Bee has opinions

Saw Iceboy! tonight. A new musical starring Megan Mullally (who was out tonight) and Nick Offerman, Iceboy! Is almost always sold out, has had its run extended three times, and is likely to transfer to Broadway when it ends in Chicago.

It has made me consider a career change. No more being a filmmaker, I have to become the most popular theater critic there ever was so I can stop horrible shows like this from being successful, it’s insane I don’t know what people are seeing in it.

The script to Iceboy starts out pretty witty, and a great cast almost convinces you that it stays smart, but shortly the comedy devolves into obvious sex jokes and reference humor - and it’s not even in service of a good story, the family drama has been done before, and the constant annoying humor doesn’t allow the one attempt at an emotional scene to land.

Even if it does work for you, worse than the script is the score and the lyrics. Some of the worst musical theater songs I’ve heard in my life. There are no catchy melodies, and the lyrical comedy abandoned all attempts at smart humor, to just vaguely gesture at jokes.

Problems with the comedy aside, I also found this to be consistently subtly sexist, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else feel the same way

Alan Scott has two main books. The first is All American Comics a variety magazine that always starts with a GL story. This one is better, it's getting sillier any day now there's going to be an actual supervillain. I'm excited. The silliness is a double edged sword though because on the one hand you do get stories like the short descendent of Napoleon starts a gang and gets power hungry

but a lot of the plots are incomprehensible. Someone starts a theater company that produces plays about crimes happening to specific people and then uses those plays to scare those people into giving him money. Someone else does the same thing but for radio stories.

Not to mention - and this is obviously more important - racism. The stories are increasingly global to horrible effect. Whenever a story centers a non-white community they are characterized, given absurd accents, and are self-destructive in need of the white western savior. One issue involves GL going to an indigenous community who, too unaware to discern on their own, has been schemed into following an evil spirituality. GL has to save them. In another a vague Asian community comes to America and decides Doiby is their god reborn and he must be hypnotized and kidnapped. Don't worry GL beats it out of them. All unpleasant to read

It's not all bad, GL supports unions! And, probably accidentally, communism

But I do not enjoy reading the 40s depictions of POC.

His other book Green Lantern is fully dedicated to 4 chapter GL stories. But in 1941 America join WWII and so Alan Scott enlists. This is the war propaganda book. And some of that is awesome obviously. Lots of Nazis beat up

But war stories are not interesting, there's more racism, and all of the America first propaganda is of course unpleasant.

Of course it's not all bad. Doiby has grown on me as a funny character. And Alan's terrible lying remains charming.