After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of hairless, earless, silent, blue-and-black clad performers, who spit paint and sculpt marshmallows, gobble Twinkies and drum in primary colors, unexpectedly became a culture-infiltrating sensation.
They achieved this — along with shows in more than a dozen cities across the globe, multiple concert tours, three studio albums, a Grammy nomination, many TV appearances, a book and one indelible sitcom story line — without changing much about their approach. Throughout one of the longest runs in Off Broadway history, they remained proudly on the silly side of performance art. Even without a narrative, they also connected viscerally with audiences, earning a legion of megafans. “We love the idea of a show that is sublime and ridiculous,” said Chris Wink, one of the founding performers.
Blue Man Group, which has been owned by Cirque du Soleil since 2017, is not disappearing: long-running shows remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return gig is planned for Orlando, Fla. But closing the New York production, where it all began — along with another decades-old production in Chicago — is the end of a chapter. (In a statement, a spokeswoman said Cirque du Soleil was proud of Blue Man Group’s track record, and that it made the “difficult decision” to shutter after “we re-evaluated our current standings.” After declaring bankruptcy in 2020, Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based live entertainment behemoth, is controlled by private equity firms.)
Emerging from the East Village arts scene, the original Blue Man Group served as a monument to possibility: D.I.Y. creativity — or unfettered lunacy — could still flourish in New York. That for 34 years it occupied the same bit of desirable real estate, near the downtown mecca of Astor Place, and across from the landmark Public Theater, gave it a stately foundation — even if its 281-seat subterranean space was, almost by design, a little dank. Photos of the bald and the blue loomed outside, part of the urban architecture.
In its own way, Blue Man Group is keeping a toehold: two of the founders, and one current performer, Wes Day, live above the theater. (Forgotten corners may still be cobalt-flecked.)
As a character, the Blue Man is a quizzical but optimistic outsider, delighting in the quotidian, like PVC tubes and Cap’n Crunch cereal, said Day, who has been a Blue Man for 27 years, mostly with the New York show. And that was the infectious experience of the production, too: “It’s just been spreading joy, sharing color and being awe-inspired at the world around it,” Day said.
As Wink put it: The idea was always to jump-start other people’s weirdness. “Part of what New York is all about is like, be your crazy self, get your freak on, try your thing out.”
Why is the Blue Man blue? For three decades the creators — Wink, Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton — have purposefully given shifting answers. It has to do with the earth, Wink said in a recent video interview, and valuing human connection over technology. Whatever the case, Goldman added, the hue was undeniable.
“When we first got all blue, we did look at each other and go, Holy cow — this is bigger than us,” he said.
They noticed, too, that numbers mattered. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing; we would just get blue and walk around,” Wink said. If he was alone, “People would be like, ‘Who’s the weird guy over there?’” he recalled. But encountering a blue trio, “They would ask, ‘What’s going on?’” — like it was a happening, an event. “We started to see that that was a powerful component to it.”
This was in the late ’80s, when he and Goldman, New Yorkers and childhood pals, and Stanton, a friend who Wink met at a catering job, were 20-somethings kicking around art ideas. They found the yuppie era stultifying and in 1988 staged a funeral procession for the decade in Central Park. MTV covered it with outsize fanfare. “Let’s get a running start on the ’90s!” Wink — painted, bald, in a blazer — announced, among the last times a Blue Man talked.
The show developed by its own logic. Castoff plastic piping was acquired from a factory in Brooklyn — both set and prop. “We’d spend a ton of time shoving stuff in tubes, trying to shoot it against the wall,” Wink remembered. With Stanton as the lead builder, they constructed instruments out of PVC, like a multiplayer tubulum. Percussion became the soundtrack. (Wink was a drummer in post-punk bands.) None of it made any sense on paper.
“We were shocked — delightfully shocked — when a lot of people started coming,” Stanton said.
Their ascent was helped by a slew of TV spots. They appeared a week into “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” in 1992 — “They’re very strange,” Leno said, by way of introduction — doing some of the same bits they still do, like catching paint balls in their mouths and spewing them into spin art. They were on 17 times over the years, including once when they trussed Robin Williams up by the ankles, hung him upside down and had him body-splatter pigment on a giant canvas. (His kids put him up to it, Williams, the Oscar-winning actor and comedian, told the troupe.)
Frequently mentioned in travel guidebooks as an only-in-New-York experience, with appearances on talk shows in places like Germany, Brazil, and Japan, they drew an international crowd early.
In 2001, when their debut album was nominated for a Grammy, for best pop instrumental, they performed on the show, with Moby and Jill Scott. (They nixed appearances with Madonna and U2, according to Goldman.) The band had to be tuned to the Blue Men’s non-chromatic PVC instruments, which looked like exoskeletons. They got a standing ovation.
By then, more Blue Men had been cast, giving the founders respite from eight-show-a-week life. But they were still exacting about their image. Around 2004, when they got a call from “Arrested Development,” the cult Fox series, about having the hapless Tobias Fünke (David Cross) become a Blue Man, they were wary, recalled Mitchell Hurwitz, the TV show’s creator. A talking Blue Man wouldn’t fly. They landed on having Tobias audition to be an understudy.
“I was like great, it’s funnier that he’s not it,” Hurwitz said. “You’ve got a guy who’s just painting himself blue — except for that diamond spot on his back that he couldn’t reach — and just waiting by the phone.” (Cross never got the hang of the makeup: “There was always a little blue to be found on David, for months afterward,” Hurwitz recalled.) The multi-season arc became one of the standouts of a now-beloved series. It was comedic alignment — “that tone of absurd things taken seriously,” Hurwitz said.
The Blue Man vision influenced other artists. Fred Armisen, the comic actor and writer, was a drummer in the house band for the Chicago show from 1997-99, his first paying job as a musician. “It really changed my life,” he said. Not just because of the steady money, or the practice in what he called “relentless drumming,” cued by, say, an airborne marshmallow. The material was wordless, abstract — but not cynical — and yet the audience was giddy.
“It was, for me, a new way of being funny,” Armisen said. “The idea of just doing something for fun, or for the hell of it or for who knows why — that also implanted in me.”
As Blue Man Group wound down in New York, Wink, Goldman and Stanton occasionally resumed their spots onstage, in what felt like buzzy reunions for friends, fans and colleagues — many have been with the production for decades.
Their network of die-hards is surprisingly varied. Jan Reynolds, 71, a retired nurse from Indianapolis, was at Chicago’s closing night on Jan. 5; she had seen the show, in cities across North America, 100 times with her husband. They were hooked from their first outing. “I remember feeling like a kid,” she said.
Micah St. George was in kindergarten when he first encountered Blue Man, in Boston. Now 18, he has been a lifelong acolyte — in seventh grade, he made a replica tubulum in his parents’ basement — and plans to study technical theater in college. En route to New York for something upward of his 300th performance, he said the Blue persona had imprinted on how he lived his life: “always enthusiastic, creative, very open.”
For the cast and creators, it’s the bonds they create, in the moment, with theatergoers, that give the show its pulse. The finale webs everyone together, literally, with reams of paper.
“The Blue Men looking down at you, you feel like they’re looking right down into your soul,” said Day, the veteran performer. Climbing into the seats, Goldman used to count how many people’s eyes he could peer into (250).
“There’s something weird about drums and music and getting together, that is magical and sublime,” Wink said. “No matter how modern and isolated we become, and all the crazy [stuff] we do and the weird food we create, we’re still here and we still love to dance, and it’s still great to be alive.”
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