The Blue Man Group is coming to Australia for the first time next month. The trio of three men dressed in blue face paint has been wowing crowds with their shows that mix music, technology and a mountain of fun for years now, but have only recently begun to tour. Co-founder Phil Stanton spoke to OUTinPerth.
Why has taken so long for the Blue Man Group to reach Australia?
This is the first place we’ve ever toured really. We’ve had sit down shows which is all we kind of knew how to do for a long time, we’d make ourselves at home in a theatre. We’ve only recently begun to travel in the USA in the last year or year and a half. It’s taken us some time to work out how to do the show as a tour.
From three friends doing avante guarde threatrical performance on NYC’s lower east side to a multi million dollar empire, you guys have come a long way.
It’s crazy we never envisaged it being our livelihood. Even though I went to New York to study acting, pretty soon I met my partners. We just started working on this project, we wanted to explore something about our tribal nature… it was the point that the internet was starting, it was clear if that was going to be a good thing or not. We were exploring, what is it to be human? I think if we’d approached it from the perspective of ‘how can we make money’ though, it would be very different; you just have to have fun and do what you love.
There are now heaps of actors playing ‘Blue Men’ in multiple productions around the world, as one of the original perfomers do you feel like a parent to them all?
There about fifty perfomers now, that’s funny I’ve never thought of it that way, but you definitely feel responsible. When you open a show and you ask people to go half way round the world, you want to take care of them. These guys are all my friends… it’s a pretty tight knit group.
The Blue Man Group is at the Crown Theatre for a limited engagement from 11-27 October. Tickets are available at Ticketek.
