JADAR

★★★☆☆

Blue Man Group has to be one of the most bizarre entertainment sensations out there, with the titular characters’ creepy, deep blue faces, facial expressions that lie in between petrified and bewildered, and entertaining and wacky drum routines. Their act combines strange comedy sketches and audience participation segments with drumming sessions of varying intensity and LOTS of paint. I almost watched them years back in Orlando but didn’t get the chance, making this my first, highly anticipated Blue Man Group experience. The pressure was on, but did I go home feeling blue?

The group were founded in 1988 in New York by Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink, and their legacy continues to draw audiences across the world. This latest show is Bluevolution World Tour, which is touring the UK and Europe. New to the show is the “Rockstar” character who often aids the group’s musical discoveries from the back, before taking centre-stage in the finale.

The trio themselves are confused blue men with no backstory or origin. Their bewilderment with new objects, food, paint, physics and drums pave the way for most of the comedy as they make mistakes, try out new inventions and tricks, investigate an audience that seems completely alien to them, and cautiously explore every new thing they see. Some parts even resemble social satire, with their approach to the expensive nature of art, although I’m not entirely sure the naive characters themselves understand their own jokes!

The performance starts with odd gibberish theatre rules on the screens, a tell-tale sign of the weirdness to come… but a little weird is always a good thing!

Like The Book of Mormon, this is one of those shows most audience members will either love or find mildly amusing. I sit somewhere between these positions, having loved the style of their drumming segments mixed with those confused glances, rock concert lighting, trippy videos, and splattered glow-in-the-dark paint (beware the splatter if you’re in the “poncho rows”!), but finding the comedy a little less spectacular towards the end.

Some moments are a true visual phenomenon with their vivid colours, tubular light streams, and engaging rhythms. The group even mixed in a rock concert vibe, creating visual and audio prompts to get the audience dancing along with them and entering the audience to hurtle streamers across the stalls (these ended up hilariously entangled in the lights and all over the audience).

Their almost alien physicality and the novelty of the blue painted trio is bizarrely endearing, especially in their interactions with each other – throwing paint, playing the wrong notes on a xylophone-like piping rig, “shaming” late-comers with a song and spotlight, or performing the most impressive “chubby bunny” challenge I’ve ever seen.

Other segments included a mobile phone and solitaire game, playing a detachable pipe drum, the mistaken purchase of Cap’N’Crunch cereal (and getting plastered in the food, mouth dribbling as bits of cereal slowly drop down), whipping lightsaber-esque rods around, directing some rather reluctant audience members with glowsticks, seeing inside some guy’s throat (thanks for that image), and more very, very weird moments related to art, music, technology and entertainment. 

The current anonymous Blue Man Group members do a phenomenal job at maintaining their twitchy, childish personalities. Their eccentric eye movements and flinchy responses to noises, audience members, objects and more are amusing and remain the biggest novelty of the show – well, aside from the fact that they are bald blue men dancing, drumming, and painting everything they see.

While some of the comedy might not be my cup of tea (despite having a rather silly comedy taste), their performances were commendable, and I’ll never know how they remained so composed and in-character without even a slight grin or chuckle throughout the entire show.

On the other hand, the show sometimes felt a little aimless, with segments never really linking to one distinguishable theme, therefore feeling a little jarring, bewildering and repetitive. Many of the comedy stunts worked incredibly well, such as the marshmallow and gumball catching (later repeated with an audience member’s Toblerone before its mushed-up contents were spat back into the poor guy’s hand), the awkward romance, or the dangling man’s full-body painting.

But often times, these moments outstayed their welcome. While the uncomfortable silence plays into the bizarre boggly-eyed, child-like curiosity of the Blue Man Group’s act, by the third time they enter the audience and stare at them before picking their next victims, it starts to drag slightly, as if stalling for time or relying too heavily on the strange novelty of earless and silent blue men before their impressively big finale.

Some of the segments ultimately felt just a little too weird or off-topic for me. From what I’ve heard, some of these tricks are Blue Man Group staples, but by the end, I was left craving more of their intense drumming sessions and the more charming antics that came from them in the final part of the show.

That intriguing combination of lighting, computer visuals of their eyes and illusions, paint splatters, blacklight, and so much more was incredible, and I honestly wish that more of the performance went along these lines, with slightly shorter jokes in between a more rigid structure – and maybe a smidge less reliance on audience members who sometimes killed the joke by refusing to get involved. Saying that, they are an alien-like group so perhaps a strict routine isn’t 100% necessary. 

Overall, the novelty of the trio’s antics and the visual and audio spectacle they create is undeniably an incredible experience, sometimes slowed by the audience wandering or jokes that linger a little too long for comfort, and other times leaving the whole audience belly-laughing.

The show has always leaned into and advertised their messy drumming and colourful lighting; I just wish a little more emphasis was placed on these moments, with a slightly smaller sprinkling of their playful personalities in between, rather than full segments that veer away so much – perhaps finding more ways to add drumming into these segments (rather than the bizarre crunching and whirring sound effects in the weirder segments).

A touch more of that eccentric rock spectacle and little less wandering and aimlessness towards the start by embedding them into the bigger concert moments or having smaller comedy bits linking from their new discoveries would just heighten the experience that bit more.

Blue Man Group – Bluevolution World Tour runs at The Lowry (Lyric Theatre) until October 6 and tours the UK until October 20.

Photo: Blue Man Group