(drumming)
- [Blue Man] The phrase that you hear a lot is the fourth
wall, we break the fourth wall.
(drumming)
I feel like that's not really accurately describing it
'cause I don't think there's a fourth wall to begin with.
I feel like we don't break anything.
We're just in here together.
So music, art, community...
It's a collective experience.
And I think when you sit down and you're in it,
you do feel like you're in it.
You're in the middle of something and it's really special.
(drumming)
- [Announcer] Ready, go.
(upbeat techno music)
(applause)
- My name is Mark Frankel.
I'm the Blue Man Captain here Astor Place Theater.
I've been performing with Blue Man for 15 years.
I've performed all around the world with Blue Man,
so it's been a really fun and varied career.
If you told the character, the Blue Man,
"Hey, go build an instrument",
it seems like this instrument is exactly
what they would build.
Because it ticks off so many boxes for Blue Man
for the Blue Man.
For the show, it's sculpture, you know.
It's low tech.
It's beautiful to look at.
It's percussive, it's primal.
It's played with three Blue Men.
These are all things that are very fundamental aspects
to Blue Man Group and to the show.
This is only the second set we've ever had.
This is the debut of the second PVC set
that we've had in this theater.
- Do it.
(drumming)
- This one sometimes is the hardest one to play,
in many ways.
- Yeah, because if you go across, right...
(drumming)
It's a...
(drumming)
It's pretty, it seems quite random.
(drumming)
So the first set was in here for pretty much 27 years.
And essentially, they were loved to death, you know.
What I love about that instrument, and I do miss it,
even though we have this wonderful gleaming new set,
is that it was something that was used
to its utmost capacity of durability.
It was used until it just couldn't take another show.
And there's something about that that is so Blue Man,
but also so wonderful.
We don't seem to squeeze the life out
of anything these days.
It's such a disposable society.
Now, this new instrument is gleaming clean on the inside,
and you can really tell it's bright and clear and loud.
And it sounds...
It sounds like it was initially intended to sound, now.
When I get asked about, you know, what is it,
what's the show, what can I expect?
It's a very difficult question to answer,
because there's so much to it.
It's not a stage and an audience, it's a room.
And that is probably the most important thing about
our show, is that we're all in room together.
We're experiencing this in real time.
The moment you can see the Blue Man,
we're interacting with the audience,
and our chosen voice is percussion.
So, we have drums, a whole battery of drums.
Large, smaller drums that we play in this
sort of very kind of primal techno style.
With paint on them, so there's a strong visual aspect.
Like anything else with Blue Man,
we don't do anything that's stock.
We don't do anything that's right off the shelf.
And the drumming style that we have in the show
is not a drumming style that pretty much
anybody growing up playing the drums would innately know.
We essentially have to teach drummers how to play
the Blue Man style.
People, myself, was a drummer.
I had to learn to play in the Blue Man style.
We can sort of build a drumming Blue Man up
from almost no musical experience.
We find the Blue Man in the people we see.
We don't necessarily have a cookie cutter profile
that people have to match.
We see women, we see people of all different backgrounds
in terms of theater or non theater.
In our cast right now, we have a person who
was working as a scientist before Blue Man Group.
So, we really say,
"Just come, and then we'll figure out the rest."
(upbeat music)
(applause)
(drumming)