Grammy-winning superstar Lauryn Hill will headline Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new Warriors concept album, the Hamilton creator announced on stage Wednesday at the 10th annual Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Miranda wrote the album, due out October 18, with award-winning actor and playwright Eisa Davis. Warriors is Miranda’s first full post-Hamilton musical. The Broadway megahit, which debuted almost a decade ago at New York’s Public Theater, also began as a concept album. “Concept albums are a series of songs that tell a story,” Miranda explained.
He pointed out that many Broadway shows started as albums, or are essentially enjoyed as albums by fans who don’t have access to the live shows. “If you are young and broke, it’s a way to see a Broadway show,” he said.
Concept albums are also, Miranda pointed out, a great way to get a star-studded cast of talented performers who otherwise would not commit to an eight-show-a-week Broadway performance schedule.
In Miranda and Davis’s retelling of the 1979 film The Warriors—about rival New York City gangs battling their way back to the Bronx from Coney Island—Hill portrays Cyrus, the gang leader. The Warriors gang is all women: played by Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Phillipa Soo, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Julia Harriman.
Harassment as inspiration
Miranda revealed that the inspiration for the all-women casting came from 2017’s notorious “Gamergate” phenomenon, in which women had to deal with a level of “malevolent chaos.”
“These online trolls were doxing women’s addresses just because they had the gall to work in video games or want to talk about video games,” Miranda said. “I remember thinking that’s exactly what Luther does in Warriors. Luther shoots Cyrus, turns to the Warriors, and goes, ‘They did it.’ And then they have to deal with the consequences.”
The announcement of Hill as the lead comes as a surprise as Hill is notably hard to pin down. Miranda himself was surprised that they secured her for the project. In fact, he said that he wrote a Lauryn Hill lyric (“you might win some but you just lost one”) into Hamilton, but took it out because he didn’t think she’d allow it, only to find out that she was a fan.
There are currently no plans to turn the concept album into a Broadway show or movie, but much like with Hamilton, Miranda views the project as a way to test the waters with the public.