Play that percussive music, Blue Men....
If what you want from a night out at the theater is a good time, then you should definitely try to get a little Blue.
As in Blue Man Group, the long-lived performance ensemble that started out as a trio of street entertainers in New York City and has become a global phenomenon.
The latest incarnation of the company’s touring production opened its week-long run at the Tulsa PAC Tuesday night, as part of Celebrity Attractions’ season. It’s a mix of some classic Blue Man routines –– the PVC-pipe-as-tuned-percussion-instrument, bits of the “How to Be a Megastar” arena show –– with new material that pokes some very pointed fun at our reliance on technology to maintain the illusion of being “connected.”
We’re not talking about anything all that profound –– whatever meaning or message one might want to find in a Blue Man Group show is at best tangential to the real purpose of the show, which is to dazzle the eye, tickle the funny bone and get your chest cavity resonating along with the amped-up music.
Tuesday night’s show did all that, even if the volume was at times close to punishing.
For those who don’t know Blue Man Group from the Blue Whale of Catoosa, the show features three performers, dressed in plain black outfits, their heads and hands coated in electric blue greasepaint. They say not a word –– a silence that gives the Blue Men, with stoic, unchanging expressions an air of innocence and mystery.
In most vignettes, they are confronted with a bit of technology –– it may be as sophisticated as a gigantic tablet computer loaded with some unique applications, or as low-tech as that PVC pipe –– that they manipulate. And things activities rarely go quite the way one expects.
That “GiPad,” for example, has an app called the “Digital Enhancer,” which becomes a wacky, yet carefully choreographed dance between the on-stage Blue Men and their digital projections.
A bag of Sta-Puf marshmallows and a machine that dispenses a unique sort of gumball become ways of making art (and proving that these Blue Men are extremely accomplished at catching things in their mouths).
While the Blue Men themselves are silent, the show’s sound track is full of things spoken –– snippets of commercials real and imaginary, instructions for how to behave like a rock star, serious-sounding pronouncements about plumbing delivered in a voice full of Rod Serling-like portentousness.
A segment about texting between two computer animated figures –– one of whom has a phobia about moving beyond its two-dimension state –– is a subtle, but stinging comment about the impersonal quality of the so-called “social network.”
But it also leads into one of the evening’s most visually dazzling moments, was the two-dimensional animations move into what they call “2.5 dimensional space,” and join in with a most colorful performance of one of the show’s percussion-and-electronica driven musical numbers.
The group also makes the occasional foray into the audience, fetching up a woman to share in what passes for a dinner date in the Blue Man world, complete with flowers and candles and a main course of Twinkies (and giving a whole new meaning to the words “creme filled”), enlisting the aid of a man to serve as a kind of human paintbrush, even taking a camera and running it...well, let me put it this way: As the live feed from the camera was shown on the screen above the stage, my wife noted, “Well, looks like he has an ulcer.”
Which just goes to show that the one thing Blue Man Group is really interested in manipulating is the audience. That’s the whole point of the “Rock Concert Movement” segment that closes the show, as the crowd responds happily to the commands from the disembodied voice. Of course, by this point in the evening, everyone is more than happy to play along.
The PAC is supplying plastic ponchos and booties for those who sit in the first few rows of the Chapman Music Hall, as a precaution against any splatter from the Blue Men drumming away on liquid-covered drums. From where we sat, it didn’t look as if any liquid went flying out into the crowd. Giant balloons, paper streamers, rolls of toilet tissue....that’s another matter altogether.
Blue Man Group continues with performances through Sunday at the Tulsa PAC, 101 E. Third St. For tickets: 918-596-7111,
tulsaworld.com/mytix.
Follow James D. Watts Jr. on Twitter.
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