Blue Man Group more than musical mimes

 

If you had told me the show was about some musical mimes, I probably would have taken a pass on it.

To describe the Blue Man Group as merely musical mimes, although accurate, would have been a gross understatement. It would have been like describing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a piece of bread with squished grapes and peanuts on it.

Sandy and I attended the Blue Man Group performance Tuesday, March 31, at Rudder Auditorium. The two-night appearance of the funniest trio since the Three Stooges concluded the 53rd season of OPAS at Texas A&M. It was the second OPAS show we saw this year, having gone to “The Music Man” two weeks earlier.

I had the privilege of doing a phone interview with Chris Smith, one of the Blue Men, a few weeks ago to promote the appearance. In the interview he noted the difficulty of describing exactly what the Blue Man Group is. After the show I put that challenge to Sandy. We struggled to come up with an adequate description. Smith referred to it as a “clown rock show.”

“It’s an amalgamation of a lot of different things that we’ve come to know and love from both theater and from music and concerts,” he said. “But really it’s an experience that’s got a lot of drumming, a lot of comedy. There’s no fourth wall, so the Blue Men and The Rockstar, the cast members on stage, are looking right at you.

“There’s a lot of audience participation, even pieces from the show that we don’t know what’s going to happen that night. We’ll pull somebody up there and we’ll see what happens. But really, I like to think of it as kind of like a clown rock show to some degree. But really, all of it’s under the goal of us forging a really fun connection with the audience and hopefully getting people from all ages to really kind of reconnect with their inner child, is the goal.”

The Blue Men are three guys in bald caps coated in deep blue face paint. They have been joined in recent years by a performer called The Rockstar, a female DJ drummer. They don’t speak, although there is some narration during the performance. The show is heavy on drumming, and paint, and optical illusions, and audience participation, and the abuse of food.

Imagine watching a show that is a mix of a rock concert, vaudeville slapstick, and magic while under the influence of some far-out hallucinogens. It’s colorful, fast-paced and wildly entertaining. I felt like we went from one belly laugh to the next for 90 minutes. The smile never left my face.

Not since my children were in a Sunday night youth group at church have I seen food so hilariously abused. The Blue Men were catching gumballs and marshmallows – lots and lots of marshmallows – in their mouths and spewing out works of art. They also had a thing for boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. It was a running gag, and they milked it for all it was worth.

Drumming is a huge part of the show. The Rockstar banged on the drums so frantically it was almost an athletic performance. The Blue Men also did a lot of drumming, often with colored “paint” poured onto the drums so they made vividly colorful splashes. They also “drummed” on creations made from PVC pipe, one of them called a drumbone.

One of the enduring qualities of the Blue Man Group is their wide-eyed expressions as they naively explore the world around them. Their sit-com curiosity and playful antics make for a ton of laughs.

The show has an added layer of visual effects and dazzling lights that overload the senses and keep the action moving. There are times when light and reality blend so well you really can’t tell them apart.

I’ve never seen anything like it, which is part of the reason it is so hard to describe the Blue Man Group. The uniqueness and spontaneity of the show is reminiscent of Robin Williams in his early days of performing when he was so crazy and unpredictable.

So, yeah. It’s so much more than musical mimes. There’s no putting these guys in an invisible box, or any box at all. This is outside-the-box entertainment at its best and I hope I get to see them again someday.