Review: Updated BLUE MAN GROUP Brings Added Merriment to The Charles Playhouse

Blue Man Group has been in residence at Boston’s Charles Playhouse for so many years, that – with the exception of tourists and new-to-town college students – it’s probably been a long time since local theatergoers have given the show much thought.

This was confirmed at a recent performance where some audience members could be overheard engaging in a pre-show discussion of how long it had been since they were inside the theater – once home to a resident acting company that included Al Pacino, Jill Clayburgh, and Jane Alexander – while making no mention of its current tenant.

So it’s not surprising that, in pursuit of new and renewed attention, the performance-art company recently rolled out its latest update, its first since 2011, including new original music and visuals created just for Boston, and a new AI character that appears onscreen throughout the show.

What remains the same, of course, is the iconic Blue Men – including, in Boston, Mike Brown, Adam Erdossy, Bryce Flint-Somerville, Kean Haunt, Dan Keilbach, Jason McLin, and Eric deLima Rubb – who appear three at a time, mute, with their heads sheathed in cobalt blue. The trio’s wide-eyed wonder continues to imbue them with a hard-to-resist other-worldliness all their own.

They also still use squirts of various paints, enhanced by Matthew McCarthy’s spot-on lighting design, to create the illusion of colorful sparks rising from their precisely pounded drums. And while the trio may be resolutely blue, brilliant splashes of color are everywhere – including on some plastic poncho-wearing audience members seated down front and clearly delighting in the attention.

The three friends, Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink, who created BMG over 30 years ago are co-directors of the Boston show as well as other sit-down productions in New York, Las Vegas, and Chicago, plus national and international touring companies, all now under the ownership of Cirque du Soleil. Goldman, Stanton, and Wink, however, remain the keepers of the BMG flame.

Devotees of the show are no doubt happy about that. They’ll likely embrace the updates, but also be glad that their beloved Blue Men still create magic from their patented bag of tricks – using custom musical instruments made from PVC pipes and Chapman sticks, brandishing their light sabers with Hans Solo-like smoothness, creating on-the-spot art pieces, and catching flying marshmallows in their mouths.

What BMG has always done well, too, is to build connection and trust between performers and audience. That wonderful communal effect was evident whenever the Blue Men climbed into, over, and around their welcoming audience or invited some of them on stage to join in the fun.

And while the “new finale” features new electronic dance music – performed by a terrific three-piece live band under resident music director Randall Wooten – it is really more a reimagining of a classic set-piece in which rolls of multi-colored bunting paper, often called “toilet paper” in show parlance, were propelled from the stage and all but subsumed some audience members.

Now the Blue Men, always the egalitarians, tote hand-held paper cannons throughout the theater, as colorful confetti falls from the rafters, ensuring that everyone gets in on the action and proving that their unique brand of mirth and merriment still has a home in Boston.

Photo caption: Blue Man Group paint drumming. Photo courtesy of Blue Man Group.

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