SINGAPORE, March 25 — Being a member of the Blue Man Group is more than just slapping blue paint on and walking out on stage, said Blue Man co-founder Chris Wink, who founded the group in the late ’80s with long-time friends Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton.
A unique mix of multimedia, improvisation, performance art, circus tricks, satire, and set pieces, Blue Man Group exists at the intersection of human interaction and technology. The Blue Men themselves are tall, bald eunuchs painted blue, and their show involves everything from drumming on paint cans to marshmallow catches to a Twinkie Feast.
There are eight Blue Men now, who do shows in the United States and the rest of the world. The group will be making its way over to Singapore next week, with a run starting on Thursday (March 31) before heading to New Zealand and the Philippines.
“It’s a bit harder than it looks,” said Wink.
First, despite the Blue Men not having to memorise dialogue lines, they still have to do a fair amount of acting, although it’s more mime and your usual stage acting. “You have to do focused acting because you have to be deadpan throughout,” explained Wink. “You have to really concentrate and stay in character as well as focus on the others. You have to be trained to keep your eye on what’s happening and respond to that.”
Apart from acting you also need to have great rhythmic skills. “You have to pretty much be a trained drummer — you need advanced percussion skills to do what we do.”
Oh, and you also need to be able to learn do to a variety of tricks too. “Yeah, you need dexterity – you need to be able to catch things in your mouth, for example,” said Wink. “We had an actor who didn’t make it as a Blue Man because he wasn’t good at catching stuff in his mouth. He’s a great drummer and a great actor... perhaps we should have let him practise some more.”
And you need patience. “(Learning the pieces) can take a while to get something right. It’s not something that anybody can do right away. Some pieces need to be practiced and tested out before it gets put in the show.”
Lastly, you also need to have some great ideas for the show. While Wink, Stanton and Goldman have come up with a bulk of the pieces in the show, they still encourage all the members to offer ideas. There is only one caveat, said Wink: “It’s not who writes the pieces but that we all like it.”
“I could come up with something and if the other two don’t like it, then I have come up with something else. It’s kind of neat, because it pressures you to bring your best. Now that we have other Blue Men, they come up with ideas too. The three of us give some direction and we have to sign off on any idea. What we’re looking for is an idea that everybody likes. But if there are too many opinions, then it has to be me, Matt and Phil who, at the end of the day, will say if it goes into the show or not.”
You also need to have a great team to back you up at every show.
Here’s what it takes to put on a Blue Man show:
Approximately 17 crew members run the show. This includes wardrobe, props, video, sound, electrics, deck and stage management. Each week in the show, the group uses:
60 drum heads (including both the band loft and stage)
16 cymbals (used with the drum kit)
64 drumsticks
550 feet of piping (which are used to make the PVC tubed instruments)
50 gallons of paint
32 pounds of Jell-O
8 boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal
40 pieces of white chocolate Toblerone
385 marshmallows
444 mashed-up bananas
44 boxes of Twinkie Lights (each Twinkie has just 130 calories!)
28 cakes of blue make-up specially made for Blue Man Group (the group even has their own proprietary colour called Blue Man Blue)
21 bald caps
75 loads of laundry — TODAY
