A strange thing happens when you talk to the Blue Man Group organization about their namesake men: If they can help it, no one uses the pronouns “I” or “we.” They artfully eschew them.
Byron Estep, BMG’s artistic director, calls any given Blue Man “the character,” as does Kalen Allmandinger, the captain of the performing company. Allmandinger appears onstage at Luxor, in the makeup, and still refers to the Blue Men as being something outside of himself.
There are a few reasons they do that. The first, and most obvious, is that the Men don’t speak; everything they communicate is done through action, facial expressions and lots and lots and lots of nuanced gestures. (Even in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” chat from eight years back, they answered questions with interpretive photos. My favorite: In answer to “Which one of you hooked up with my friend Amy?,” a Blue Man forlornly holds up a whiteboard reading, “Hey Amy, I’ll never forget U. [Heart], Center.”)
Another reason is that the founders of the company, the three original Blue Men—Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink—no longer perform in the show. But the primary reason appears to be that to be part of BMG is to be part of a larger, creatively integrated whole.
“It’s always [been] a big collaborative effort,” Allmandinger says. “When Chris, Matt and Phil were still front-and-center running the company, they were very active about seeking out input. We would have rehearsals together where we would just workshop ideas, and they would kind of act as directors to pick and choose the direction we were going to move in with any particular piece.”
But to this outsider—an average, flesh-colored man with a tiny bit of Latin seasoning—it appears that everyone in the BMG organization believes, wholeheartedly, that Blue Men are bigger than they are. They’re a bit awed by them.
And as the Luxor show celebrates 25 years in Las Vegas—a milestone silver anniversary that few Strip productions without “Cirque” in their title ever reach—it’s a good time for us to be awed by Blue Man Group, too.
You can see their influence everywhere: In shows like the Jabbawockeez’ Strip production; in interactive attractions like those at Area15, where Chris Wink has a glow-in-the-dark funhouse called Wink World; and they appear, in paint and in action, throughout Vegas’ nuts and bolts. The Blue Man Group is part of the city’s visual identity. They begin eyeballing you the second you land at Harry Reid.
“It’s funny, as theater has evolved over the last 30 years, to see things that we did—you know, breaking the fourth wall, interrupting the show, involving the audience, things that were once considered very taboo and were extremely surprising to people—it’s interesting to see them now incorporated into other people’s shows,” says Estep, who formerly performed in the show himself. “In the old days we kind of talked about [how] what we do is a multi-dimensional experience that happens in a theater. It’s not a play; it’s not a theater show. … It’s like a hybrid of a rock concert, a theatrical show and maybe a more abstract, vaudeville type of experience. It’s a mishmash of a lot of different things. And just because it happens in a theater doesn’t mean we have to play by those rules.”
THE (BLUE) DAWN OF MAN
Paint drumming.Blue Man Group came together in New York City in 1987. Longtime friends Goldman, Stanton and Wink put the concept together over a series of salon-style “happenings” around the city, which they eventually shaped into a production that made its off-Broadway debut at the Astor Place Theatre in November 1991. It would run in that theater for nearly 34 years, finally closing in February 2025.
Goldman, Stanton and Wink performed the first three years of that show without understudies. They were constantly blue. Soon, however, there were lots of Blue Men beyond the OG three, which allowed BMG to expand to Boston and Chicago in productions named Tubes, after the cool handmade PVC tube instruments the Men still play on stage, using flat mallets to push air through the pipes. That alone is arguably worth the price of a ticket.
(While we’re talking about the Chicago shows: You can unearth both a historical document and some good laughs by doing a web search for “Blue Man Group Radio Spots.” You’ll find the surreal, hilarious ads they used to advertise this unexplainable show. And while you’re online, look for a TikTok video of Blue Man Group called “We’re back,” which features some of the cast members out of makeup. Sample comments: “They have no business being this fine,” and “My new favorite thing to ask people is, ‘Did you know the Blue Men Group are hot?’”)
Because anything worth doing is worth doing in a pointy building with a spotlight at the top, the Blue Man Group came to Luxor Las Vegas in January 2000 with a show called Blue Man Group: Live at Luxor. Since then, the show hopped around the Strip before returning to Luxor; Cirque du Soleil has acquired the Blue Man Group LLC; Las Vegas’ “family entertainment” era has largely vanished from memory; BMG-inspired interactive shows like De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta have appeared in Vegas and disappeared almost as suddenly; and the New York and Chicago runs of BMG ended, now replaced by productions in Berlin, Boston, Orlando and Spain’s Canary Islands.
Through it all, the most unlikely thing happened. Las Vegas, a city not previously known for theatrical innovation, managed to hold onto this weird azure production for a quarter-century. The why of it isn’t that hard to figure out.
“It’s just a good show,” says Antonio Aguirre, a member of the propulsive musical combo that backs the Men on stage. “I think that’s evidenced by the fact that I’ve played it who knows how many times—a lot, like, a lot—and I’ve seen the show a lot, and it’s still enjoyable. It’s still funny. It still kicks ass. It’s great. And I think people feel that way regardless of where they come from. We’ve been able to do the show all over the world, and people love it because the character is transcendent. You don’t need to speak [the language] to get the jokes or to get the premise.”
If you’ve yet to see the Blue Man Group—if all you know of them are the ubiquitous bald blue heads, checking you out from billboards and taxicabs—I confess I’m hesitant to tell you exactly what you’re in for. But I can recommend the show, wholeheartedly, on these merits: It’s funny, hilariously so at times; it’s interactive, invasively so at times; it’s unpredictable, wildly so at times; it’s loud, head-bangingly so at times. Like Looney Tunes cartoons of old, it’s engaging for young audiences and contains plenty of oh-no-they-didn’t moments for older audiences. And it’s clever in a way that makes you feel smarter for following along with it.
“I couldn’t even see Blue Man going to Vegas [in 2000],” Chris Wink said to the Weekly shortly after the 2021 opening of his splendid psychedelic freakout at Area15, Wink World. “When we came in, we said, ‘This is either going to be the worst idea ever or it’s going to be really interesting.’ And the fact that we weren’t like everything else made it interesting for people. People really do have a desire to see something new.”
The truly weird thing is that Blue Man Group’s Luxor show still feels new. Shortly before I began working on this story, I realized that I hadn’t seen the show in decades. It didn’t seem that way to me, because the boldness of the show—its lingering, indelible newness—had stuck fast; entire skits and musical numbers existed in my memory nearly intact.
I watched the show again just before I began writing, and while it was familiar to me, it also felt fresh and surprising and ageless. At no point did I feel like I was watching a show that’s carbon-dated to the late Bill Clinton period. And yeah, the sketches have changed with the times—the show now contains references to mobile devices and other current technologies—but the immediacy of Blue Man Group’s show isn’t in its references. It’s in the playful attitudes of monochromatic stars. To paraphrase an immortal city tourism slogan, what happens with Blue Man Group could only happen with Blue Men.
“The character is such a unique presence,” Allmandinger says of the Blue Men’s wide-eyed wonder and good-natured chaos. “There are certain similarities [in what he does] with clowning and mime, but we don’t use those terms because clowning and mime are specific kinds of artforms, with a very long heritage and specific ways to go about them. There are Blue Man performers who have histories in those fields. … But it’s kind of our version, which came about over years of doing the show.”
Estep, the creative director, adds that the Blue Men’s interpretations of three key tropes define the show.
“We’re sort of obsessed with certain themes,” he says. “One is humanity’s relationship with technology. Another thing that we’ve always been really obsessed with is art…You know, we use a Jasper Johns painting as a target, and the Men make abstract art throughout the show. It’s kind of an homage to the creative act and to the art world—but it’s also kind of making fun of art, because we never want to take anything too seriously. It’s sort of reminding people that making art is actually just a form of play. It should be fun. It’s not something you put on a wall in a museum and then you don’t touch it kind of thing.”
The final theme, the one that ties everything together, is connection with the audience. There are several episodes of audience interaction in Blue Man Group’s show, and yes, they’re awkward. But it’s a good kind of awkwardness, which Aguirre, the backing musician who enjoys watching the show when he’s not busy jamming out on zither or Chapman Stick, perfectly describes.
“The awkwardness is part of the show,” he says. “I think all the performers love that and tend to lean into it. If there’s kind of an awkward or uncomfortable moment, the Blue Men are really good about kind of curating that, trying to take something that would be a negative and make it more of a moment, into something funny or relatable.”
ENDLESS BLUE WORLD
Making music with PVC tubes. One of the things the Blue Man Group did almost immediately after arriving in Las Vegas was … let’s call it “nesting.” Those three nonverbal fellows are tremendously social, and they have been right from the jump. In the early 2000s they appeared in passenger instruction videos at the airport. Members of the razor-sharp backing band perform on local stages; I remember seeing Elvis Lederer’s BMG offshoot band Uberschall at the Double Down Saloon regularly in the early aughts, and Aguirre plays in Tinnitus, a “solidly rock band” that plays the music of the 1990s and 2000s. And Wink World draws in curious throngs at Area15 every day.
But where BMG truly shines is in the charitable realm. The Men are quick to support organizations like Aid For AIDS of Nevada and Sunshine Kids; I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen them goofing around on a dais, in front of an oversized check. But one event stands out for Allmandinger, for both its charitable mission and its efforts to bring this loud, propulsive show to an audience that couldn’t enjoy it otherwise.
“We have an ongoing relationship with Grant a Gift Autism Foundation, where we do sensory-friendly performances every year,” he says. (The next one is on June 29.) “It’s nice to be able to share the show with everybody possible. But if people have sensory issues, that could be hard. … We kind of customize the show a little bit, so it’s not quite as stimulating. The lights are a little muted, the music’s not quite as loud. Those audiences are just a joy to perform for.
“It’s nice to feel like you’re a part of the community,” he adds. “I’ve only been here for eight years, which is relatively short compared to how long Blue Man’s been in the community. But one of the things I was struck with when I got here was seeing how really integrated it was [with the local community]. You’re meeting people from other shows, or the [Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority], or other institutions in town. It feels good to be a part of that.”
So it happened that three Blue Men came to America’s unlikeliest city, moved into a pyramid and stayed for 25 years. And if the Luxor stands, it’s hard to imagine Blue Men not occupying it. It’s their house. It’s their blue world. They could well be there in another quarter-century, celebrating a golden anniversary.
Estep thinks it’s not only possible, but a solid bet.
“If you had told me 25 or 30 years ago what we would be doing now—that we would be all over the world and we’d have all these different shows … I would never have believed it. It’s kind of incredible what’s happened. But we’re constantly branching out. … We’re definitely trying to continue to push that boundary of where the stage is, where the audience are. We’re trying to develop new musical avenues, new instruments and new media. There’s no world in which I can’t imagine Blue Man doing a movie or branching out into other media.
“The hard part about that is if we do it, we want to maintain the same experience. We want to figure out a way to create that same sense of unique, spontaneous interaction and connection with the character. So, I definitely think Blue Man Group is going to be around in 25 years, and probably not just as a theatrical show. The question is how we’re going to get there.”