Rock show parody with blue men

By John Benson

The three blue men don’t speak and are accompanied by an eight-piece band.

111That’s the idea behind the Blue Man Group’s foray into the live concert realm with its “How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.1,” which comes to Youngstown’s Chevrolet Centre on Wednesday.

“The show is fun,” said Blue Man Group Performer/Director Brian Scott, calling from his Brooklyn, N.Y., home. “It’s a rock concert, but it’s a pretty hilarious parody of a rock concert at the same time. Our perspective of the whole thing is the idea of a rock concert is pretty awesome, but they’re kind of silly as well when you start to take into account the sometimes kind of bloated ego that’s involved in the idea of rock ’n’ roll and rock stars. We as a culture have a real attachment to that kind of cult of stardom.

“And the idea is the three blue men, who don’t speak and aren’t rock stars, are going to attempt to execute a rock concert for the audience. So that’s kind of the angle of the show. But what happens is we have a really great rock concert using an eight-piece band. We all are playing our butts off. But it’s also pretty interactive. We’re sort of starting at nothing and taking the audience with us on this exploration of what a rock concert should be.”

While in concert, audiences may witness an eight-man group supporting the three Blue Man performers; upon closer look many of the instruments being played on stage are, well, somewhat odd and often mind blowing. The outfit, which will be playing material from its 1999 debut, “Audio,” and its 2003 follow-up “The Complex,” creates percussion-heavy music using obscurely named homemade instruments.

“At some point we started putting an -ulum at the end of all the instruments we built,” Scott laughed. “So we have a tubulum. This is basically a PVC instrument you hit large drumsticks with different-length tubes, so the length of the tube determines the pitch of the instrument. It’s a bass instrument.”

He added, “We also have a drum-bone, which is a hybrid between a trombone and a drum, which you play with sticks. But it’s as a moveable tube, so you can change the pitch. We play an entire song on that, and it takes three blue men to play.”

Not only are the musical results unique but they often lend themselves to unexpected reinterpretations of classic rock songs. For example, Scott said audiences will be dazzled by the act’s PVC-heavy cover of Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days.”

Despite the fact the three blue-colored figures appear to be somewhat alienlike — almost nonhuman — it’s their genuine and incorruptible behavior that makes them not only appealing but a germane character study into our own existence.

“Every time we go to a new place, we think maybe this is somewhere people don’t get it,” Scott said. “We go to South Korea and maybe it won’t connect. Maybe people won’t connect with it because of the culture and the fact we’re an American group. But it has never happened. First of all, the Blue Man is not American.

“Also, there is an element of the character that every actor we have ever hired has to have and that’s a sense of innocence. It’s like an ability to be vulnerable and innocent on stage. And that quality, I think, is the thing that really allows people to really connect with the characters.”