Musicals are gross and I hate them. People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at. This is not a sentiment that will be shared by all but when someone told me DEEZ NUTS was a rap play with a prominent musical bent I was a little very afraid. Full disclosure, the playwright, Sacha Jenkins is a friend but that's always the massive risk when you partake of a very creative friend's creative offerings. It can veer extraordinarily deep into the realm of the unfortunate and you can't make eye contact with a bunch of people once- to-thrice removed from said locus. But whatevs it's New York and I barely leave my house!

So yeah, I was thinking this might could be like Carmen, that especially bad and super earnest hip-hopera (BARF) that had Beyoncé all up in it and this is where I stop talking about it because I totally didn't watch that shit and only got about four lines deep in the Wiki entry before I DIED. Anyhoo, DEEZ NUTS was a play about and STARRING Queens' own Beatnuts. They were a BIG DEAL in the rap scene as a part of the Native Tongues family especially amongst the Latinos since Psycho Les and JuJu are Colombian and Dominican and, what, non-Dominican gets along with Dominicans?

OK, so it didn't end up being a musical per se (thank God), it was a bunch of reenacted hilarious scenes from their childhood with interstitial LIVE MUSICAL PERFORMANCES and it was enormously engaging and then Juju got verklempt because he loves the opportunity to do something new and got misty talking about Big Pun (RIP) who was also a big (gigantic, really) deal since he was Puerto Rican. AND IT WAS SO NICE.

Anyways. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF RAP MUSIC AND/OR MUSIC JOURNALISM.

Think about it, we're in NEW YORK, lots of rap GREATS live in NEW YORK, Sacha is a music journalist and having grown up in Queen also, recounted his experiences listening to the Beatnuts as a youth and falling in love with hip-hop (man, Brown Sugar was a good movie) and it was WAY BETTER THAN READING because stories are good when I don't have to lift them and magazines are dead and live rap shows are horribly stressful because they run late (hey! CPT's not just a rumor, and I can say that) and you don't get to have cushy stadium seating.

This is a conduit for information that I can get behind because I am so lazy.

Besides, they called Queens "cultural bukkake" which is TRUE and at one point Psycho Les wore a cap with earflaps BACKWARDS which still served the warming function but as a new silhouette BLEW MY MIND.