A Sucker Emcee
Opening Night: September 10, 2014
Closing: October 5, 2014
Theater: Bank Street Theatre
Infused with hip-hop, slam poetry and personal recollections, this one-man show charts the ups and downs of muMs’ incredible journey, from growing up in the Bronx to starring on one of HBO’s biggest shows. A life set against the backdrop of the birth of hip-hop, this is the story of a man looking for his spotlight and finding it in the most unlikely of places.
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September 23, 2014
“I didn’t want to be a nurse, I wanted to be a rapper.” – Craig “muMs” Grant I should confess my bias: One, I don’t love one-man shows. Two, I have a massive artistic crush on Craig “muMs” Grant. All things considered, Mr. Grant doesn’t disappoint with his new one-man show A Sucker Emcee, a love song to hip-hop, to the Bronx, and to the high and low cypher. When you walk into Labyrinth’s Bank Street Theater, you will head-bob all the way to your seat, thanks to DJ Rich Medina, the perfect soundtrack, hype-man, and bastion of all that is funky fresh. If Grant is Diana Ross (with a 5 o’clock shadow) then Medina is the quintessential Supreme. The music is a throwback to a time when hip-hop was about skills, not booty. And Grant is all about skills. He has all the lure of a world wise virtuoso—a gentle bull from the Bronx, he glides through masculine rites of passage, unprecedented success, and a lament to a life full of the oooohs and ahhhhs.
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September 23, 2014
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau set to a hip-hop beat, Craig Grant offers his confessions in A Sucker Emcee, produced by the Labyrinth Theater Company. While a D.J. (Rich Medina) bops between two turntables, scratching and spinning, Mr. Grant tells the story of his life in rhymed couplets. Mr. Grant, also known as muMs, has a blocky face with a mobile mouth and gleaming teeth. He speaks in a gentle growl with just a trace of a native Bronx drawl, though he can send his voice swooping up and down the social register. Dressed in Nikes and a T-shirt proclaiming “The Truth,” he spends most of the show near the front of the bare stage, lips pressed close to a microphone. Though he’ll occasionally speak as his mother, his father, a friend or a teacher, he spends most of the piece as simply himself, narrating youthful screw-ups with fondness and exasperation.
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