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Warriors Come Out and Grate
Lin Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’s remake devolves into kumbaya.
The Hamilton mastermind’s gifts — a love of hip-hop and a knack for folding intricate plotlines into percussive rhymes and dense stacks of melody — as well as his quirks — fearless but overbearing maximalism and good-intentioned liberalism with a tendency to wring an uplifting takeaway from an objectively bleak situation — are unmistakable here. Opener “Survive the Night” is a meeting of representatives from the five boroughs — Cam’ron for Manhattan, Big Pun’s son Chris Rivers for the Bronx, executive producer Nas for Queens, Busta Rhymes for Brooklyn, and RZA and Ghostface Killah for Staten Island — we never hear from again. Life is rough but we weather it together, says the drippy U2-style ballad surveying New Yorkers of different backgrounds sharing a common experience, interrupted periodically by the Mexican folk standard “Cielito Lindo.” But it’s too neat, a praise-band take on a scene meant to communicate the discomfort of contact with people who will never relate to you.
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