Blue Man Group
With flying colors
May 16, 2006
In the beginning -- 1988 to be precise -- nine men and women donned bald wigs, painted their heads blue and did something to the annoying decade of the '80s that other people only dreamed about: They buried it. They typed up a press release announcing "a funeral for the '80s" and carried a coffin full of symbolic items such as a Rambo doll and a yuppie effigy to New York's Central Park, where they burned them in a barrel. MTV's Kurt Loder showed up with a cameraman in tow, and through the miracles of fast cutting and a slow news day (it was Memorial Day weekend), the Blue Man Group's first public engagement was seen nationwide the following day.
"They took what was basically one of the lamest events of the modern age and added a voice-over that said, 'If you're tired of the '80s, it's OK because they're over according to the Blue Man Group,'" recalls Matt Goldman, one of the group's three founders. "There was this bombastic statement and quick-cut editing, and all of a sudden, you feel as though you've missed something incredible. And that was a lesson."
Blue Man Group has since mushroomed into a critically acclaimed entertainment juggernaut of award-winning multimedia theatrical shows, concerts, DVDs, movie soundtracks and commercials, not to mention a Grammy-winning CD that went gold. So far, the group's empire employs 500 people spanning two continents, and though the company doesn't release financial figures, Forbes Small Business estimated in 2003 that Blue Man Group's first four resident shows alone would have brought in $1.4 million a week -- and that was before permanent shows opened in Berlin, London and Toronto. (Japan is on the horizon.)
Last fall, the outfit's Las Vegas troupe ended a five-year run at the Luxor Hotel and moved to a new 1,750-seat theater at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, which spent $25 million on the venue, custom building it to the Blue Man Group's specifications. The younger crowd the show draws is helping to keep all the hotel's gaming tables open four hours longer, until 6 a.m., according to Venetian president and chief operating officer Robert Goldstein. "It adds a great energy to the building, and we're enthused about it," he says.
Now, that dour 1988 procession in Central Park seems like a mere footnote, but it contains the seeds of Blue Man Group Prods.' unusual success story. The blue men might have rebelled against the commodification of that decade's art world, but they never romanticized starving artists or divorced themselves from the almighty dollar. They cast themselves as artist-businessmen, but instead of turning art into commerce, they turned commerce into art, creating commercial work with aspirations to the same high artistic standards as their shows.
"Almost the first time we got bald and blue, we realized there's something very special here," says Goldman, 45. "This is going to sound weird, but after the first couple of times we got bald and blue, we were feeling that we could be creating in this medium of bald and blue forever."
At the time, Goldman, a software designer with a Master of Business Administration degree from Clark University, was living in Manhattan with his high school friend, Chris Wink, then a self-proclaimed "lost soul" and drummer. Wink met their third roommate, actor Phil Stanton, while both were working as waiters for a New York caterer. The idea for a bald and blue character flashed through their minds during a ride on a city bus.
"We watched a bunch of punk rockers with colored, spiked Mohawks and 50 safety pins through the cheek," Goldman says. "They walked right by three or four Wall Street guys in the most expensive Armani suits, and no one blinked an eye. It was a profound moment. If the imagery of those two different kinds of people doesn't even warrant a moment's notice, what possibly can today? Someone who's bald and blue with no ears."
Blue Man Group began appearing in edgy performance spaces in the East Village. Wink, 45, had studied drumming as an ethnomusicology student at Wesleyan University, and the group relished the primal energy unleashed by the instrument. They also liked creating their own instruments, which fit their nonexistent budget. Stanton, whose father was a builder, cobbled them together from cut-up washing machines and PVC piping they found on Canal Street. In the shows, the blue men take apart the tube instruments that have become their signature and put them back together, using them to make music and project sound.
"It's the old thing like when you're a kid and put cups together with a string," says Stanton, 46. "We thought these were interesting metaphors. The tube is a really old structure, but it's made with high-tech materials. We wanted to use it as a device for communication."
The Blue Man Group began traveling the performance-art circuit, but the original members never felt quite at home there. Art was a component of their exuberant show, but so were music, science and humor. Vaudeville -- albeit a modern form of it -- seemed a better fit. Goldman recalls watching an interview with old vaudevillians. "One of them said, 'If you're in vaudeville, you've got to open a show doing something no one in the audience can do,'" he says. "Back then, they were talking about juggling or sword swallowing or spinning plates. We decided to catch things in our mouth."
They opened their first permanent show at New York's 299-seat Astor Place Theatre in late 1991. Thanks largely to word of mouth, shows began selling out, but the trio became victims of their own success. With no understudies, they performed 1,285 consecutive shows over the next three years.
To finance the show, the founding members signed a three-year deal with outside producers, but they quickly ran into conflicts over costs. At one point, the producers decided that such expenses as the weekly $880 spent on Jell-O (a prop in the performances) was excessive and cut the money from the budget. Before long, a legal tussle ensued over the rights to the production, but the matter was ultimately settled out of court, with the blue men winning back full ownership of the company and learning a powerful lesson in the process.
"We didn't sell our souls to the devil," Goldman says. "We just leased ourselves to the devil."
As a private company, Blue Man Group Prods. has been able to control the pace of growth, cultivate an egalitarian work culture and reinvest a higher-than-usual percentage of profits back into R&D. The founders opened a second show in Boston in 1995 and handed over the stage to an expanding troupe of blue men, who now number about 60. Three full-time casting directors hold casting calls around the country to screen up to 3,000 people a year in a search for the dozen or so who will qualify for the troupe's two-month training program.
Offstage, the company recently started the Blue Man Group Creativity Center to teach children of all ages how to be imaginative in an educational setting. In late summer, there are plans to launch "Blue Man Group Making Waves," a traveling exhibit on sound waves and light waves sponsored by JBL Audio at the Boston Children's Museum. Kids will be able to make blue man-style sound waves themselves with a new line of toys inspired by the PVC-tube instruments and other contraptions used in the show. The Los Angeles-based company ToyQuest collaborated with Blue Man Group to produce four instruments, two of which will launch in July: an $80 keyboard-pipe hybrid and a $70 pipe-heavy percussion instrument that makes sound without being touched using proximity-sensor technology.
For grown-ups, Blue Man Group plans "counter-training for modern life for people who've become overly adultified," as Wink puts it. The founders are formulating corporate workshops using acting techniques to teach people how to cooperate with each other in the workplace. In the end, he says, collaboration has been the secret to the group's own success.
"We found we were able to reach beyond anything we would have been able to do separately by teaming up, subjugating the ego, listening and cooperating," Wink says. "It's an amazingly powerful thing."
"They took what was basically one of the lamest events of the modern age and added a voice-over that said, 'If you're tired of the '80s, it's OK because they're over according to the Blue Man Group,'" recalls Matt Goldman, one of the group's three founders. "There was this bombastic statement and quick-cut editing, and all of a sudden, you feel as though you've missed something incredible. And that was a lesson."
Blue Man Group has since mushroomed into a critically acclaimed entertainment juggernaut of award-winning multimedia theatrical shows, concerts, DVDs, movie soundtracks and commercials, not to mention a Grammy-winning CD that went gold. So far, the group's empire employs 500 people spanning two continents, and though the company doesn't release financial figures, Forbes Small Business estimated in 2003 that Blue Man Group's first four resident shows alone would have brought in $1.4 million a week -- and that was before permanent shows opened in Berlin, London and Toronto. (Japan is on the horizon.)
Last fall, the outfit's Las Vegas troupe ended a five-year run at the Luxor Hotel and moved to a new 1,750-seat theater at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, which spent $25 million on the venue, custom building it to the Blue Man Group's specifications. The younger crowd the show draws is helping to keep all the hotel's gaming tables open four hours longer, until 6 a.m., according to Venetian president and chief operating officer Robert Goldstein. "It adds a great energy to the building, and we're enthused about it," he says.
Now, that dour 1988 procession in Central Park seems like a mere footnote, but it contains the seeds of Blue Man Group Prods.' unusual success story. The blue men might have rebelled against the commodification of that decade's art world, but they never romanticized starving artists or divorced themselves from the almighty dollar. They cast themselves as artist-businessmen, but instead of turning art into commerce, they turned commerce into art, creating commercial work with aspirations to the same high artistic standards as their shows.
"Almost the first time we got bald and blue, we realized there's something very special here," says Goldman, 45. "This is going to sound weird, but after the first couple of times we got bald and blue, we were feeling that we could be creating in this medium of bald and blue forever."
At the time, Goldman, a software designer with a Master of Business Administration degree from Clark University, was living in Manhattan with his high school friend, Chris Wink, then a self-proclaimed "lost soul" and drummer. Wink met their third roommate, actor Phil Stanton, while both were working as waiters for a New York caterer. The idea for a bald and blue character flashed through their minds during a ride on a city bus.
"We watched a bunch of punk rockers with colored, spiked Mohawks and 50 safety pins through the cheek," Goldman says. "They walked right by three or four Wall Street guys in the most expensive Armani suits, and no one blinked an eye. It was a profound moment. If the imagery of those two different kinds of people doesn't even warrant a moment's notice, what possibly can today? Someone who's bald and blue with no ears."
Blue Man Group began appearing in edgy performance spaces in the East Village. Wink, 45, had studied drumming as an ethnomusicology student at Wesleyan University, and the group relished the primal energy unleashed by the instrument. They also liked creating their own instruments, which fit their nonexistent budget. Stanton, whose father was a builder, cobbled them together from cut-up washing machines and PVC piping they found on Canal Street. In the shows, the blue men take apart the tube instruments that have become their signature and put them back together, using them to make music and project sound.
"It's the old thing like when you're a kid and put cups together with a string," says Stanton, 46. "We thought these were interesting metaphors. The tube is a really old structure, but it's made with high-tech materials. We wanted to use it as a device for communication."
The Blue Man Group began traveling the performance-art circuit, but the original members never felt quite at home there. Art was a component of their exuberant show, but so were music, science and humor. Vaudeville -- albeit a modern form of it -- seemed a better fit. Goldman recalls watching an interview with old vaudevillians. "One of them said, 'If you're in vaudeville, you've got to open a show doing something no one in the audience can do,'" he says. "Back then, they were talking about juggling or sword swallowing or spinning plates. We decided to catch things in our mouth."
They opened their first permanent show at New York's 299-seat Astor Place Theatre in late 1991. Thanks largely to word of mouth, shows began selling out, but the trio became victims of their own success. With no understudies, they performed 1,285 consecutive shows over the next three years.
To finance the show, the founding members signed a three-year deal with outside producers, but they quickly ran into conflicts over costs. At one point, the producers decided that such expenses as the weekly $880 spent on Jell-O (a prop in the performances) was excessive and cut the money from the budget. Before long, a legal tussle ensued over the rights to the production, but the matter was ultimately settled out of court, with the blue men winning back full ownership of the company and learning a powerful lesson in the process.
"We didn't sell our souls to the devil," Goldman says. "We just leased ourselves to the devil."
As a private company, Blue Man Group Prods. has been able to control the pace of growth, cultivate an egalitarian work culture and reinvest a higher-than-usual percentage of profits back into R&D. The founders opened a second show in Boston in 1995 and handed over the stage to an expanding troupe of blue men, who now number about 60. Three full-time casting directors hold casting calls around the country to screen up to 3,000 people a year in a search for the dozen or so who will qualify for the troupe's two-month training program.
Offstage, the company recently started the Blue Man Group Creativity Center to teach children of all ages how to be imaginative in an educational setting. In late summer, there are plans to launch "Blue Man Group Making Waves," a traveling exhibit on sound waves and light waves sponsored by JBL Audio at the Boston Children's Museum. Kids will be able to make blue man-style sound waves themselves with a new line of toys inspired by the PVC-tube instruments and other contraptions used in the show. The Los Angeles-based company ToyQuest collaborated with Blue Man Group to produce four instruments, two of which will launch in July: an $80 keyboard-pipe hybrid and a $70 pipe-heavy percussion instrument that makes sound without being touched using proximity-sensor technology.
For grown-ups, Blue Man Group plans "counter-training for modern life for people who've become overly adultified," as Wink puts it. The founders are formulating corporate workshops using acting techniques to teach people how to cooperate with each other in the workplace. In the end, he says, collaboration has been the secret to the group's own success.
"We found we were able to reach beyond anything we would have been able to do separately by teaming up, subjugating the ego, listening and cooperating," Wink says. "It's an amazingly powerful thing."
Share on LinkedIn
