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Celebrating 30 Years and 16,000 Performances Backstage at BLUE MAN GROUP!
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Oct 26, 2022
Blue Man Group, the critically hailed theatrical phenomenon with an open run at New York City's Astor Place Theatre, celebrates 30 years of living in full color with a variety of festivities and special offers planned throughout the month of November including its 16,000th performance at Astor Place Theatre today, November 7 and special birthday performances during the week of November 15.
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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The phenomenon known as Blue Man Group, which has been seen by over 35 million people in over 25 countries
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is back doing live shows here at their New York home, the Asher Place Theatre
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and I'm about to chat with some of the Blue Man family. Wes, this is so great to be standing here on this stage at the Astor Place
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I mean, I see you still got some blue on, right? I do, I do. It's not always the easiest thing to get off
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And at the end of the night, you get tired of scrubbing your face. And you're like, you know what? It's going to be back there on the next night, so let's just keep it
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Okay. So I've spoken to many of the Elphabas. So it's like you were blue first before the ladies went green
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How long does it take you? Like, you've been with the show for how long first? 24 years
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That's a long time. And I've got it down to a science. So usually, you know, if we're in a pinch and I need to be ready really quick
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I can get ready in probably 15 minutes. But on the whole, it takes us about 30 minutes. You know, we first put on, it's a really fun process
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You put on a bald cap and you put the blue all over your face and you sort of see your distinguishing features disappear
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and you sort of see yourself kind of become a blue man right before your very eyes
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It's a lot of fun. So has the amount of time to become blue changed over those many years
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Oh, yes, yes. Started out, you know, taking about an hour, and now I've got it down to about 15 minutes
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Okay, so when do you start to see the blue man creeping around the corner? Like when you're putting your, you know..
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Yeah, well, sometimes I have a lot of fun with it. Sometimes I'll just cover half of my face
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And then you have like, you know, a Harvey two-faced, a blue man two-faced. It's really fun
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And yeah, sometimes I'll just do like a blue mustache and just do a go-to to start off with
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And as you go, you know, about three quarters of the way through, you start to really see the blue man come through
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I love that. So how excited are you? You're back. My performance is here at the Astro Place
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I mean, what do you remember about that first performance backstage? Backstage first and onstage after the pandemic
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I remember the last stage, the last show before the pandemic. We really didn't know how long it was going to last
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And we thought, oh, this is going to be two weeks. And two weeks became three months. And now here we are 18 months later
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And it's really refreshing to see live theater return again to New York City. It's great to see people's faces, you know, laughing and having a good time watching
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live actors up there doing their thing. It's great. How did you stay creative during the pandemic
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You didn't paint yourself blue at home, or did you? No, I didn't paint myself blue
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Painted friends? Painted friends, yes. I enjoyed, you know, I missed getting messy
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I missed sharing color. I missed painting. I missed just bringing joy
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So I started painting in my shed, my lawn shed, and started making spin paintings and selling them to fans
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and just did what I could. I got creative. Because you have a really great website
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I was telling you right before we started. I mean, his paintings are amazing. Thank you. I mean, so you did that during the pandemic
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I did. I did. I cleared out, you know, my lawn gear and my shed and set up
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I just wanted to get in touch with being creative again. So I just came up with a creative space
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And I was really inspired by an artist that I saw online making spin paintings. So I started doing likewise, sharing art, sharing color, and sharing joy
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You sort of learned that art here at Blue Man, right? Spin painting
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Absolutely, yes, absolutely. I got my start here at Blue Man Group. We make a spin painting on the show
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And it's really beautiful to see the Blue Man hit the drums and see the paint fly off in the air and it's wonderful
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You never saw Blue Man before you auditioned did you I did not I was fresh out of college and I came in to audition and it is a lot of fun You have a blast when you audition for the show
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They have you first check to see where you're at with your drumming. Can you keep a rhythm
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And then they have you do some storytelling, and they want to see how alive your eyes are
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You know, Blue Man acting is all about expressing yourself with your eyes. The eyes are kind of the windows to the soul, and whatever the eyes focus on is what the
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crowd focuses on and it's what's it's what's important so um yeah you have to kind of master
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the technique of uh being expressive with the top half of your face and your eyes and um and you have
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to be rhythmically inclined and know your way about a stage you know what's also great about
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blue man is you're introducing young kids or anybody of any age maybe seeing theater for the
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very first time and they're like, oh, this is what this world is like
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That must make you feel so great. It is great. It's great to know that, you know, you're standing up there before someone who's influenced by
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what we're doing and to show them like, you know, and to show them that the stage is yours
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The stage is yours to do whatever you want with and to go and do likewise
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You know, Blue Man is about following your bliss. It's about following your creative impulses
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And it's about, you know, finding your individualism. There's a lot of paint used in the show
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every night, right? Do you know how much paint do you use? If I had to
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it's so hard to guess. If I had to guess, I would say we'd probably go through probably at least a gallon of paint every night
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Some of the paint is less thick than the others. Like when we put the paint on the drums
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it's water-based. So, you know, it's very translucent and it can reflect the light
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that's coming up underneath. And then there's the drumsticks. And then there's the drumsticks
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Yeah, the drumsticks are colored and they have UV lights underneath so you can see sort of like a tracer
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when the drummer's playing. It's really beautiful. Very colorful. And a lot of those break a lot too, don't they
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They sure do, yeah. The drummer's up there going to town, you know, he's hitting as hard as he can and yeah
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we have a lot of broken drumsticks. We're standing here on the stage at Astro Falls
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You've started live performances all over again. What does it all mean to you just to be black again
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Oh, it's a dream come true. It really is a dream come true
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Yes! I'm playing Blue Man. Yes he is! This is fabulous, I love this
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You wear lots of hats at Blue Man, so how many hats do you wear
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Well, for the bulk of my time here, and I have been with the company collectively about 18 years
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I was in charge of casting and training, so the director of casting and training
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and training. So all of the blue men that have run through the system I found, I helped train
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I know them really well. I mean the process is very much like going to school for eight weeks
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So you get to know people very well. It's a very intimate experience. And then I moved into a
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position of being the head of artistic direction, which is also a really small group of people that
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have been here for a very, very long time. And then recently as also part of the general management
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the team here at the Astor Place Theater to help the show reopen. So those are kind of the three
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hats. They're big ones. Those are big hats. Okay, let's talk about casting. So talking to Wes
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I'm fascinated about the process. I'm sure it's changed over the years, but like, how does someone
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audition to become a blue man? And what do you look for? Basically, what we do is we take people
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in a group setting So it a very unusual audition process because most of the time course it just we looking at you but we actually looking at you and how you respond and interact with the other like six or seven guys or occasionally we will have also other people not just men audition and how you can tell
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a story non-vergly and kind of also just be. I think that would be the simplest way to put it
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Have a little sparkle in your eye. I want to know what you're thinking. You know, that's kind of the
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fundamental thing that we're looking for is that ability to invite you in to invite the audience
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in to your thoughts because our founders were here earlier today on the stage and and they said
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something so amazing which is which is a particular way of putting it is the audience authors a lot of
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what is happening in the blue man's head and that's what we want is we want to be like what
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are they thinking what are they thinking so that's the first step of the process and if we see that
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Then we bring you into more of a workshop where there's experimental sort of trio work and storytelling and more things that we get to see
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And then sort of music has become a thing that we feel really confident we can teach most people
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So we don't start there. Now that's really flipped on its head from when I started at Blue Man
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It used to be, can that person drum? Can they keep time? And then it would go into that next phase
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And we, as of around, you know, 2010, we sort of flipped that on its head and started looking more for the person first and the musician later
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Why do you think it's such universally loved, the show? I, it's, it is impossible to, I mean, it is one of the things that I think about so much because when I saw the show for the first time, I think in 95, I had just graduated from college in Kansas
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I was like, what is this thing? And I understood where it was coming from in terms of like La Bama and downtown and, you know, all of these sort of like avant-garde places
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And to see now that it does have this appeal, which is incredibly wide and can really, I mean, it's rare that you get someone who doesn't enjoy Blue Man Group
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And to think about where that started, I don't know. I don't know what that formula is
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I don't think any of us do truly understand it, you know? Do you ever play this
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A little bit. A little bit. Like a while ago. I can't
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I mean, I learned the left part, which is sort of the easier drumming part or the easier
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PVC part. But that was probably in like 2012. I haven't done it since
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But you know what to look for for people to be cast in this, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm tempting you to go blue
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No. No, no, no. Can't do it. I want to go back behind that curtain
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What's back there? So back there is some of the secrets, actually
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So, yeah, we can... So Broadway World, here are some secrets for Blue Man. Here we go
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We don't have a whole lot of space. Yeah, no, totally. Everything is very..
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So we have an economy of storage. Oh, this is beautiful. Behind the scenes, here we go
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This is the video station here. Here we have the drum bone, it's an instrument that gets played during the show
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And then we have some props that get used during the show hanging back here as storage
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They are usually set in various places on stage before we start the show
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Part of my job is to make sure they're here. Where they're supposed to be before we start the show
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We actually, the show updates occasionally, and so this is actually a remnant of something
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that is no longer in the show after a couple weeks. we put something else in the show instead um and so those props are hanging in other places he also got the tape on in case someone doesn bump into it Right exactly Now that it sits here It so new that we haven gotten this thing removed yet
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This is great. So here for the drum bone are the sticks
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So these are what they use and we see that, you know, for those that like to have a little bit more grip
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we've got some grip tape. For those that like to have a, you know, more gentle feel
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they'll use these other six. What's this? These are all my back stations
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And they're for specific roles. So this will be where the guy who's generally on stage right
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will have his touch-ups happen. And then left and center over there
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we do have a big green trash can. That's a secret, right
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I mean, it's a thing that we turn into an instrument and a prop during the show
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So there tends to be a lot of that finding musical or unconventional ways to use things that otherwise look pretty mundane
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And then over here. Right. Over here we have our different types of paint drumsticks and Doppler drumsticks
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Some of them are allowed. Well, so we have a differentiation between which ones have been used, the wet sticks, and which ones are dry, the dry sticks
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And we try not to get the dry sticks wet unless we have to, obviously
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And then we have our scrim drumming sticks, which is for the very top of the show when they're actually playing in shadow
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And then the Doppler drumsticks, which add some accents during the big musical number climb
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Now, a lot of these break, don't they? There's a lot of drumstick breakage at Blue Man
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So, yeah, the thing about their drumming is that it's not subtle. It's not jazz. There's no brushes
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And they really go for it. So there's plenty. Yeah, we go through some sticks
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A lot of paint and a lot of drumsticks. A lot of paint, a lot of drumsticks, definitely
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I'm fascinated by that instrument. Yes, yes. So that's not the shape that it's normally in
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And it starts out in two pieces. One of them is on stage
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and it looks like it's part of the PVC instrument. And it gets discovered
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And the other piece gets brought out right after we talk about plumbing getting back done
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So we leave the audience's imagination to what might happen once we disturb that plumbing
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And then it gets assembled on stage during the musical piece. It's called the drum bone because it acts like a drum because you hit it
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and a trombone because there's sliders. I love how many instruments Blue Man has come up with. Yeah
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I mean, that's the point of finding the musical, the joy, the unconventional in things that
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are otherwise pretty simple. One of the things that draws me to the show is that it can be enjoyed on so many different levels
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If you want to look at it as just a rock show and just come for the music and the paint and
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the drumsticks, that's there for you in abundance. But if you want to come and also get a little bit of commentary about technology and art and, you know, connection and how, you know, how we're doing as people like communicating with each other as observed, you know, by these three aliens, like that's also there for you
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Yeah. You know, you can be as deep with it as you want to
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But and it's fun regardless. We're thrilled you're back. Thank you so much for doing this today
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Really great. Welcome back
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