Review by Steve Bennett

In the early hours of a Glastonbury festival, when all the musicians are safely tucked up in their Winnebagos, the outlying fields are filled with alternative entertainers. Wanderers with circus skills, entertaining the stoned and the pissed with flashy spectacle and the primal beat of a drum.

Blue Man Group are the corporate answer to this; a fast-expanding global franchise with up to 60 performers in cities across the world. The troupe actually boasts anti-corporate roots from the New York arts scene, but since they’re now best known for their adverts for Intel processors, and weeknight tickets for their 100-minute West End show are a pocket-stretching £40 to £50, that’s a hard line to peddle these days.

So, what do you get for you money? A parade of disconnected visual sketches, impressively staged, that look and sound great, if in a retro way. But it’s a lot of bluster to a flaky end, making the whole experience an empty pageant.

There are moments of enjoyment as our trio of featureless blue-faced clowns give their tubthumping demonstrations of Stomp-style percussion, with a smattering of well-executed silent gags thrown into the mix.

But too often the overgrown Smurfs get carried away in ramming home the message that this is such tremendous fun, even when it it’s merely mildly diverting. Such relentless insistence on enjoyment in place of genuine emotion just feels cold and manipulative.

The show is clearly intended to appeal to the inner child, though it often mistakes that for being juvenile. They have a thoroughly unpleasant obsession with regurgitation, for instance. First a mouth full of half-chewed gum is spewed up into a modern ‘sculpture’, later they stalk the audience menacingly, and uncomfortably predatorily, to steal some chocolate, which is pre-digested then deposited back into the owner’s hand.

The worst offender is a sketch in which the threesome embarrass another audience member by taking her out on a ‘date’, only to spew forth pints of porridge-like bile from blow-holes in their chest. It’s disgusting without being witty, like the worst excess of Little Britain’s projectile-vomiting blue rinses.

Many sketches, that one included, have an unwelcome tendency to milk a gag, giving it far too long a build-up, then repeating the key points of the joke again, just in case we didn’t get it. This slows the pace frustratingly, and dents the Blue Man Group’s appeal to kids, who might otherwise be drawn by the combination of spectacle and childishness.

The driving beats, the smart visual carnival and the undeniable skill of the performers keep the interest – just. And when they stick to slapstick, rather than enforced audience participation or the ikky factor, the show comes into its own.  But ultimately there’s just little reward for watching.

And the finale, in which the auditorium is wastefully filled with huge swathes of toilet paper, passing in almost endless waves over your head to the beat of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, sums up the bizarre, futile and sometimes plain annoying experience of the preceding 99 minutes. Like so much that went before, it’s supposed to be anarchic – but it’s too well-choreographed and slickly marketed for that.

With such a triumph of style over substance, no wonder they were so successful fronting an ad campaign.

The Blue Man Group is on at the New London Theatre. Click here for tickets

Steve Bennett
December 2, 2005

Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett