Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, and playwright Eisa Davis, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, have created a new Broadway musical — which is not actually on Broadway.

Instead, it’s a concept album, meant to be listened to in one sitting. That idea came about because Miranda wanted to write something about The Warriors, the 1979 cult-classic movie about members of a Coney Island street gang who are trying to get back home to Brooklyn after they’re accused of assassinating a leader advocating for peace.

It’s one of his favorite movies. And he couldn’t stop thinking about how he could do his own love letter to it. Then he brought Davis on board — and they started thinking about the 1970s.

“We were inspired by the concept albums from the ’70s that we love,” Miranda said, “where you would sit on your living room floor and read the liner notes to your vinyl. And we wanted to create that feeling.”

The album tells the Warriors’ story by using music that crosses genres, including hip hop, rock, ska and salsa; it’s sung by a cast that includes everyone from artists like Lauryn Hill, Nas, Ghostface Killah and Billy Porter to Broadway stars Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Amber Gray.

“We just got this dream team” of musical artists, Miranda said. “So it was very freeing, always full of joy.”

Mixing it up

The women of the Warriors

Jimmy Fontaine/Atlantic Records

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Jimmy Fontaine/Atlantic Records

Miranda and Davis flipped the gender of the Warriors so that, in their version, the gang is all women. This means a central romance is one between women as well.

“The gender flipping allowed us to angle in on the sexism and homophobia in the film and make sure that we left that in ’79,” Davis said. “We’re in 2024 here.”

Miranda and Davis say they have no plans for Warriors to come to Broadway, but that “We’d love to see a stage adaptation of this down the road.”

There likely won’t be a movie version, though, because, as Miranda says, “That already exists.”

Ciera Crawford edited the audio and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.

A woman named Estela García sits alone in an interrogation cell and begins talking to the police she assumes are listening in from another room. She’s 40 years old, born to a single mother in the Chilean countryside.

Seven years earlier, Estela traveled to the city of Santiago in search of work and was hired by a wealthy couple to be their “housemaid” and nanny to their soon-to-be born daughter, Julia. That daughter, now 7, has just been found dead in the family’s swimming pool. Whether the cause of her death will be deemed an accident, suicide, or foul play we don’t know; but, if it’s the latter, Estela is the chief suspect.

We readers learn almost all of this information in the first pages of Clean, a slim, extraordinary novel by Chilean author, Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated into English by Sophie Hughes. But, here’s something we never learn: what Estela looks like.

I’ve sat still in Estela’s company for hours, raptly reading her story and hearing her voice; yet, it wasn’t until I began describing the premise of this novel that I realized I have no idea of Estela’s appearance beyond the general categories of gender and age.

Through the brilliance of her writing, Zerán lulls readers into the same haughty blindness as Estela’s employers. To the señor, a doctor, and the señora, who works for some kind of corporation, invisible Estela simply is what she does for them: “making the bed, airing the rooms, scrubbing the vomit out of the rug,” cooking and serving their meals; bleaching the sweat and dirt out of their clothes; and attending to their surly child, who, even as a baby, had to be coaxed to eat.

In its narrative structure Clean may sound like a suspense story, but it’s really a memoir-in-miniature narrated by Estela — a sharp woman who’s had to funnel her life into the rooms of her employers’ house. “Claustrophobia” would have been a good alternative title for this novel, which is set almost exclusively in interior spaces.

Why stay inside with Estela, you may ask? The answer is her voice. Listen to this passage, where Estela in her cell answers the question she assumes is on the minds of her unseen inquisitors, as well as us readers:

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … My answer is the following: Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories and the shops on the other side of this wall?

I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals — open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth — each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

There are so many sentences in this closely-observed novel where an image or comment suddenly swerves matters from the mundane to the revelatory: For instance, when Estela, in answer to an ad, first shows up at her employers’ address, the señora, then pregnant, looks her “up and down,” while the señor doesn’t even make eye contact: “He was texting on his phone [Estela recalls] and, without even glancing up, pointed at the kitchen door.”

When Julia, as a 2-year-old, begins to bite her nails so compulsively her cuticles bleed, Estela comments:

I kept thinking about the girl, … about her chubby, idle hands, always ready to pop those nails into her mouth, for them to be destroyed by her teeth. I never bit my nails. My mama didn’t either. I suppose for that you’d need to have your hands free.

Through the years, tensions within and beyond the house escalate as protests against income inequality rock the city. Even Estela’s own behavior becomes less tamped down. For instance, she illicitly cares for a street dog in the laundry room of the house — an assertion of autonomy that, in a roundabout way, leads to that prison cell.

Clean is an intense novel about class and power and the kind of deep down rot that lingers, despite the most vigorous scrubbing.

A skin, hair or makeup routine is never just a skin, hair or makeup routine. We dived deep into the beauty rituals of artists and aestheticians across L.A., and in turn learned more about their relationships to themselves and the world around them. A beauty ritual is as much personal as it is a portal: to better versions of ourselves, to better versions of the future. For Barrington Darius, a creative director, photographer, director and model, beauty is found in freedom, and freedom is found in practice, specifically a hair-cutting practice Darius has been perfecting for the last few years. As Darius says, cutting hair is math, it’s theory and it’s art. “When I cut my hair, I feel like that aura has been turned up. Aura points going up … My conversations are sharp. My thoughts are married to confidence. I speak directly.”

Cutting my hair is something I do in private. As an artist, I feel like I’m always kind of anxious about sharing. I do what I think are some magical things privately, but while some people share their magic — I use it for inspiration, for reference. I might be transitioning into that space where I share more. I have “take risk” tattooed on the back of my neck.

I think our haircut is our crown, so deciding to tinker with my crown at my own leisure, it’s liberating. As a creative director, filmmaker, photographer and everything else, I decide to follow off spirit — there’s never a right or wrong way. All that theory that goes into the photos, the films, the music, it’s literally the same exact thing with the practice of cutting hair. Cutting hair is math and also assessing — assessing the bones of what it’s about to be before you actually go into sculpting. You see some people’s heads and the hair that they have and it’s like, “You’re supposed to have that hair. It just fits.” I feel like I’m the fade. I’m the same every time, but I’m sharp. Every little corner that no one else thinks about, that sticks out most to me. With haircuts, there’s no Photoshop, so you have to be on point. When I cut my hair, I feel like that aura has been turned up. Aura points going up. It’s like, “I’m back.” My conversations are sharp. My thoughts are married to confidence. I speak directly. I hate to hurt people’s hearts but I do use soap and water as my skincare. My grandfather used Irish Spring, I use Irish Spring. It’s just something about that Black skin.

I plan everything. For so many years of my life, I’ve had this kind of linear vision — checkpoint to checkpoint to checkpoint. But as life introduces new realms, and everything gets shifted, your rituals change. But it’s been the same thing forever. I get up at 5 a.m. I just like the blue — I like when the blue comes up in the morning. I can sit there and see the gradient of no sun to sun and it just changes everything. I get up early, I download early, praise early. How I get up, how I include myself in the day, that’s my ritual.

I think I watched too much Spike Lee too early. “Mo’ Better Blues,” Spike Lee’s installment with Denzel [Washington], shaped my idea of beauty. I love jazz music. When you watch the film, you’ll see how selfish the Denzel character is in his space, even how he allots himself an hour of practice, no distractions, every day. I saw beauty in action. To be an example is leadership. If you move like you’re beautiful, people really just start believing you’re beautiful. I’m starting to look in the mirror like, “Wow, we are amazing human beings. We can learn to do things with our hands that we didn’t think we could do.” When I’m cutting my hair, I feel like I’m doing something real. Any practice makes you feel liberated.

Barrington wears Carhartt Wip Pants customized by the artist.

Prop styling: Synthea Gonzales
Production: Mere Studios