BLUE MAN GROUP

From its humble origins in small town America, the anonymous trio of bald, mute, blue-painted men who assail each other with paint, food and gum balls to the sound of a loud rock’n’roll band has done pretty well.

Evoking the recently departed Marcel Marceau, smoke’n’mirrors music hall, extravagant slapstick, split-second timing, barrels of laughs and a suitably bizarre audience-participation finale, Blue Man Group now plays simultaneously from Las Vegas to Berlin, and the audiences keep on coming.

The BMG phenomenon crossed the Atlantic in 2004 when it was first opened in Europe by producer Stage Entertainment at Berlin’s Theater am Potsdamer Platz, in its largest production to date. A new and revised production opened at the New London Theatre in late 2005, followed by another at Amsterdam’s 1,080-capacity Theater Fabriek, a converted factory near the Central Station, in late 2006.

This spring, the original Berlin show created, written and produced by Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink moved to Oberhausen’s Metronom Theater, while a new Berlin show opened across the street on Potsdamer Platz at the new Bluemax Theater (formerly an IMAX theatre), which shares the Amsterdam production’s technological updates. With us so far?

Lighting for all the European shows is supplied by Holland’s Flashlight Rental, part of the Ampco Flashlight Group (AFG), and in Amsterdam and Berlin this contract was extended for the first time to include sound — by sister company Ampco Pro Rent — with AFG companies Lightco and Rigging Box supplying production rigging. Hulskamp Audiovisueel of Utrecht supplied the extensive video production.

In Amsterdam, Rigging Box’s task was complex, as the old factory roof (part of which was ripped off by a storm earlier this year) offered no weight loading at all. This entailed fabricating a rigging grid of Prolyte truss, cantilevered from the theatre wall. The entire grid is designed to be lowered to ground level on chain hoists for maintenance and the daily resetting of various special effects. To facilitate this, Rigging Box specified and provided design consultancy to create a new B100RV-CW Catwalk Truss, deployed as a substitute for regular lighting bridges.

Twenty-four Atomic 300 Strobes ring the proscenium (and they’re not afraid to use them) along with a plethora of Altman UV705, UV703 and UV250 black lights, with various sections of the show involving an intense battery of strobes and black light effects. Conventionals are headed by ETC Source Four PARs and ETC Source Four Profiles with dual Wybron scrollers from the new CXI IT series. The proscenium arch itself was also fabricated by Rigging Box from Prolyte truss, and carries 40 ETC Spot Pars.

Moving lights are the cornerstone of the rig with Martin MAC 2000 Profile lights and Vari*Lite VL1000 Arcs with shutter units predominating — “the MACs are for the more rock’n’roll looking stuff and animation effects while the VL1000s are the follow spots for the show,” explained lighting designer Joel Moritz, who has taken up Marc Janowitz’s lighting and Marc Brickman’s original stage design. “It’s a theatre show which has a lot of rock’n’roll movements.”

DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE
Paradoxically, although the show has evolved visually and technically over the years, it’s a not a visibly high-tech show to the audience, as Moritz emphasised: “It’s not about having the newest, latest gear for its own sake.”

Like music hall, the smoke and mirrors are there to fool the senses, not to impress the techno-heads. A neat example is the ‘livewire’ sequence, performed in blackout, in which an animated, glowing stick-figure appears to jump up from typing at a cybercafé PC keyboard and leap through the air.

The seated part is actually achieved by a simple 2D, LED based animation and in mid ‘leap’ it’s taken over by an actor wearing a black catsuit adorned with LED threads. The timing has to be split-second for the illusion of continuous movement to work, and it is — SMPTE timecoded via the main grandMA lighting console.

“I found the visual trickery fascinating from an outsider’s point of view,” said Moritz, “but now I’m on the inside, I think what’s so interesting is how analogue and digital forms work together. One of the things I love about Blue Man Group is that so many things seem so analogue and so simple, yet when you look at the technology some of it’s crazy — some of the best the entertainment world has to offer, and to the audience it appears simple, although still alluring and interesting. It reiterates that theatrical conventions in this day and age are still really powerful when used properly and thought through.”

He continued: “The Amsterdam show is the third time we’ve worked with Flashlight (Bluemax and Metronom make it five) and it’s worked out well — the gear has been brand new, and their staff are fantastic, so in that sense alone it would be a pleasure to work with them again. And I must say, they’re staff that really understand and are interested in what we’re trying to do.

“Such as, for example, the challenge of lighting a shiny cobalt-blue head, because of the special type of make-up that the blue men use. The blue heads only react well to certain colours, others make the blue look brown or just weird or plain, and although it means using only a particular range of the spectrum, I think it’s a really nice challenge, because it becomes about finding the perfect blue, and yet that perfect blue can be completely different depending on the emotion of the piece or what else is going on.

“It also gives us the opportunity to use other blues around the stage, other than just lighting the blue men. In a way it’s akin to what Jennifer Tipton was doing with white lights 40 years ago, which became such an iconic design tool.”

The blue trio oblige the audience to feel as much a part of the show as they are — culminating in the final audience participation gag in which dozens of giant rolls of paper unfurl, to be passed all the way down from the back to the stage by the audience.

“You lose track of all the silly things around you…it’s community-building in a weird way,” laughed Moritz, “but one of the really remarkable things about the blue men is that even if they drag you up on stage, you immediately realise it’s a faith environment and they’re not going to hurt or embarrass you.” Not that that’s any reason not to cower when they head your way!

PROJECTION
A key element of the visuals, video and projection designer Caryl Glaab employs a pair of converged 12kW Panasonic projectors, mounted on the first circle, while LED has made its presence felt in Amsterdam with 16 Color Kinetics ColorBlaze48 scenic fixtures used to backlight the ‘band loft’ boxes (upstage left and right soundproofed performance cubicles with translucent front and rear faces), while Pulsar Chromabank II LED strips illuminate the brightly-painted industrial pipework, retained from the theatre’s factory days, which adorns the left hand auditorium wall.

Video is another major ingredient, from the endless projected caption witticisms to the I-Mag imagery whose chief function (using handheld cameras) is to mercilessly home in on late arrivals in the audience and then follow a captured male ‘victim’ backstage where he’s bound, boilersuited, upended on a rope, covered in blue paint and swung against a large white board. (The board, complete with blue body imprint, is then presented to the ‘victim’ on stage.) The latest technological incarnation sees Hippotizer video servers at the core of the system.

A pair of Barco video projectors provides rear projection, and the camera complement comprises two Sony SO-Z1 handhelds, a Sony ‘finger camera’ and a single Sony B3H00 remote control camera.

Backing it all is a production system — also supplied by Hulskamp — based around a dual Medialon system, synchronised to both sound and lighting desks, along with Doremi storage and a Panasonic vision production switcher.

AUDIO
Long-time Blue Man Group sound designer Ross Humphrey — currently on the road with BMG’s How To Be A Megastar 2.0 touring production — and associate sound designer John Owens created the audio landscape.

The FOH mix is handled by a Yamaha PM1D digital console (“the last time I looked we’d filled up every input and output!” commented Humphrey). That, and the d&b PA, were supplied by Ampco Pro Rent to Humphrey’s standard Blue Man Group specification.

The PA comprises d&b Q1s and wide-dispersion Q7s, supplemented by three C series subs in ‘cardioid’ mode at the top of the arrays. C7s are deployed on stage to focus the imaging onto the stage and E3s provide front fills, helped by a small number of Q1s and Q7s hidden in the proscenium.

Most of the subs are B2s, but in Amsterdam, where the theatre is longer than most, the design is supplemented by a delay system consisting of Q1s, Q7s and C series subs, plus a distributed delay system.

Besides the FOH mix, the team also delivers in-ear monitor mixes to the three Blue Men, while the band’s monitors are served by a mixture of stage splits and stems from FOH, routed to a pair of Midas Venice 320 consoles — one in each band loft, delivering hard-wired IEM mixes to a string player and a drummer in each loft.

The musicians, meanwhile, use a bewildering array of hand-built stringed and percussive instruments including some fabricated from lengths of plastic drainpipe, which are miked with a total of 12 ATM 4051s, two per cluster of tubes in an X-Y pattern, via Midas XL42 pre-amps. 360 Systems Instant Replay devices deliver the show’s stereo cues, with SFX supplying the multitrack surround cues and timecode for lighting.

Microphones are drawn from across the industry with Audix, Shure, Audio-Technica, Sennheiser and Countryman well in evidence.

BUILDING THE SHOWS
For BMG’s European technical supervisor Nils Lunow, each new show’s challenge begins with the venue itself, with most requiring some modification. The Amsterdam show entailed the building of an entirely new interior, lighting bridge, crane truck and cantilevered access catwalk within the building’s shell — and there’s always a power issue to tackle. Ah, and waterproofing…

“Trying to find out if they have enough roof capacity for all our equipment is always a big issue, as is the power because we needed an extra 250A just for lighting,” said Lunow.

As for liquids, the first three rows of the audience wear waterproof capes, which tells you all you need to know about the aquatic physicality of the piece. In one of the opening numbers the blue men sit side by side downstage, literally drumming up a storm of uplit coloured paint.

“Everything is very thoroughly sealed, weatherproofed, and grounded within an inch of its life,” commented Lunow. “It’s very safe, but a huge mess, with huge drains throughout the stage; everything’s power-washed after the show. It’s one of the most extensive post-show clean-up sessions apart from a circus!”

Other notable production credits include executive producer Barbara Darwall, music director/artistic director Jens Fischer, costume designer Chase Tyler, Stage Entertainment Amsterdam’s executive producer Willem Metz, Stage Entertainment Germany’s executive producer Ulf Maschek, Blue Man Group London general manager PendaBede Stally, production LXs Simon Needle (London & Amsterdam) and Jürgen Becks (Berlin, Oberhausen), Ampco Pro Rent project managers Sydney van Gastel and Hayo den Boest, Flashlight project managers Guus Hogenes, Bas Kind and Jeroen Seeboldt, Rigging Box project manager Aart Gigengack, and Ampco Flashlight Group co-ordinator Marc van der Wel.

Nils Lunow concluded: “For me, it’s not so different to a normal show, even though the production itself is very different. I deal with the designers and make sure the set is built and waterproofed in a proper way, and that vendors provide us with what we need in time.

“Berlin 2004 was the first time with Flashlight, but the difference in Amsterdam and Berlin is that we’ve used their group as the main provider for rigging, sound and light. It’s a huge deal and it’s been fantastic to have everything in one hand.”