Celebrity Gossip From Las Vegas With Robin Leach | Luxe Life Digest

If there were no Cirque du Soleil productions, my favorite show on the Strip would be the Blue Man Group. I love their quirky humor. I marvel at their maniacal music. I play along as does the entire audience with the interactive episodes. They are truly unique and ever since their humble street beginnings on New York’s sidewalks, they’ve amused and entertained all around the world. They’ve been a big smash hit ever since landing in Vegas and have been taken to heart by our community. Now they even have their very own theater at The Venetian. For the first time, the secret wraps are being lifted on the Blue Man Group as its co-founder Chris Wink opens up the curtains for this behind the scenes Luxe Life exclusive interview and Scott Doctor photo tour!

RL: Why blue? Why not red or yellow?

CW: I think we were just drawn to the color blue. We wanted a character who didn’t look too silly or too serious and I think the real basic answer is we liked the Blue Man -- the way he could look serious at one moment and be kind of funny the next. We kind of felt like some of the other colors could look kind of clowny. That was one thing. The other thing is there’s an artist, named Eve Cline, who we were fond of, who was obsessed with this cobalt blue and he was influenced by kind of the color of the sky as you’re getting a little dim towards sunset. He felt that it was kind of an infinite space. That it was also like the planet. Those are kind of cerebral things. It’s just the color that came to us. We wanted the Blue Man to seem kind of primal and gooey you know, just sort of rich, it really seemed right for that. It wasn’t thought out beyond that really.


Yours truly on the Blue Man Group set, speaking with co-founder Chris Wink.

RL: Alright, so we’ve got the color out of the way. In a day and age of equality between the sexes, has anybody ever said, "Why isn’t there a Blue Women Group?"

CW: Well there used to be blue women and men when we first started and we were actually going to call ourselves "Blue People" but we just thought "Blue People" sounded weird, and even some of the women in the group thought it would be interesting to call it "Blue Man Group" with women in the thing. Then they moved to another city, leaving the three of us with this gender specific title having to answer to "Why not "Blue Women?" for the rest of our lives. And so, we’ve actually have had performers that were women and when we audition we audition both men and women. There’s a height requirement so we do have a height bias, we’re "heightists" but we’re not sexists.

RL: So let’s go back to the very beginning. This was born where? And where did it start on the streets of Manhattan?

CW: Yeah we were living in downtown New York and it started with basically, we’d get all in blue and just go outs to a bar and wherever we could go and just to see what would happen. From there we did a few events, kind of like a "sixties happenings." We did a funeral for the eighties -- we buried that decade in Central Park -- and we would go out to clubs that had velvet ropes and people who were clamoring to get in. We’d bring our own velvet ropes. We’d have an alternative sidewalk club that anyone could come into and once they were in we’d just sort of dance around without any music and we’re kind of just spoofing on things. It was like the presence of the Blue Man would cause you to look at the situation with fresh eyes, maybe see something ridiculous in the moment. At that time we also started to build our own drums. That was what we started with, and put paint on it, because we wanted to have that range from the ridiculous to the sublime and back.

Chris Wink inspects the Mona Lisa, as interpreted by the Blue Man Group.

RL: So you started on the street, in a sense, as sort of gentlemen rebels?

CW: A little bit. We didn’t do anything particularly outrageous, but just the presence of the Blue Man… Say we would go to the Museum of Modern Art, and they would have to decide whether to let us in or not, and it was an awkward position for them because if they didn’t let us in then they would seem to discriminate against blue people, but if they let us in, what were we going to do inside? You know, they couldn’t be sure. A guard would be following us around making sure we weren’t up to something. We’d go to bars and it was the same thing. A lot of times people would buy us free drinks just for being a little different and they would come up to us and say what was going on? And we wouldn’t have an answer.

RL: Where did amateur street theatre change over into professional mainstream theatre?

CW: Well, pretty quickly. We felt like we wanted to build some stuff and have some effects, and that made it hard to be in the streets. So, after a few outdoor things we went into this sort of rough and tumble indoor places. A couple of times we would go into these "speakies", even bars, and performance spaces -- any place that we could get ourselves into. But, we needed some lighting, you know to bring our drums, and we started figuring out how to do some technical things. Often, in the early days, we’d control the lighting with our feet. So we’d stand behind the drums and we’d have the light switches down below. We’d sit behind a table, and if there was something that happened there we’d control it with our feet and if we were behind a screen and there were shadows, we’d control those lights with our feet because we didn’t have a crew or anything. But, that was early on.

RL: Going back to the beginning, are you glad that it was difficult at first, in order to find out what made you extraordinarily successful?

CW: Absolutely. Because we needed time to get a hold of what this was all about. We needed time to develop the character. We really didn’t have the character. In a sense we were blue, but we hadn’t developed the kind of fullness of the interior life, or the approach. In fact, the first thing that we did, the Blue Man talked and then we said, "no the Blue Man doesn’t talk." So actually it took us a few years to develop that. It took us a few years to learn how to build things and come up with an aesthetic. I think that if we had some backer come to us and say, "here’s a bunch of money, do a show" it would never have worked, because we needed the gestation period to develop a voice, an aesthetic, an approach, some ideas, and we’ve been developing that the entire time. It really is a work in progress for us. It has always been that way. Even to this day we still think about -- as we train other Blue Man -- what is the essence of the character? How do we train it? Who is this character? And we think about when our new material is in development what kinds of things would Blue Man do? So, it’s always been something we’re learning and thinking about.

RL: How long was the gestation period do you think? From the birth of the idea to time that Blue Man came to life, as we know it now?

CW: Well, I think by three years the Blue Man had kind of come into existence. It took that long, and then from there he’s taken more gradual refined changes.

RL: So, the Blue Man’s family is a growing concern these days. What started on the sidewalk of Manhattan downtown has now grown to what?

CW: Well, it’s hard for me to even know exactly how big it is. I’m not sure how many employees we have because all of our shows. People have substitutes, sometimes they have second subs, because with the holidays we do so many shows. But we have shows in Las Vegas, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, London, and Berlin. The European element is more recent for us.

RL: Universal appeal?

CW: Well it seems that’s one of the things, from the very beginning. The reason we knew we wanted to move around the world was, in the New York show, the audience was coming from all over the world. In fact, very quickly we got as much, if not more, media coverage in other parts of the world as we did in New York. So, actually the people coming into the show in New York were from all over, So we realized that somehow we stumbled onto a character that had international, universal appeal, and age groups. We hadn’t planned it like that way. We didn’t design it with anything in mind other than it kind of being something that we would like.

 
Yours truly, spending some downtime with the Blue Man Group.

RL: Would you categorize it at all as a delightful accident?

CW: It was a delightful accident with a lot of hard work. But, it was a bunch of accidental things, some luck, a lot of hard work. I think that, if we hadn’t stumbled on this kind of character that sort of resonated for some reason, we would not have gotten the encouragement that we’ve gotten all along the way or that sense that, "hey this is something really worth pursuing."

RL: So this proves you don’t really need a master plan to win.

CW: Well that’s the thing. We had no master plan at any point along the way. Even today, we can barely think past the next project and it makes everyone crazy. Sometimes it’s great to have a goal, but if you have a goal you’re either going to go to the place that you planned or you’ve failed. But what about the place that you couldn’t have even imagined? And so, sometimes it takes fools wisdom to get there, and if you think of how 'Forest Gump' starts, it starts with a feather floating in the air, and that’s sort of the magic of the foolish wonderer -- harnessing some kind of wind that goes to some wonderful place that you couldn’t have planned. So we do have goals and try to work towards them, but sometimes if you let yourself blow in the wind you’ll go to a place that’s even better then where your goals would have had you go.

RL: As a co-founder of Blue Man Group is it a case of once a Blue Man, always a Blue Man at heart?

CW: I think so. I think once you’ve been on stage and done a run of stuff, there’s a part of you that is sort of permanently impacted by that and I feel that when I go too long without getting Blue, something starts to… it just doesn’t feel right.

RL: Alright, so let’s talk now about the Vegas show. You’re in your own custom built theatre here in The Venetian, which was a massive undertaking. What are some highlights of changes that you made? How much was new here versus what was old at Luxor?

CW: We’re always working on the show it isn’t a show that opened at one time and just keeps going. But sometimes it’s hard to stop what you’re doing and put a bunch of changes in because we’re doing shows all the time. We’re doing shows everyday. You can make little changes, but it was really exciting for us to have a chance to move the show so we could take all that we had learned. So at the very least, we felt like we had some additional things that we wanted to do to the Vegas show, so we designed all of this stuff for the show so the setting itself is a bit more rich and dense and it gave us some more complexity. From there we developed a couple of new bits. But, the flip side is that there is certain pieces that you just don’t want to take out. There are sort of those signature pieces that maybe will always be in a Blue Man show. To me this show has to have that paint drumming near the beginning. It needs to have a meal with an esteemed guest in the middle and it needs to go crazy with the sort of paper finale at the end. I mean, those are sort of audience favorites and you’d be crazy to take those out.

RL: Talk about your favorite signature and your highlight element that everyone walks away talking about. What are those two things?

CW: One of my favorite pieces right now is called "Rods and Cones." It’s sort of a piece where we take the audience into the human brain. It’s kind of funny, but it’s got the backpack tubes and it uses the set we’re looking at now. It’s sort of the look of that piece, and it’s very state of the art of where we’re at -- mixing the tube instruments that we’ve invented with some of this broken up video that we’ve been working on. Another one that I really like as well, uses this sort of flexible neon. It starts out with a Desert scene, kind of the Buttes, very appropriate to Las Vegas, but then it builds up quickly to the modern era with a bunch of sort of neon stuff and then the Blue Man show up with their shamanic LAD signs. They start the drumming and then all hell breaks loose and the animation steps off the wall and sort of comes out and does some stuff. I always like that, and I also like that piece of music as well.

RL: Do you have to be slightly, but nicely mad to envision this?

CW: I think you have to be "yes", slightly comfortable into swinging out into the periphery and hopefully not to cross the line into insanity. You know, a show life is a balance between order and chaos. To get out here you have to swing a little bit further into chaos and then find a way to order it so it doesn’t become crazy. I think people who are completely mad go so far into chaos thatthey don’t know how to order it. Putting on a show is almost… It mirrors the process of creation itself. You have that moment before opening, just what they talked about in 'Shakespeare In Love,' where it seems like you’re never going to get to opening night. It happens every show. It seems like it’s going to fly out of control, and then somehow, if you’re lucky, it comes together and you escape going completely mad and the show happens. But that’s what the creative process is like sometimes.

RL: Somebody in the audience who doesn’t know what Blue Man is does not know what to expect and then they sit there for two wondrous hours and escape into some childhood fantasy that they never experienced growing up. What do they say when they leave? What have you heard when you loiter in the theatre?

CW: I love hearing people say, "that’s not what I expected" and I love it when people talk about the feeling they got, that they felt "like a kid" or they felt "ecstatic." I prefer that to "oh I thought it was funny," because it feels like they’ve had to of an all consuming experience. We try to be funny, but also get you with the visuals and then have the music kind of creep in. If it works right -- if you kind of let yourself go with it -- it kind of rolls you into this ball of feeling, of almost giddiness. In a sense we’re trying to create an antidote for growing up too well. It’s almost like a regression to that glorious state in childhood when everything was so wondrous and that’s in a sense what we’re trying to do.

RL: If somebody said that you could take vacuum cleaner pipes and mass mechanical PVC and tubing and turn it into and musical instrument that produces a CD of music, no one would believe it, and yet it’s become a musical instrument with the same depth and character as brass instruments. Where did that come from?

CW: That was another accident. We were down on Canal Street, at a Canal rubber and plastics store with a bunch of tubing around, and we were talking through them and hitting them. It was almost like what a Blue Man would have done, noticing that this sound is very satisfying. We were hitting them with pieces of rubber and we just thought we had wanted to play musically with our percussion skills.

RL: So Chris, what gets the bigger laugh in Vegas,the arrival of the airplane that’s lost its way in the nearby runway or the three miles of toilet paper that covers the audience every night?

CW: Well, the airplane is the most expensive joke in the world, per second. It’s a seven second joke that costs… I don’t want to think about how much it costs. The paper is a longer experience it creates kind of squeals of delight, but it’s not necessarily a punch line the way the airplane is. But we had had a piece in the earlier version of the Vegas show that we thought was one of the most expensive pieces per second and we wanted to up the ante and have an actual airplane to come on the stage just for one punch line, just to be utterly silly.

 

RL: How long does it take an actor to turn into a Blue Man?

CW: We’ve got it down to a faster version. It’s about an hour-and-a-half. When we go to Hollywood to get ready for a commercial shoot, they’ll bring in a person from wardrobe and from make-up and they’ll say, "well we’re going to take four hours to do this" and we’re like, "hey we do theatre we don’t have four hours."

RL: And how long for somebody to take on a persona of a Blue Man? When an actor comes in to audition he’s not a Blue Man, so how long does it take to become a Blue Man?
CW: There’s a training process that takes at least six months. Also, since we feel like being a Blue Man isn’t just the costume, we have a warm up process during the day that’s much more extensive than, say, someone on Broadway where they would just show up put on make-up and then go on stage. We do a sound check every night and the Blue Man spend a lot of time off stage with the band on an ongoing basis because there’s a set of connection where they really have to listen to each other and play as an ensemble.

RL: If a Blue Man could speak, what would he say about all of this showbiz success?

CW: "You guys are weird, you’re a little strange."


IN HER OWN WORDS…


Pamela Anderson talks about "MY LOVE -- MY WEDDINGS" as the final hours tick down to her weekend French Riviera marriage to Kid Rock. Tonight (THURS) she fliesfrom Vegas to Los Angeles. Tomorrow (FRI) she flies from LA to Paris and onto Nice and then a 20-minute helicopter flight into St. Tropez for the Saturday ceremony. Then Monday, all the details right here in Luxe Life with Pamela's very own description of how she feels come Sunday morning.

STRIP SCRIBBLES
The new Phantom of the Opera show from composer Andrew Lloyd Webber may be getting a similar spotlight and attention also at The Venetian -- but before it became the longest running Broadway musical ever his earlier venture Cats chalked up nearly 7,500 shows during its 18 year run. It also won 7-Tony awards. Well, the junkyard cats will hold their annual Jellicle Ball to celebrate the shows 25th anniversary with six special performances at the Aladdin starting tonight (July 27) thru Sunday. Incidentally that memorable song "Memory" from the show has been recorded by more than 150 different singers including Barry Manilow who still showcases it in his Hilton shows... . Local talent Nick McGough who appeared on 'So You Think You Can dance' for FOX-TV proves he can while appearing on this current tour!!

TONIGHT'S TIP
Pauly Shore hosts a boot-camp at TAO in The Venetian and the girls are encouraged to show up in cut-off-war-torn military outfits to drop and do 20!! Manic comedy-star Lewis Black begins a run of explosive and exasperated rants at the MGM through August 2 claiming he’s 'Red, White & Screwed'! The Fremont Street Experience turns into a Pit Stop party for The Score with driver autograph sessions, displays of over the top vehicles and pit-crew challenges.

TOMORROW'S TEASE
A huge weekend of superstars looms and a taste of Mexico comes to the Strip when Sammy Hagar turns the outdoor Roman Plaza amphitheater at Caesars Palace into a wild Cabo Wabo day and night-time weekend long fiesta of everything from beach volleyball to hit-filled concerts. It's all in the Royal Robin Rundown so you won't miss out on any of the fun and excitement.

CONTACT US
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Go to AOL Vegas for much more on hotels, casinos, restaurants, nightlife, and everything Las Vegas! Check our travel section for great deals on hotels, airfare and much more! And when visiting Vegas, be sure to see Las Vegas Magazine in your hotel suite featuring a print edition of AOL Vegas LuxeLife, and an incredible directory of attractions, shows and restaurants.

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