Blue Man Group: Bluevolution World Tour – Festival Theatre

Where to start?  Well, if you don’t like rib rattling drumming, strobe lighting and a full on multisensory happening, don’t see this show!    It is an experience of epic proportions, colourful, loud, funny and stompingly engaging.

The fun starts before the show begins, with public announcements being displayed on a board reminiscent of those motorway signs. Neon red letters requested us not to be annoying with our phones and announced that the flying of drones was definitely not allowed. 

Blue Men come in threes.  They are mute, bald, blue and strangely endearing.  They are curious about everything, like silent aliens they seek to connect with the unfamiliar world in which they find themselves.   Essentially, I suppose the Blue Men are drummers, and actors, and performers with excellent comic skills and perfect timing, and a lot more besides.  And they’re very good at catching a whole heap of stuff in their mouths, thrown from a considerable distance.  There must be a Guinness World Record to be had there, surely. 

The first two rows of the audience were given blue plastic ponchos with hoods, for protection, and it was soon evident that this had been a wise precaution.   It turns out that if you pour paint onto a drum skin, it makes a most colourful effect when the drum is hit, especially with clever lighting catching the spray.   This opened the show, and the rest is hard to describe, at least not in a way that would do adequate justice to the joyful mayhem that followed.  Suffice it to say that it involved drumming; lots of drumming, and paint, cameras, colourful paper streamers, water, audience volunteers, some very funny and clever digital stick men, slapstick comedy – and did I mention the drumming?  Loud, booming, bass drumming, the sort that you physically feel through your feet and up your whole body, exciting and exhilarating.

Apart from the Blue Men, the only other performer on the stage was a female multi-instrumentalist, known simply as “Rockstar”.  Dressed in black with fluorescent yellow stripes she spent most of the time aloft, banging out the beats on several different devices, because there can never be quite enough drums.  Sadly, there was no programme for this show, and no amount of internet searching has yielded any information about lighting and sound design, which is a shame, because both were excellent.

The Blue Man Group is the invention of three New Yorkers, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman.  The name Blue Man was apparently chosen because of its similarity to the word Human.    Having formed in 1987 they achieved some notoriety the following year when the trio carried a coffin through Central Park in a performance they called “Funeral for the ‘80s”.  Performances off Broadway followed, and it was soon necessary to create more Blue Men to take their particular and unique performance art around the world.  Auditions are still held annually, so there is an ever-evolving cast of the Blue Man Group.

The Bluevolution show lasts for 90 minutes with no interval.  Never has an hour and a half been packed with so much exuberant, colourful humour and stomping beats, and never has the time passed so quickly.

The Blue Man Bluevolution World Tour plays Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre until 13^th October.

Reviewer: H.S. Baker

Reviewed: 9^th October 2024

North West End UK Rating: