www.forbes.com: Backstage, the Astor Place Theatre feels as much like a bodega as it does an arts venue. Twinkies, marshmallows, and Captain Crunch cereal boxes line the shelves, abutting reams of PVC tubing, buckets of neon paint, and varied tools of indeterminate purpose. It’s the kind of place Willy Wonka might call home, and not only because almost all of it is edible. Including the paint.
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The Blue Man Group was around long before me and I am absolutely convinced that they will be around long after. I am sure that in billions of years as the sun angrily engulfs the Earth the Blue Man Group will still be out there somehow somewhere in the cosmos, banging on those PVC pipes, splattering neon paint across the galaxy, and eating their set. In all seriousness though I am genuinely glad that they were picked up by Cirque De Soleil. It seems like the entire team associated with the Blue Man Group has a genuine love and passion for what they do and I it helps me sleep better at night knowing that entertainment hasn’t been homogenized yet, that there is still room out there for the bizarre and strange types of art that groups like this provide. And I am glad that they are finally going to get the infrastructure they need to propel themselves out past the heat death of the universe.
I’ve seen the Blue Man Group a few times before, and it is a fantastically entertaining production. Learning that nearly all the props used in the shows are edible made so much sense; I remember marveling at how almost every scene featured an element that eventually ended up in one of the Blue Man’s mouths, so this would definitely be a needed safety measure. Thus, the enormous fan base of the show was able to provide a financial crutch for production during the unpredictable circumstances of the pandemic. I also found the point made in the article that emphasized the global popularity of the Blue Man Group being partly due to the lack of a language barrier to be very interesting. On a similar note, the bizarreness of the show also makes any sort of cultural criticism rare as the performance contents do not even come close to referencing any in particular.
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