Review: Blue Man Group by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Whenever possible, I like to go to any and every live production cold. No foreknowledge whatsoever. Of course, this is sometimes difficult with extremely popular works and often impossible if it’s a classic. Now, I wasn’t particularly worried about spoilers when it came to the Blue Man Group, but all I really knew about it was that there would be Blue Men and lots of drumming. I also assumed there would be a lot of clown and mime work, and when there wasn’t that was my first surprise.
Suffice it to say that just because a person on stage isn't talking, that individual isn't automatically a mime or a clown. Mimes and clowns work around their lack of vocals and tell a compelling story through action alone. The Blue Man Group’s intent in not using dialogue is to create a universally appealing show not limited by language barriers, age groups, or cultural backgrounds. They claim that by now more than 50 million people around the world have seen this show.
The group debuted in New York in 1991. In addition to touring the world, the production has established resident companies in Berlin, Boston, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton began it as a performance art group in 1987. The three donned blue masks and caught the attention of MTV with a public performance in New York City celebrating the end of the 1980s. They stuck to environmental theater until 1991, when they did their first inhouse performance at the Astor Place Theater. Ten years later they bought the theater and made it their home base.
The implied fiction is that the three titular blue men are aliens exploring our world. They attempt to maintain an emotionless façade (described by some as naïve) when they interact with human technology and the humans in the audience, they are both shocked and playful when they inevitably fail to do either. The implication is that the artifacts of our world, not wholly relevant, are easy to misunderstand. Or, in other words, we live in a world awash with information and technology that are bombastic, playful, and engaging but ultimately superfluous. The Blue Men understand this but not the implications. If the show aims to make a point, it does so without offering an alternative or a solution to our enslavement to the overload of information and technology. It simply pokes fun at it.
Watching from the outside a group of outsiders looking in, the Blue Man Group essentially hasn't evolved. They offer performance art with an 80’s aesthetic, from a time when technology was still considered cool and almost alien. The show’s audience interaction sequences have the Blue Men video audience members and present them on the big screen as an impromptu music video. In our age of iPhones and identity theft, this trope has lost significance. It's fun but incredibly dated. Perhaps they could break new ground by adding the gifs, filters, and animations available on all modern smartphones.
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This is also the time to point out that the show’s soundtrack is equally dated. Modern EDM music has come so far with dramatic layering and contrapuntal rhythms that one wonders why the group’s soundtrack is still 80’s house music. It has the same drum circle beat and melodies presumably cut from an early Herbie Hancock album. The rest of the show involves a lot of throwing things into the audience and playing drums covered in colored water. It's clear why this show has enormous family appeal. This is exactly how kids play when they don’t have to worry about making a mess. The kids and families loved the show's freedom to play along with the performers.
So, while I had no expectations before seeing this show, I can say I got exactly what I expected: a fun night of whimsical mischief that delighted fans of all ages. The audience participation started from the get-go and the cheering lasted till the end. There is no rule that a night of entertainment needs to have any deep meaning or provide cultural revelation. Performance art was originally meant to bring high art to the general public; the Blue Man Group disguises low art as high art and brings it to an adoring public. Still, with the vast improvement and innovations in technology in the last thirty years, the ‘toys’ now available to them have a lot more potential than this.
Blue Man Group
touring company
