count, uses several of the character’s rallying lines from the screenplay but builds them into something much more resonant. “Nobody’s wasting nobody” becomes a call not just for laying down arms but for recognising the collective potential of every member in this posited gang of gangs.
The biggest change is to make all of the Warriors female, addressing the film’s machismo (the character of Ajax is particularly detoxified) and adding a sense of women reclaiming the night. The gang members are vividly portrayed by Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Phillipa Soo, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones, many of them Hamilton alumni, as is Julia Harriman who plays their new recruit, Mercy. In the film, Mercy is all mouth, demeaned by the men and mostly reduced to a love interest; the album gets to her heart and gives Harriman a standout solo, Call Me Mercy, whose poignant yearning is all the more striking for following a very funny interlude with the resentful, small-fry Orphans (Casey Likes and Utkarsh Ambudkar).
One of the album’s joys is its unexpected pairings, especially how musical theatre stars are matched with acts from other genres. Broadway’s Alex Boniello teams up with Australian metalcore artist Kim Dracula as the Rogues on a rat-a-tat-tat duet, Going Down, that manages to veer from monstrous destruction to soaring anthem and back again. Dracula channels the toddler rage of the film’s arch-villain Luther (original star David Patrick Kelly gets an album cameo as a cop), and as you’d expect his taunt “come out to play” becomes a thunderous hook.
Liberally repeating other catchphrases, as well as the Riffs’ military cadences and even Norman Mailer’s “armies of the night” from the film’s poster, this pacy album also namechecks US sprinter Wilma Rudolph but really it judders along like the film’s graffiti-sprayed subway trains. Miranda and Davis’s own vibrant tagging adds colour to the consistent mood of desolation in both novel and film. Listeners are given just enough meaningful time hanging out with the gang through snippets of sparky dialogue, while the songs carry sound effects of sirens, thunder and spray paint. Like Hamilton, a flurry of refrains combine in the final stretch, which is a tad too earnest yet distinguished by shifting narrative methods. You arrive at the final destination in something like the Warriors’ dazed state. “Bring your swagger and your spark,” enticed the DJ at the start. Both are very much present and correct.
