Charli xcx just unfollowed the Blue Man Group on Instagram. Don’t repeat her mistake.
My experience seeing bald men covered in sapphire greasepaint at the Miller Theater was, to say the least, life–changing.
Before the show begins, LED teleprompters light up with commands to guide the audience through a type of cultural prayer: “Congratulations on going viral / Don’t let it go to your head.” The crowd is excited to chant in unison all the way until the screens taunt them with “age doesn’t matter.” Surprisingly, no one is too enthused about yelling that one out into the theater.
The program is filled with bios that are written as if transcribed from someone with a dozen marshmallows in their mouth. Funny, because an uncanny reenactment of the Chubby Bunny challenge constitutes the first performance of the show. The blue men use their mouths to catch paint–filled balls lobbed at them, then squirt the contents at a canvas to let their artistic spit conjure the next Jackson Pollock painting. I have to give it to the blue men—they are quite skilled.
This type of tongue—or rather, marshmallow—in cheek spectacle sets the tone of the rest of the 90–minute program. They drum on PVC pipes for musical interludes and fill their absence of language with humorous physical absurdism. At the same time, tight rhythms fill the silence with something more primal, a sound felt in your ribs alongside the laser show burning your retinas. Slapstick in every sense.
Their pipe–slappage is accompanied by the show’s newly debuted character: the rockstar. She is neither blue nor a man, and this social exclusion is felt as she presides on scaffolding towering over the trio. It helps expand the acoustics—but the Blue Man Group is more than just a concert. It lives on the bones of obscure theater, and that pedigree demands more than an underdeveloped personage. I kept waiting for my questions to be answered: “Who is she? Where did she come from? Why is she there?” Even upon the final bow, my hunger for information goes unsatisfied. In a show so committed to its own internal logic, she remains an ellipsis the production never resolves.
Any hunger stewing in my stomach is replaced by repulsed lack of appetite during the visceral body horror that serves as the show’s throughline. If watching bald men regurgitate marshmallows from their throats doesn’t appeal to you, consider what happens when the direction reverses. Down the throat of an audience member goes a scope camera—or so it seemed—as the blue men stage a deepthroated endoscopy projected for the theater’s collective delight. We laugh, finding joy in the abject, growing giddy for whatever obscure scene might play out next—even if lacking the rockstar’s involvement.
Although, if you’ve ever been told that anxiety and excitement come from the same place as a means to calm your nerves, just know that equivalency goes both ways. I think I'm excited, but then, as those cobalt characters step off the stage, my quick–beating heart accompanies sweaty palms as they draw closer. Their wide eyes scan the audience like they are selecting the most perfect fruit to pluck from the vine.
The first victim: a mother of two. One of the blue men shimmies down the aisle, grabs her by the hands, and guides her back to the stage—all without uttering a single word. As we wait to see who was next, my boyfriend whispers in my ear the four scariest words I will ever hear: “Where’s the third one?”
Like the grim reaper waiting to receive a damned soul, that third blue man stands on the stage ready to greet the mother taken from the crowd. The first one brings the woman up to him, and the second brings a man as well. Like a reverse–implementation of gaydar, I feel my spidey senses tingling at the anticipation of a sexualized joke made between the two of them. And of course, this expectation is fulfilled as the blue–men–wing–men hand a weird telephone, flowers, then furry handcuffs between them before their marital parade towards the back of the theater. As champagne and tissues are handed out to the audience, the wedding march is complete, and everyone smiles cheesily.
The whole crowd unifies as everyone laughs—excluding perhaps the real spouses of those handcuffed lovers. The solidarity continues through the next music performance, complemented by guided dance moves. I look over at my boyfriend, who cracks a smile and follows the crowd. As I watch his hands move to the beat of the pipe, I can practically smell the Kool–Aid on his breath. And when an eagle graphic on the projected screens prompts someone to yell “GO BIRDS!” from the back of the theater, I knew: Philly hadn’t just come to see the Blue Man Group. We, as a city, brought them to us.
Then comes the consummation. The blue men take a man from the audience onto the stage. The camera zooms in close to his face, showcasing his perfect bone structure, as one of the men dons his skin with a blue smear. His blue fingertip caresses the man’s beautiful skin, and their eyes meet as my heart flutters. I would have been worried that my boyfriend was sitting right next to me as I was witnessing this if he wasn’t already watching with the same sensual thirst. We have unveiled our new desire: to be blue.
At this point, I genuinely can’t decide whether to use the tissue from earlier for my tears or cum.
But this is a short–lived want. We soon see the consequences of such a gift. That man, marked with lapis lazuli like a reenactment of the Lion King’s Circle of Life, is then pushed into a white hazmat suit and motorcycle helmet. These are all then painted blue while the rockstar watches, presides, observes over the chaos below. Then, the newly blue’d man is lifted by his feet like meat hanging in a butcher shop. He is pulled back before pendulum–swinging towards a blank canvas. His limp body hangs and then, with a second, more audible thwack, he ensures his corporeal stamp is legible in the obscure art.
I gasp. My boyfriend flinches. And even after they lower him down, I truly cannot describe the feeling that resides deep in my guts from this sight. Fear? Horror? Terror? Any of these would be apt descriptions for the trickery played on my innocent eyes. I started green, naive, expecting this performance to be nothing more than a jolly concert, but leave blue, traumatized, and mildly titillated.
When I go back to my friends, I am met with interrogations immediately: “How was it? What even is it? Who is the rockstar?” I find myself struck with the same silence that overtook my boyfriend every time the audience was prompted to chant—paralysis born between skepticism and surrender. But as I let myself embrace the blue, I feel something shift. I've grown to look back on that experience with an exceptionalism usually reserved for the birth of your child.
Instead of my son being born, my new mentality was—a fresh perspective on the obscurity of art and what will entertain a crowd. Turns out, mouth tricks and slapping on pipes may be plenty.
