Words often fail those trying to describe a Blue Man Group performance, so let's let a few experts try. "It's a post-modern Vaudeville routine," says Los Angeles Times theater critic Michael Phillips. Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Erin Auerbach says, "It's like having some ER doc shock you with a defibrillator." Actor Dustin Hoffman, an early fan, said it was "like an acid trip in first grade that happens when the teacher leaves the room."
Which all goes to show that the Blue Man Group is pretty hard to explain. But what else would you expect from an avant-garde theater group that once performed on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee; one that gives front-row guests plastic sheeting for protection, à la prop comic Gallagher?
The Blue Man Group experience grew out of three friends' experiments with guerilla street theater and performance art in New York City. Even in the early days, the group had its trademark sense of irreverence and humor firmly in place: One early attention-grabbing antic was a funeral for the 1980s, where the group bid a public good-bye to yuppies, post-modern architecture, and other icons of the time.
Today, the experience has grown into an empire with shows in four cities. There are now almost 60 Blue Men (although only three appear on stage during any given show). Probably the most dramatic evolution is the fact that the performance has become entirely non-verbal.
Quiet, though, the show is not. Percussive music fills the air. And not just any old instrument will do. In a nod to a prediction by John Lennon that in the future, new instruments would replace guitars and keyboards as pop-music standbys, the Blue Men have invented some of their own out of materials ranging from PVC pipe to Cap'n Crunch cereal.
The show is a visual extravaganza, as well, starting with the shocking sight of three shiny, bald, blue people roaming the stage like the Marx brothers with an NEA grant. Paint spurts out of drums, Twinkies are thrown, neon signs flash, and audience members are pulled onto the performance, turning the stage spectacle into a community ritual--one where you never know what's going to come next.
If all this makes you reconsider the definition of art, so much the better. If you leave feeling that some of the seriousness and pretension of the performance art world has been deflated, the Blue Men don't mind. If it just makes you laugh, that's good, too. The show explores grown-up themes of community and the role of technology in our lives. Yet it's playful (and squeaky-clean) enough to appeal to children. Even co-founder Chris Wink cheerfully admits the show is full of "childish stupidity."
And that may just be the best description we've heard yet.•
