What I liked
The actors inhabit and capture the roles they portray with grace and dedication. Stan Lee’s wired high energy, contagious optimism, boundless ambition, and carnival barker like tendency toward self aggrandizement with its somewhat tenuous relationship to the truth, that made him the perfect ambassador to sell comics to the mainstream world, while simultaneously rubbed many of his creative collaborators the wrong way are perfectly captured. Jack Kirby’s prickly rough and tumble tough guy workaholic New York attitude that masked a heart of gold, a bottomless pit of creative ideas and an eagle eye for creating timeless iconic imagery is all here. Even Steve Ditko’s nebbishly eccentric, but undeniably singular uncompromising creative perspective is represented in all its weird charm.
What I didn't like
“There are no heroes in this story,” says Jack Kirby, and while it is certainly true that both Stan and Jack are portrayed as the flawed but incredibly talented humans they were, the play moves at a crisp pace in 90 minutes as it attempts to cover these men’s prolific careers and lives over half a century. As such, it completely omits Kirby’s time as a war hero, and Stan Lee’s use of his soap box column in the 60’s to stand in solidarity with the civil rights movement. One wishes the play could be expanded to include these heroic aspects of the men who created the Marvel Universe as well.
My overall impression
My favorite play I’ve seen this Fringe Fest, so far. It deftly captures the circumstances, the men and the moments that created the new American mythology of the modern superhero, both larger than life, and with feet of clay that continue to resonate world wide with millions.
