When Blue Man Group debuted downtown in 1991, no one could have predicted that its offbeat performance art would grow into the multimedia phenomenon it is today.
After all, the show consists of curious-looking bald men wearing dark clothes and blue face paint, playing percussive instruments of their own invention and throwing in a little vaudeville on occasion.
It’s not the kind of event that screams crossover appeal.
But crossing over is just what Blue Man Group, now in its 10th year at Astor Place Theater on Lafayette Street, has accomplished. The production is now national – playing in Las Vegas, Boston and Chicago – and boasts 30 Blue men and 400 staff members in all.
The group has also branched out into TV, making four well-received ads for computer-chip maker Intel and appearing on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” eight times. It’s even released a successful CD, “Audio,” that showcased original music – avant-garde percussion, for lack of a better description – by Blue Man.
“For the creators of the show, it’s essential that the viewer have a community experience with the characters,” says Laura Camien, assistant press and marketing director of Blue Man Group.
“I think the pushing through of that desire is why their television spots and their music album have been as successful as their theater performances,” she said.
But the most shocking achievement of all for these performers – whose stage routine includes indulging in a Twinkie banquet, after which they squirt the cream from their stomachs – is a feature in Forbes magazine this March. The buttoned-down business publication profiles Blue Man Group in its “celebrity issue.”
That’s a long way from the scrappy East Village origins of Blue Man Group and its creators, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman, who started out performing in blue face paint on the streets of New York and in small Village venues in the late ’80s.
“Baby steps,” says Blue Man Group press director Manny Igrejias of the show’s approach to expansion. “Everybody is always telling us where we should expand to next and what philosophy we should undertake. We’ve just taken our own path.”
The same penchant for individuality is true in the group’s choice of musical instruments. Rather than use a basic guitar or drum set, Blue Man Group plays less conventional music makers, some of which the performers fashioned themselves.
The Hungarian cimbalom is a set of strings banged on with drumsticks; there are three kinds of “airpoles,” which, when waved, make a “swoosh” sound; and PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipes are struck with homemade foam-rubber paddles.
“They just approach every medium as a creative opportunity,” says Camien.
That would include the mediums of advertising and marketing.
To publicize their shows at Chicago’s Briar Street Theater, the group ran a huge poster campaign advertising a variety of nonexistent events at the theater. The punch line: Those shows would open when Blue Man Group closed at that same theater.
So what’s next for this off-Broadway powerhouse?
Europe is a possibility, although nothing has been set up yet. (See http://www.blueman.com for more information.)
One thing is assured, however: Wherever Blue Man ends up next, you can bet the troupe will be raking in the green.