Why it’s more ‘Blue’ in the Philippines

A tickertape overhead announces which famous people are in the audience, who’s celebrating a birthday, who in particular has a headache, who is “of no particular distinction.”

By the end of the show, people are on their feet, wrapped in neon streamers and batting huge blue beach balls around the Solaire Theatre.

Yes. The Blue Man Group is in town.

“What does it all mean?” my teen daughter asked at one point, as three men in blue makeup took turns catching and throwing colored marshmallows into one another’s mouths, only to chew and spit them out on rotating canvases to display before a puzzled audience.

It means: The Blue Man Group is in town.

Hard to believe that this trio of mime and dada-influenced entertainers has spread to dozens of countries over a quarter century. That’s right: 25 years of being blue. In that time, they’re done top-selling rock concert tours, appeared on The Tonight Show a record number of times, and become a true pop cultural phenomenon, popping up on everything from The Simpsons to Arrested Development.

Hard to believe, too, that this is the first time Manilans have experienced the show on its own shores (thanks to Concertus Manila), a production that has lit up Broadway, Vegas, Berlin, Tokyo and other world cities for two and a half decades. The local campaign was already afoot on social media weeks ago with short videos of blue-faced dudes interacting with Filipinos on LRTs, streets, malls and sidewalks. (#Bluemangroupmanila, in case you’re searching or posting.)

So is it the original three dudes up there onstage? Nope. Just as we’re used to KISS and the Rolling Stones changing out older members to ensure a longer road life, Blue Man Group is no longer performed by show creators Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman — the guys who developed the act in New York’s Lower East Side in the early ‘90s and went on to turn a simple, irresistible idea into a global hit. In fact, they’ve become global enough to launch their own Blue School to train future Blue Men for the world’s stages, as well as a Blue Man Productions house to churn out various multimedia versions of the show.

The core remains the same though: three silent men interacting in baffling ways, laced with humor, sly wit and a bit of audience participation. It’s a solid 90-minute stew of skits and vignettes, retaining the early bits that have been crowd-pleasers all these years — the paint-splattering drummers, the rotating marshmallow canvases, the PVC tube music ensembles and fun interaction time with audience members — but they’ve also updated the show to take a skewed view of social media, cellphone apps, the Internet and rock concert etiquette. (In fact, the insertion of a “selfie” segment in the middle of the show makes it unclear just how much picture-taking is actually tolerated during Blue Man Group performances. A lot of cameras were popping on the sly during opening night.)

All of these new vignettes are meant to keep the show fresh, but also help seal its connection to a rock concert-type experience. When we first saw the show in New York circa 1993, it was a much smaller stage, no rock band inhabited a second level, no world-class production lights or sound as with Solaire. The explosive finale music was KLF, to give you an idea how much times have changed.

Even with all that blue makeup, it’s no easy feat to replicate the subtle non-speaking emoji shadings that cross the faces of the actors onstage. They’re like silent film comedians, only Smurf-colored, trading double takes and pregnant pauses. The audience is quickly drawn into a rhapsody in blue.

The other one that got my daughter scratching her head was the “dining out” skit. A female audience member is led onstage adorned with a Kevlar-like vest, presumably to avoid getting spattered (audience members in the first five rows are given plastic raincoats to avoid explosions of paint, food and other wet items). She sits with the three at a dining table and the makings of a romantic evening begin: a candle is lit (and immediately snuffed out by a Blue Man with a fire extinguisher); a vase of flowers is installed; an old-style boombox is hauled out to play various songs, to various bursts of collective head-nodding (the audience member at this point is awkward and laughing). A feast of Twinkies begins, resulting in shared plastic forks and mashed spongecake bits, and finally, an unfortunate explosion of Twinkie goo à la Alien that freaks out the audience member.

What’s it all about? To Blue Man Group’s founders, it’s about creative fun, coming up with new routines while still playing off the crowd’s demand for “the classic hits.” With a name meant to rhyme with “human,” the genius of Blue Man Group, even if you’ve seen it before, is that you can read anything you want into their show. Without a single word of dialogue, it’s all about the audience reaction. Is it a commentary on race relations? Is their baffling blueness an ode to otherness and being yourself, whatever lifestyle or gender choice? Is it a commentary on Red States versus Blue States in the US electoral map? The Blue Man Group, typically, remains mum.

By the end, we are awash in confetti, neon streamers, huge beach balls and toilet paper rolls launched into the crowd as the spectacle transforms us into rock concert fans. As the Blue Man Group demurely bow and leave the stage, an announcer politely asks us to “please return the Blue Man Group’s balls to the stage.” We politely do so.

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Blue Man Group performs at Theatre at Solaire until Sept. 25. Visit concertusmanila.com and ticketworld.com for tickets and show information.