Blue Man empire
The Blue Man Group began as do-it-yourself performance art on the streets and at small experimental theaters in New York’s Greenwich Village; it has become an international industry.
Most nights of the week there are Blue Man performances taking place at dedicated theaters in six cities around the world: Berlin, Boston, New York, Orlando, Chicago and Las Vegas. (The Tokyo theater is on hiatus.)
There also is a touring company, which will perform at the Fox Theatre, as well as Blue Man Group performances aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line ship Epic.
About 6o performers have trained to become Blue Men, and most of them are still performing, including co-founder Phil Stanton, who performs occasionally. However, Stanton, 53, spends most of his time writing, art directing and managing the business. “I’m not too old yet,” he said. “It remains to be seen how old a Blue Man can be.”
The Blue Man Group. 8 p.m. Jan. 15-18; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Jan. 19; 1:30 p.m. Jan. 20. $34-$66.60. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree Street N.E., Atlanta. 855-285-8499, www.foxtheatre.org.
The performers in the Blue Man Group, who bring their hairless, earless profiles and cobalt tint to the Fox Theatre for seven performances beginning Jan. 15, look like they hail from a distant galaxy.
It turns out the group has roots much closer to the Peach State.
Phil Stanton, a co-founder of the group, grew up in Savannah, the son of an Assemblies of God preacher.
And while Blue Man performances are strange (in a food-throwing, paint-spewing way), the path that led a charismatic preacher’s son to become co-creator of a multinational theatrical empire is much stranger still.
The commonality between those two worlds, Stanton said, is a love of celebration, community and making things.
“My father was a minister, but he was also a builder,” Stanton, 53, said in an interview from the group’s offices in New York City. “There are 10 or 11 churches around the country that he actually built, 10-sided decagon-shaped structures.”
Stanton traces his love of craft to his father’s example. In the Blue Man Group’s early days, Stanton and co-founders Matt Goldman and Chris Wink built all their own props and sets and fashioned their own musical instruments out of PVC pipe.
Stanton’s time spent working in a hardware store was also an asset. “I learned a little bit about plumbing back then, about pipe nomenclature and all, and that came in handy.”
What Stanton also inherited from his father was a quality harder to define — the desire to do something that connected people with each other and with their own essential humanity. Today, Stanton is not religious “in the conventional sense,” but he wants visitors to a Blue Man show to get what he used to get from the Pentecostal services at Bacon Park Assembly of God.
“Even though they might be silly, the Blue Man shows, by the end, have a communal feel to them, kind of like the communities that are forged in the churches I grew up in,” he said. “A sense that you’re all there together, that you’re not alone.”
It seems a stretch, but nothing about the Blue Man phenomenon follows a logical pattern. This is, after all, an avant-garde street theater group that has become a multimillion-dollar business, with Blue Man-dedicated theaters in six cities and a Blue Man show going on in multiple places almost every night.
Even Sundays.
That’s a switch for Stanton, who grew up forsaking secular activities on the Lord’s day. To be sure, it was usually an exciting day. Assemblies of God services are known for faith-healing, speaking in tongues and what Stanton calls “a demonstrative, celebratory experience.”
But there were some sacrifices.
“The only thing I’m bitter about, to this day, is I never got to watch ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’ on Sunday nights,” he said.
Stanton studied theater at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., and directed a children’s theater group before moving to Manhattan in the late 1980s. He met Wink at his first New York job as a waiter at Glorious Foods, and Wink introduced him to childhood friend Goldman.
Performance art in those days centered on the angry political monologue. Stanton, Wink and Goldman went in the opposite direction, with a show featuring three silent innocents struggling to deal with a bewildering world.
“We wanted to make ourselves laugh and entertain people,” Stanton said.
As the trio added shows in other cities, they began to train additional Blue Men, creating a rigorous six-week course of study. There are now about 60 Blue Men appearing in shows around the world, plus dozens of musicians and countless technicians.
CNN Money estimated the enterprise brings in $3.54 million in revenue each week, if the shows sell out.
Stanton won’t be among the performers appearing at the Fox this month. He spends most of his time managing the company and planning shows, and slaps on the greasepaint only for special occasions. One of those occasions was a recent fund-raiser for the independent private elementary school founded by the group, the Blue School.
Although the Blue Man Group has grown beyond his imaginings — and the old days of buddies building things together and performing for free are long gone — “it still feels like a bunch of friends doing it,” Stanton said. “It feels like a very gradual, organic growth. I don’t have any laments for the old days.”
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