The wild success of a show starring strange bald men painted in Yves Klein blue.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
They called themselves theBlue Man Group.
But its lasting success has surprised no one more than the founders themselves.
But its not like we expected to get as far as we did.
It would have been insane to think that.
.Going Blue
.
Wink and Goldman met while attending Fieldston School in the Bronx.
In their 20s, they shared an apartment on the Upper West Side.
Juliet Lofaro, props coordinator, 199194:I was living with Chris and Matt.
It wasnt really fleshed out.
Heinemann:Around 1986, Chris and Matt started holding salons.
We were all charged with sharing something a song, a photo, an idea.
A theme was our disappointment with what early-80s music had morphed into.
Wink:Punk had died, Studio 54 was closed, and it was the Reagan 80s.
That was when the termyuppiestarted.
MTV came along and turned all these cool bands into singing monkeys.
For us, the decade didnt seem cool.
Heinemann:We thought performance art would be the next cultural tidal wave.
Wink:We used our apartment as a home base we got rid of all the furniture.
We were like, Thats cool, but your hair looks weird.
The next salon, he had a bald cap.
Wink:Its not like we were saying, Whats the characters backstory?
Should he be green or blue?
It was more mysterious than that.
We picked blue because it felt right.
Goldman:I have a visceral recollection of the first time the three of us got bald and blue.
We went on the roof and just sort of looked at each other, realizing this character was special.
Heinemann:Then it became, What are we going to do with this?
Lofaro:The funeral for the 80s came about in the living room.
We wrote a press release and invited Kurt Loder.
Heinemann:Kurt actually covered it, which was crazy for our first thing.
Goldman:He made it seem like if you missed this thing, you were a loser.
Club Nowhere was the last of the verbal Blue Man events, Heinemann says.
Around then, we discussed how the character doesnt talk.
In 1991, they staged a production calledTubesat the OffOff Broadway theater La MaMa.
Before and during shows, performers and crew members used the tubes to speak to the audience.
Transitioning a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation to the more formal demands of an Off Broadway production presented some difficulties.
There were lots ofSpinal Tapmoments like that.
So we got white surgical gloves and had someone dye them.
Eventually, somebody called the glove company and said, Hey, can you dye them for us?
They said, Yeah.
We couldnt believe it.
The plywood deck of the stage got permeated with organic matter.
What we were looking at was a blossoming of fruit flies that all hatched at the same time.
Ian Pai, original drummer:It took us a long time to learn to be efficient.
We were spending all this money on goat cheese, not realizing we could use cream cheese.
Wink:TheTonight Showmusic director came to the show during previews.
Through him, the producer heard about us.
Next thing you know, were in L.A. catching marshmallows in our mouths.
If there was a night where we didnt get a standing ovation, it became a whole discussion.
Wed start on the stoop of Astor, go to bars, go bowling.
We were a sort of traveling circus.
It was sometimes labeled as a cult.
Cunningham:Goldman and Wink would talk to Werner Erhard on the phone before shows they were deeply involved.
Goldman:Not once did we speak with Werner Erhard before shows.
Wink:We didnt know him, but a lore developed thats what happens.
Goldman:Est had certain themes of integrity and of willing things into existence.
Was it an ethos at Blue Man to will things into existence?
Was est a significant influence?
Quinn:I had never done est, but elements of it were incorporated into our interactions.
Part of what made the community tight was we could say if we had a problem.
Goldman:That was certainly talked about in est having the ability to have open conversations and get complete.
That was their lingo.
We were drawing from anything to have a space that felt respectful.
Est had a couple good nuggets, same as Buddhism or Freudian analysis.
God bless them for trying to create a utopian corporation.
In the mid-90s, they made a deal to advertise a Spanish orange soda, Mirinda.
They were orange instead of blue.
One was Philip Glass.
He goes, A long time ago, someone wanted to use my music in a commercial.
I didnt do it, and so they changed one note and didnt pay me.
He told us, Youvegotto do it.
So we did it.
.Who Can a Blue Man Be?
The night he stepped in for Stanton transformed what was possible with the show.
More than 200 Blue Men have since performed in national and international productions.
The training process is a paid eight-week gig, but many candidates are cut before the end.
Wink:Each archetype has a binary opposite.
Then theres the group member and the trickster.
Day:The audition process was about having to express feelings with your eyes.
Mark Frankel, a Blue Man since 2005:They gave me different scenarios.
One was that I was walking in the desert and saw a bottle of water.
I was just supposed to look at it.
They must have been 12 hours long.
Frankel:The three guys who started it were white.
Initially, they were looking for analogs.
Wink:We were close enough in height that we looked similar.
There was a sense, in that Devo/Kraftwerk tradition, that uniformity forces you to look closer.
We were trying for a bit of ego dissolution.
General Judd, a Blue Man from 1998 to 2015:I went to an open call in 1997.
In practice, the Blue Men have mostly been white men.
Eddy:Its that classic thing of whiteness being considered universal.
Im thinking,Does it matter?
The references to tribes and shamanism feel appropriative.
Those aspects need to evolve.
Eddy:There was one woman in Boston who performed.
Of course, that was referenced all the time we had a woman once!
But then a decision was made not to acknowledge it at all.
One of the casting directors explained the Blue Man was supposed to be representative of all people.
I guess they wanted to make it seem like blind casting was the natural result of that.
It wasnt intended that way, but it happened.
Johnson:In my opinion, the trainers displayed a boys-club atmosphere where double standards were the norm.
I didnt trust that anyone in the organization had my back.
It became huge there.
The first person on his feet screaming was Justin Timberlake, Moby remembers.
(It now runs through the eighth grade.)
Blue Man Group was then valued at somewhat less than $100 million.
Frankel:It felt like we had a stepmom moving into the house, changing the furniture.
Willy Burkhardt, president, 201013:Theyd been doing the same thing for 20 years.
Chris and Phil hired me to become a change agent.
But one mistake we made is that I got deeply involved in the creative side of things.
Frankel:At one point, he wanted to put on the makeup.
I wanted to see how they instilled this ethos into a person.
But I never performed.
That wouldve been a disaster.
Frankel:Willy was very enthusiastic about the show, which was good.
But he also had his own ideas about how he wanted to do it.
Burkhardt:My two and a half years there were a failure.
(The defendants stated Pai was paid $100,000 to $200,000 a year in royalties.)
The case was settled for more than $3 million.
Pai:I think in later years, the show was trying to cut corners to be more profitable.
Theyre the founders, but they didnt do that all by themselves.
Pai:If it had been a five-year run, it would have been different.
But its gone on for 30 years.
Some contributions were not recognized as they should have been.
(Shows in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Berlin have also reopened.)
Many current crew members and performers have been with the production for a decade or more.
Goldman:I live directly over the theater, so I hear the show.
I put them in the balconys back row.
Wink:I was walking by the other day and heard a piece of music I didnt recognize.
I just sort of smiled.
Its not a blow to the ego that theyre able to do it without us.
Thats part of whats satisfying.
Day:give a shot to eat a Twinkie with all that.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
