photo credits: Paul Kolnik
Still crazy after all these years!
The BLUE MAN GROUP thrilled the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre March 25 when they opened their five-night run.
Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton created the show back in 1987 as a street act and have grown it into an incredible industry with permanent shows across the United States, and several international tours. For the Vancouver tour the talented Mike Brown, Benjamin Forster, Russell Rinker, and Brian Tavener keep us in stitches with this hilarious audience-interactive show. With no spoken word and entirely reliant on expression and body movements, it is no small feat to nail a role like this: it's largely about timing, listening, and imagination.
Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton created the show back in 1987 as a street act and have grown it into an incredible industry with permanent shows across the United States, and several international tours. For the Vancouver tour the talented Mike Brown, Benjamin Forster, Russell Rinker, and Brian Tavener keep us in stitches with this hilarious audience-interactive show. With no spoken word and entirely reliant on expression and body movements, it is no small feat to nail a role like this: it's largely about timing, listening, and imagination.
The show is a lot more high-tech than it was 20 plus years ago, and features plenty of new content, along with musicians, a new sound, set, and video design and utilizing an enormous LED curtain, but there are still a lot of the original BMG favourites that never grow old: marshmallows, toilet paper, and drumming on big vats of coloured water.
The show opened with a large ticker-tape prompting us to move, look, clap, point, and had us laughing and calling out within the first few minutes. There were huge drums played with over-sized clubs and several pieces that were played on plumbing pipe trombones.
The show opened with a large ticker-tape prompting us to move, look, clap, point, and had us laughing and calling out within the first few minutes. There were huge drums played with over-sized clubs and several pieces that were played on plumbing pipe trombones.
There were two portable pipe xylophones that looked like enormous eyeballs, digital robots, human painting, big plates of jello. There was a dance scene where the BMG, dressed in black suits fitted with LED lights, danced with 3D neon-light animations on life-sized moving screens that was particularly impressive.
One of the biggest hits of the show was the massive, four-metre-wide Zygote balls, designed by Vancouver's Alex Beim. The stage was filled with six light-filled balls that were used as drums and were quickly unclipped and released, along with several others, into the audience. Every time someone hit the balls, they changed colour.
By far the best part of this show was the level of engagement the BMG attained and how willing the audience was to participate in the exchange. In an era where the more we connect technically, the more we seem to disconnect personally, the BMG came through like an enormous crack in the armour, reminding us that we do want and need that interaction. The positive buzz that this show sent through the audience was undeniable, and to watch the middle-aged man in the Heavy Metal t-shirt red with laughter right along side the elderly woman, the three small children in the row before him, and the business man three seats over, was an indication that this desire is not only strong but a beautiful reminder of our ability and willingness to connect to and through each other.
two of the amazing percussionists!!
click on Queen Elizabeth Theatre for tickets
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