Blue Man Group

Dada meets Devo

By Tim Bullard
www.timbullard.com

     Snapping heads to the beat. Impressionistic schizophrenia. Drumming heaven.

     The show to see in New York City is Blue Man Group. As one awaits the opening, a red-letter scrolling sign onstage entertains the audience with funny messages, welcoming individual people in the audience and scrolling jokes. Before the show walk across the street to Tower Records where you can pick up a free Village Voice. If you arrive early, walk around the two-block area to visit shops or McDonald's.

     Loud and percussive, the music is accented by the tubes the men play with a stereo effect that seems five-channel and surroundsound. Chocked full of special effects, the ending contains the merriment of a wedding as toilet paper rolls above the first floor are unrolled, creating a massive blanket of soft tissue barreling over one's head toward the stage. Remember the Cap'n Crunch. Watch out for the yellow goo.

     A shocked audience member is summoned onstage with the blue boys as she sits at a table in a vaudevillian act. Her expressions mock their looks, and they turn on her. Cereal boxes, a mouth full of marshmellows, spinning canvas art painted by an oral burst of paintworks and blacklights out the wazoo.

     The show is child-friendly, and the kids I saw loved it, responding with glee. There are a few curse words on the red-letter scrolling sign and spoken by the narrarator, but it's nothing they haven't heard at school and only a few obscenities. Watch out for the Twinkies. The first couple of rows wear plastic like a Gallagher concert. It's 80 minutes long without an intermission, so hit the bathroom before the show.

     The blue guys seem like cosmic visitors from a friendly UFO; they move like robits, reacting to each other in an embroynic response, an embylical cord from Mars. The theater is decorated in tubes which snake through and dangle at one point in the show, twisting to the pulsing music. They started the show on the streets, and now Germany is their next destination.

     "This is a celebration of the act of creation," Wink told Richard Zoglin of TIME.

     Before long they do what you expect is coming - that is, they walk out into the audience on the seat arm rests, staring with empty faces, glaring at you, turning their heads from side to side like fish in a waterbowl. The most visual moment is when they squirt vibrant colors of paint onto the drumheads, flailing away as paint splatters, illuminated by light. The message signs are used like baseball bats and lifted above their heads at one point, sputtering oblique, stream-of-consciousness utterances.

     "When we first started working together, nobody knew where to put us," Wink told the Chicago Tribune.

     "Our folks always assumed the two of us would grow up to be business partners," his friend, Goldman told the newspaper which compared them to Devo.

     I used to hate "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, but in this show, I join the audience in singing along to the screen, "FEED YOUR HEAD!" Don't try to keep up with the three sets of posterboards they flip off, summoning you to read one stack while printed statistics show the chances of the person next to you reading the same set of posters is 1 million to one. They act like mutant children, star cousins of a distant post-modern galaxy. The show numbs your mind, asking old and young to release inhibitions and ask psychiatric, deep questions about life. You hear The Sex Pistols at one point.

     Ecletric music fills this show, and the band steals the first half with fiery lead guitar riffs and synthesizer madness. The blue boys came out after the show into the lobby to mingle with audience members who snapped photographs with them, buying bumper stickers, T-shirts and mousepads at the gift shop.

     I remember seeing Blue Man Group advertised in Village Voice after it had formed in 1987 and opened Nov. 7, 1991 at the theatre, an invention of three friends, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman. The Drama Desk Committee has given the three inventors the Obie and Lucille Lortell Awards with a new category, "Unique Theatrical Production."

     Perennial "Tonight Show" guests, the three blue boys opened a show in Boston in 1995 and one in Chicago in 1997. They opened its largest show in March 200 at the Luxor Theater in Las Vegas. There are 30 Blue Men, so I don't know who we saw. There are 50 musicians.

     The concept of blue makeup and a stark environment is compelling; minimalistic with existential tones of Sartre married with the surreal idiocy of Dali and the silent mind-meld force of Samuel Beckett. The entire group has 350 members now, and they have produced a CD, "Audio," nominated for a Grammy after its release in 2000 as Best Pop Instrumental Album. It went gold after they performed at the 2001 Grammies. "The Complex" is their most recent release in 2003 with the single, "Sing Along." The CD includes artists like Dave Matthews, Dan The Automator, Tracy Bonham, Gavin Rossdale, Rob Swift, Venus Hum and others on Blue Man Records.

     In Boston the show is at The Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton St. (617)-426-6912 and in Chicago at the Briar Street Theatre at 3133 North Halsted, (713)-348-5996. Visit their website at www.blueman.com or call (212)-387-9415. Performances in New York are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8 p.m., Fridays at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m., 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. and Sundays at 2p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.