by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
What: BLUE MAN GROUP’S HOW TO BE A MEGASTAR TOUR 2.0
When: November 19th @ 7:30PM
Where: Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena
The iconic figure of the Blue Man has become instantly familiar as it saturated our culture from the late eighties on. As pop-culture icons they’ve become so recognizable that they’ve even made an appearance as the butt of jokes on The Simpsons and Family Guy. The Blue Man Group started out as New York street theatre in the eighties and became popular as a kind of off-Broadway fringe performance. The Group soon found their way on to the Tonight Show, garnering mass appeal. By 2000, their appearance in Intel ads assured that everyone was at least nominally familiar with them.
On stage the Blue Men perform in different ways, by making found objects into percussive instruments (not unlike STOMP) and by performing silent parodies of our pretensions, our culture (modern day Harpo Marxs).
Actor Matt Ramsey has been a Blue Man performer for about six years. His background, which includes an MFA in acting and percussion experience, was a perfect match for the Group. Originally from the New York cast, he’s hit the road with the traveling version of the Blue Man Group. I asked him about the process of getting into and out of all that blue make-up, but he wouldn’t go into detail, saying that “It’s part of the magic to not really know.” We do know that it takes about half an hour to forty-five minutes to transform an actor into a Blue Man. Getting out of make-up, says Ramsey, is a bit more involved.
“Its grease-paint, it doesn’t dry, it kind of has the consistency of margarine. It shows up everywhere, but you get better [at taking it off] the more you do it…You know where the paint hides….At first it’ll show up everywhere, on the collar of your shirts and coats. [It] gets in your hair-- but it’s not a big deal, you get used to it, just like anything else.”
A bald-cap and grease paint can go a long way towards disguising physical characteristics. As a result, Ramsey hasn’t often been recognized out of make-up, though he did have a reverse recognition experience, wherein a woman who lived in his building recognized him while he was in make-up as her neighbor. “It’s challenging as an actor at first…people enjoy being recognized for their work. So as an actor, playing this character that is essentially egoless is a really great exercise-- and continues to be a really great exercise.”
Ramsey says that although the job can be “tiring, exhausting and… not easy on the skin,” he benefits from playing an egoless, unjudgmental character. “Certainly there’s a lot of power and a lot of presence in this character as well …I’ve enjoyed trying to take those aspects and trying to live them.”
The concept behind this particular tour, according to Executive Tour Producer Paul J. Emery, is that the Blue Man Group downloads “a tongue-in-cheek ‘how-to’ manual on becoming a rock star, [and] is joined by an eight piece band and subsequently takes us through, step-by-step and song-by-song, every head-bobbing, fist-pumping moment of a real concert.” Emery added, “The result is a uniquely clever interactive show that delivers hypnotic entertainment for all.”
During the show, Ramsey says, the Blue Men will be playing on “PVC tubes, pipes of all sorts…swishing long fiberglass poles around to make a swishing sound…It just goes along with the Blue Man’s character to discover things and use things in a new way that most people would see as non-traditional, they just wouldn’t do at all.” They will also be accompanied by a rock band. “Unlike the theater show,” says Ramsey “this concert has an opportunity to feature the band and the musicians.”
The Blue Man Group’s special brand of humor and performance will be at the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena on Sunday, November 19 at 7:30 PM Tickets range from $39.50 to $85.00. For tickets or more info call (904)632-3373 or go to www.artistseries.fccj.org
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