The challenge has been to maintain artistic integrity and autonomy while becoming wildly popular.

The challenge has been to maintain artistic integrity and autonomy while becoming wildly popular.
By MIMI AVINS
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Dustin Hoffman assured his then-12-year-old son, one New York evening in 1993, that going to see Blue Man Group would be fun. Photos on the marquee of the NoHo theater were compelling enough -- an alienoid creature staring out through big, curious eyes. Passers-by who didn't know any more than the Hoffmans about what an evening of music and comedy offered by a trio of bald, blue men might be, would look and wonder: Who is Blue Man, why is he here and what does he want?
Hoffman, father and son, decided to find out. They descended into a tiny cave of a theater where three performance artists had fashioned an unlikely off-Broadway hit out of splattering paint, homemade percussion instruments, Hostess Twinkies and a smorgasbord of notions that explore and satirize the significance of art and technology.
After the 90-minute show, the Hoffmans went backstage to meet the Blue Men -- Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink. Once they'd removed their makeup and latex skullcaps, the performers engaged their LA visitors in a rambling four-hour discussion of the problem that has intrigued them from the beginning: How do you achieve global commercial domination and not lose your soul?
The question hadn't exactly been verbalized 13 years ago, when three friends in their late 20s first covered their heads with blue paint and staged guerrilla theater skits on Manhattan sidewalks.
Today Blue Man Group Productions is a thriving theatrical conglomerate with a staff of 473, companies performing in New York, Boston, Chicago and Las Vegas, and an annual operating budget of $28 million.
So the problem of maintaining artistic integrity that they considered with Hoffman nearly eight years ago is more relevant than ever. They aren't earnest young hopefuls anymore. Last month, they performed for the Grammy Awards TV audience, estimated at more than 55 million.
Beginnings: Back in the formative years of Blue Man, Goldman and Wink, now 39 and 40, had been best buddies since junior high school. When they met Stanton, now 41, after college, they discovered they all yearned to be the art world's Ben & amp; Jerry.
If you were a software producer with an MBA (as Goldman was) or a drummer and aspiring actor (as Stanton was) and found yourself in conversation with someone who also devoured high and low culture as voraciously as peanuts, you'd revel in the company of a kindred spirit. So with Wink -- a drummer who paid the rent by synopsizing articles for a Japanese magazine and then took a job as a waiter for a catering company -- they pondered how they could pursue their diverse interests and still make a living.
"It was the mid-'80s, and we wanted to figure out what our generation's voice was going to be," Wink says. "'Rambo' and 'thirtysomething' didn't work for us. Reagan was president, and there was no music scene. Art had become about celebrities. We looked all over the world and the century for inspiration -- at Kodo drummers, the Bauhaus, '60s happenings, the Abstract Expressionists, Pink Floyd, punk rock and the comedy of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. We were interested in performance art and science. We'd ask, 'What is it about art that seems both promising and pretentious?'"
Well-planned: The decision to be blue, not chartreuse, was the only accidental element of Blue Man's genesis. Everything else was analyzed ad nauseam, from how many Blue Men there should be ("three puts you where community and isolation meet," the founders decided) to what instruments they should play (they wanted to fulfill John Lennon's prediction that new inventions would eventually supplant guitars and keyboards).
At first, Blue Man was conceived as a painting come to life. A lot of performance art was tediously talky then -- psychotherapy in the presence of an audience. Sometimes early Blue Man spoke. Sometimes he didn't.
"When Blue Man stopped talking, we noticed that suddenly our personalities went away, and this other character showed up who was more profound," Wink says. "Not speaking almost felt like a form of rebellion."
If he didn't speak or sing or dance, what was Blue Man doing onstage? He was challenging the audience to accept that art isn't necessarily elitist, humor doesn't have to be verbal, music need not be melodic, and entertainment can be nonlinear. Perhaps the sound of Cap'n Crunch being munched is a language. Maybe music should be seen and heard.
Dilemma of success: As selling tickets became less of a struggle, the group became a bit more particular. "We got more specific about what we'd do to get attention," Wink says, "not to be divas about it, but to protect the sanctity of the character." They've been guests on "The Tonight Show" 10 times since 1992, and the way they developed special, brief bits for those appearances turned out to be the perfect training for their Grammy number.
Once the show was a hit, a focus on keeping Blue Man pure became as important a survival skill as filling the theater had once been. "We realized we had something very special with the Blue character -- special in here," Goldman says, thumping his fist on his heart. "We wanted him to be around for decades, not for months or even years."
So when the offers came in -- for HBO and Showtime specials and feature films, for Blue Men on Ice and Blue Man theme park rides -- the answer was "no."
As demand for tickets increased, the original little show -- in a theater of 299 seats -- went from eight to nine to 10 performances a week. Even that expansion wasn't enough to support the future the founders envisioned.
The plan to open outside New York was born of necessity. It wasn't that the success of the first show made opening in a second city possible. Revenues from a Boston company were needed to sustain more growth, and all growth supported Blue Man Group's autonomy.
Criticism: Playing off-Broadway, training armies of Blue Men, opening in Las Vegas, doing commercials for Intel and marketing a music CD have all been cited as evidence of Blue Man Group selling out.
The criticism doesn't faze them. They wrote the Intel spots themselves, and saw them as chances to make little 30-second films, practice for an eventual Blue Man Group movie. Besides, they didn't feel they were hawking a product. Intel is a brand, a good fit because Blue Man Group sees itself as a brand too. The Las Vegas show recouped an initial $7 million investment before its first anniversary, and Blue Man Group's 12 shows a week consistently sell out.