Blued: Revue Review

The performance in Fayetteville of Blue Man Group filled my mind too full to write about immediately. A deadline would’ve been wonderful.

So now it’s time to free up to brain cavity. Past time. We saw the third of its eight shows at the Walton Arts Center, during the first week of September. The company — part of it, because it has permanent stages in five U.S. cities and a traveling international troupe — developed a “bus-and-truck” smaller-venue tour here, rehearsing through August at the WAC, under the direction of two of the three founding “blue men.”

Imagine: Blue Men walked among us at the Farmers Market, ate at our restaurants, and without the paint we did not know. It’s a large group, a full pop band backs them along with innumerable technicians and stagehands. Hope they enjoyed their sojourn.

Because I’d only seen them on TV and YouTube, all I knew was drumming, technobeat music and perhaps some clowning.

What one sees in person is surreal mime, a current manifestation and merger of several classic theatrical techniques, like Commedia dell’arte, Harlequin and Pantomime. And Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and improv of The Second City.

The blue fellows have a meal skit that could be straight from Chaplin’s The Little Tramp character. Two of them reprise Groucho and Harpo’s mirror scene in Duck Soup (a fake mirror is a longstanding gag, but down to the number of hops, is a Marx homage).

Parts of their show seem to be longstanding Blue Man Group pieces, like drumming with telescoping PVC plastic pipe and, famously, rhythmically splashing paint poured onto drum heads. New for this year was an extended series of skits mocking Apple’s keyboardless iPad computer. The Marx mirror send-up was part of this.

The meal scene, with props like Twinkies, a vacuum cleaner and hanging on the wall Andrew Wyeth’s famed Christina’s World, painting, used a female volunteer chosen from the audience. A male volunteer was chosen for a large wet-paint stunt. Given their skills, gullibility and timing, I suspected the audience members were plants and really part of the company. An usher confirmed that for me: The same woman and man had been selected the previous two shows.

The Wyeth, the Groucho, the harlequin — those make me sound like a cultural historian. Not close. These elements are just what flew through my mind sitting there in the dark. Of course I took notes. The journalist in me won’t let up. The child in me loves any kind of circus, like the Blue Man Group. The slightly older boy in the mirror, who religiously on Sunday mornings watched Camera Three and its successor CBS Sunday Morning lives on, too, and sees past the face and drum paint.

The thing I don’t understand is how appealing their bizarreness is. People increasingly clamor for “real,” thus the appeal of so-called reality shows and a decline in interest in fiction. But Blue Men have been clowning and hitting drums for 23 years. They don’t speak. Their acts are not particularly sequential. If their routines were just slightly less accessible, they’d be abstract”performance art” funded by grants not tickets.

I’d buy tickets for them again. Perhaps next fall in Fayetteville, if they’ll give my town a fresh coat of blue?