When it comes to anonymity, the likes of the Residents and Angine de Poitrine have nothing on the Blue Man Group. Though we knew the names of its performance-artist founders who started being blue, bald and mute on the Lower East Side in 1987—Matt Goldman, Chris Wink and Phil Stanton—we didn’t really know which one was which. And we certainly didn’t figure out who among their countless nameless understudies fit their requirements of being “between five-foot-ten and six-foot-one, skilled at drumming, and able to ‘wordlessly emote.’”
While its live performances were the thing of legend—uncomfortable audience immersion and interactivity, paint pouring onto malleted kettle drums for a stunning visual and sonic effect—before the end of the 1990s, Blue Man Group became a hugely successful recording-artist collective with Audio, which was certified gold and nominated for a Grammy. By 2003’s The Complex, BMG wound up with big-name guests like Dave Matthews and Gavin Rossdale and actually had tracks on Billboard’s pop charts. Not long after that collab, Blue Man Group performed with Ricky Martin at the Latin Grammy Awards.
Do any of BMG’s membership identify as Latino? As any race at all? Who would know? How do they fill out their census forms?
Yes, the BMG founding fathers sold out to Cirque du Soleil in 2017 and closed their decades-long run on Astor Place a year ago after nearly 18,000 performances, but such twists in its economy meant nothing to its deserved encomium when it came to the opening night of its extended Ensemble Arts Philly run at the Miller Theater (through March 1).
Along with a fourth—non-Blue, non-Man, non-stop—Group member, drummer Mackenna Tolfa (making BMG history as its first woman percussionist), the big, red-eyed (what from its wealth of pore-tight close ups across several large projection screens), non-verbal, sleekly cobalt-colored trio moved gracefully across the Miller’s stage. They handcuffed nervous audience members to each other and cajoled the crowd with directions of acting as if theirs was “rock concert” (“hands in the air, shake it like you just don’t care” stuff). They even provoked one gentleman to don an all-white protective jumpsuit and helmet, get doused in blue and pink paints, hang upside down from a meat hook and get slammed into an over-sized canvas for the coolest-ever ginormous mural. Yes, he got to keep the painting as well. No merch could ever be as great as one’s own life-sized, slick-blue work of art.
It was, however, the vibrant live sound of the Blue Man Group that still managed to thrill, even entrance—the manner in which they used the most common of construction items, hollow PVC pipes at various lengths and degrees of separation from each other—what with this threesome-plus-one’s determined manner of making uniquely tuneful, hypnotic, percussive-driven music.
With Tolfa taking on the character of The Rockstar throughout the evening (genuinely incessant hardcore pounding, too, the likes of which would surely impress Zak Starkey), the Blue Man Group moved beyond the novelty of its PVC-pipe practice and into its own self-designed percussion instruments, including the Chimeulum, Pipeulum, Snorkelbone and Tone Spokes. Any classical percussionist slamming timpani and cymbals will tell you that it’s their wealth of pulsating, nuanced rhythms that guide their respective orchestras.
Now, multiply that wealth by a thousand, give it tribal heft, a sense of humor that allows for stiff, silly interactivity among its all-Blue membership, continually pour multi-colored Day-Glo paints onto their various over-sized kits (from a device wrapped around each Man’s waist, so that they must coordinate their sizeable moving faucets while pounding out its provocative pulsations), while shooting cannons filled with endlessly long ribbons of pastel-colored paper onto themselves and their devoted crowd?
Yeah, the Blue Man Group is still pretty cool after nearly 40 years.
—A.D. Amorosi
