NEW YORK, Dec 4 — They are bald, blue and earless. They do not talk. They play with their food (and their paint), perform wild music on instruments of their own devising and are the centrepiece of an international entertainment empire with 550 full- and part-time employees and annual revenues of US$100 million (RM444.2 million).
But perhaps the most striking thing about the men of Blue Man Group, which began as a nebulous let’s-do-something-weird response to the banality of downtown culture in the late 1980s, is how comprehensively they have moved from the fringes to the mainstream, and beyond.
In November, the group celebrated its 25th anniversary in a manner befitting an institution whose brand reverberates far beyond the city limits but that also shouts “Manhattan” as thoroughly as the Rockettes or the Circle Line.
Cities with permanent Blue Man productions — Las Vegas; Orlando, Florida; Boston; Chicago; and New York — declared November 17 “Blue Man Group Day.” Madame Tussauds in Times Square unveiled limited-edition wax figures. There was a party at the Highline Ballroom. And the Blue Men got to flip a switch and turn the Empire State Building blue for a night.
Their popularity is undisputed; two million people worldwide visit their shows every year. But in New York, full of theatregoers who scurry to the other side of the street when tourist buses roll up, wide appeal is hardly a recommendation. It’s easy to write off Blue Man Group as the local equivalent of The Mousetrap, a piece of old furniture that is always there but has little new to offer.
But that may be the wrong way to look at it. The show is so winsome, so witty, so energetic that it might ensnare you despite yourself, leaving you as tangled up in blue as the most undemanding out-of-towner. “The appealing peculiarity of these wordless, smooth-skulled creatures remains,” Laura Collins-Hughes wrote last year in The New York Times, checking back on the show 24 years after the newspaper gave it its first (glowing) review.
Snootiness doesn’t bother the original Blue Men, who argue that they never saw themselves as avant-garde, anyway. They couldn’t be, they say, rooted as they are in the populist traditions of vaudeville.
“We look at it like we tapped into something deep and universal and profound,” said Chris Wink, one of the original Blue Men.
Give in to the Blue Men, and you give in to their silliness, seen to its best advantage during the showstopping Twinkies-based banquet scene that relies on the kindness of a participating audience member. Other unlikely props include splatter-prone paint, Cap’n Crunch cereal and a series of tubes.
The show has been refined and overhauled with new material over the years but still features gentle digs at pretentiousness and technology saturation, and a lot of good drumming. As always, it ends with an exuberant finale that leaves everyone in the theatre covered in glorified toilet paper.
Anyone can TP a room. What sets the group apart is the Blue Man character himself: An exotic Everyman — outsider to the punk rocker and the business executive — that Wink and his collaborators, Matthew Goldman and Phil Stanton, brought to life in the late 1980s. (They are all now in their 50s.)
Wink, a musician, and Stanton, then an aspiring actor, met catering an event at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Chris was putting garbage liners in the big garbage cans, and they asked me to help,” Stanton said. Goldman, a software producer, knew Wink from their junior high days at the Fieldston School in New York.
They have told the story often, but it essentially goes like this. Unhappy about the cultural scene in Lower Manhattan — so exciting in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so dreary in the ‘80s — they began holding weekly get-togethers at the apartment Wink and Goldman shared on the Upper West Side.
“Basically everyone was charged with bringing something interesting to share — a book, a movie, a record, an article,” said Larry Heinemann, an old friend of Wink’s who was a musical coordinator for the group in the early years. “It was like a book club, but it wasn’t limited to books.”
Performance art was in the air: “We got this idea that we should get blue and walk around,” Wink said.
Their formative event, the famous-in-retrospect Funeral for the ‘80s in Central Park, was not especially well thought out. “It wasn’t like we were really earnest about this,” said Wink, the group’s big talker despite his years as a silent Blue Man. “It was more like, ‘Let’s put it out of its misery and make way for something new.’”
But he was savvy enough to send a news release to MTV. The VJ Kurt Loder and a cameraman came along to witness a bunch of blue people carrying a coffin, making portentous pronouncements and setting fake fire to ‘80s symbols they found objectionable, including Rambo. The audience: perhaps two dozen.
MTV hyped the story, Goldman said, “and through the magic of editing, made it look like you’d missed the Sex Pistols” if you missed the event.
The ‘80s were still not over — this was 1988 — and the Blue Men began refining the Blue Man. He would be at once primal and futuristic — and mute, on the grounds that silence would increase his mystery and his power.
They started putting on short sets with homemade props at alternative spaces downtown, got their first reviews when they played at La MaMa, performed (and got a standing ovation at) the Serious Fun Festival at Lincoln Centre, and in 1991 moved to their permanent home, the Astor Place Theatre on Lafayette Street.
For three years, the original trio were the only Blue Men, performing six days a week without respite. But wanting to expand to other cities, they began training other men (and a few women) for the job. There have been a total of 125 so far.
All the Blue Men are trained in a facility downtown, and the place was bustling during anniversary week. In one room, a trio of current Blue Men explained why it was not wearisome to continually play a character who is always blue, always silent and always surrounded by two others of his ilk.
David McLaughlin, 28, from Northern Ireland, said the role was counterintuitively liberating. “When you have the inability to speak, you have to be honest and be yourself,” he said. “There’s nothing to hide behind.” — The New York Times
