Blue Man Group at the Astor Place Theatre December 28
Checking Back
Blue Man Group Shows a Sense of Fun at Astor Place Theater
- Blue Man Group
- Off Broadway, Experimental (Incl. All Music Forms) , Experimental/Perf. Art , Play
- 1 hr. and 30 min.
- Open Run
- Astor Place Theater, 434 Lafayette St.
- 877-250-2929
The lights in the theater's entryway turn us all blue as soon as we walk through the door. That's kind of charming, and so is the ridiculously upbeat song playing on speakers in the lobby bathrooms. The main lyric is the word bathroom, over and over. And over.
But the first thing that really won me over at a performance by Blue Man Group at Astor Place Theater, the small Off Broadway space where the company has been performing since 1991, was the preshow announcement. It scrolls across an electronic screen, first revving up the audience with a little participatory silliness. Then, slyly, it extracts a pledge.
"Let's all say the following oath together. Ready, go," it urges in red LED letters, and the crowd, reading along, speaks as one: "I promise not to use electronic devices or luminescent products once the show starts."
An oath! Thank you, Blue Man!
The company may have a juvenile sense of fun — spectators in the first five rows wear rain ponchos to shield them from assorted wet and goopy substances that fly off the stage — but it's serious about creating an atmosphere. And, one can guess, about protecting the copyright of an act that long ago became a global brand.
In its youth, though, this cultural juggernaut was the marvelously odd, cobalt-colored child of the downtown experimental scene. For the first few years at Astor Place, the show's creators, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman, were the only Blue Men, and their work was dissected for its teasing art-world references. (That LED display? Probably a remnant of their early affection for riffing on Jenny Holzer signs.)
Like a lot of things with roots in the 1980s, Blue Man Group feels somewhat corporate now. What was fresh and audacious coming from young artists responding to the scene around them can seem cheerfully slick these days.
The show is updated regularly, but the strongest bits tend to be the oldest: when the Blue Men spatter canvases with bursts of pigment from their mouths; the gross-out sequence involving Twinkies and a volunteer; the use of Cap'n Crunch cereal as a percussion device. The bright sprays of paint they send into the air with each rapid beat on a drum will always be weirdly beautiful, partly thanks to the gorgeous lighting by Matthew McCarthy.
And the appealing peculiarity of these wordless, smooth-skulled creatures remains. Played by Mark Frankel, Brendan Dalton and Gideon Banner at the matinee I caught, the Blue Men are like benevolent aliens — perplexed, faintly anxious and deliriously fond of making both music and a mess.
But the performance is overly dependent on video, some of it shot live. Three giant iPhone-looking objects are lowered from the ceiling to serve as screens. The show calls them GiPads, and they are cheesy. So is a well-worn gag that purports to show us, via backstage video, an audience member being hung upside down and used to paint a canvas.
Whether you like the show's traditional manic ending — in which the Blue Men festoon the theater with rolls of white paper, essentially toilet-papering the house — is a matter of taste. I wasn't wild about having to disentangle myself when it was over, and I could have done without the huge wad of paper that fell on my head from the balcony. But that's just me.
"You've got it stuck on your feet," a woman said to her companion as they exited into the lobby. And honestly? She sounded pretty amused.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/theater/review-blue-man-group-shows-a-sense-of-fun-at-astor-place-theater.html