The crowd was under capacity, the volume was grandma-sized, and the sex and drugs were mostly absent during the Blue Man Group concert at the Kohl Center last night — not exactly the rock spectacle the group's "How to be a Megastar Tour 2.0" tried to emulate.
The almost 6,000 concertgoers remained well-behaved throughout the sit-down show, and the scent of weed didn't waft across the venue until the opening strains of "Baba O'Riley" during the planned encore.
But where the Blue Men have failed to become a Pentium-era version of Kiss, they have succeeded in bringing their quirky percussion grooves to the arena setting. Last night's full-on spectacle bombarded the senses with finely tuned visual effects, an eight-piece band and an army of props centered around complex PVC pipe creations.
DJ Mike Relm opened the show with a set of turntable music that included nods to everything from AC/DC to TV theme songs. The synchronized video playing on the screen behind the DJ used clips from Charlie Brown, "School of Rock" and Led Zeppelin concert footage to illustrate his musical selections. While Relm's dexterous scratching was nothing to scoff at, his virtuoso turntable skills did little to spice up the songs, and his act was basically a snazzy version of your standard preshow music.
Even if Relm had been able to really stretch out his legs, he couldn't have matched the beginning of Blue Man Group's show. One group member started playing a steady cadence as spotlights projected his silhouette onto a curtain in front of the stage. The other two soon joined him, their spidery shadows drumming wildly as the lights began to jump and move, throwing their forms into different reliefs. The curtain dropped once the band kicked in, unleashing a highly orchestrated spectacle that would take up most of the next two hours.
The group structured its show around a mock instructional video designed to teach aspiring rock stars how to use makeup, dance moves and bizarre wardrobe items (i.e., cod-pieces) to put on a kick-ass concert. A series of commands and "Rock Star Move" tips played between songs, prompting crowd interaction and setting up gags like the theft of an audience member's credit card.
The comedy shtick was the liveliest part of the performance, easily outshining the group's relatively repetitive original music. For performers whose mime-like facial expressions range from "wide-eyed, slightly bemused but serious" to "wide-eyed, slightly surprised but still very serious," the Blue Men were surprisingly adept at pulling off a wide variety of humorous antics. They played to the crowd without ever breaking their stoic silence, employing gestures and body language alone to accentuate the video's punch lines.
While the trio's quirky humor was amusing, the heavy reliance on the video killed any sense of spontaneity. It appeared the show might veer refreshingly off course when a fan yelled "Free Bird!" as the group was going about yet another silent stunt, prompting the band to begin a trippy rendition of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic. The request was soon revealed to be premeditated, however, when one of the Blue Men just happened to have a lighter to continue the joke, and another just happened to have a fire extinguisher, and… well, you get the picture.
But the atomic-clock precision required by the synchronized elements of the show didn't stop the trio from delighting the audience with its extensive bag of tricks. The group exhibited circus-performer skill in executing awesome feats. The most notable of these occurred when one Blue Man caught a seemingly endless stream of gumballs and marshmallows in his mouth as they were thrown some 50 feet across the stage by his fellow, before depositing them in a perfectly formed mound on an audience member's head.
The actual performers were nearly overshadowed by their incredible array of props, which included everyday items as well as re-dedicated musical instruments like a tipped piano. The group adapted its stunts to the large venue through the extensive use of miniature cameras, which broadcast their lightning-quick drumming and wide-eyed expressions to the nosebleed section via three video screens. At one point, a camera was even snaked down an audience member's throat.
This surprise lesson in human anatomy was complemented by an educational segment on global warming. The group joked about an endangered planet with their usual panache, provoking hesitant laughter from the audience. Later on, a Sept. 11 tribute managed to avoid Toby Keith cheeseball territory, proving that Blue Man Group can pull off an entertaining show with social commentary to boot.
Perhaps the only real downside was the group's original music, most of which was based on their elaborate PVC instruments. The tripped-out rock vibes rarely rose above a mild andante tempo. Combined with bland lyrics about themes of alienation and conformity set to animated videos of sad-looking people acting out such vagaries as "But I'd rather look at the sky/ than wonder why/ I let you take my time," the music got old fast. "If I sing a song, will you sing along?" warbled the vocalist/keyboardist (who even dressed liked Brandon Flowers in a Rat Pack suit coat), but with such lame verses, few in the audience were singing.
Luckily, the relative monotony of this music was broken up by a number of covers. A snippet of Devo's "Whip It" started off a medley of classic rock tunes climaxing in Van Halen's "Jump," all of which were newly entertaining when played on PVC. And when the Who's "Baba O'Riley" began the encore, the concert kicked into the high gear the crowd had been waiting for.
The concertgoers were ultimately tangled up in blue when the Blue Men showered the crowd in paper streamers from — what else? — cannons constructed from PVC pipe. It may not have been "Megastar" in the rock 'n' roll sense of the word, but it certainly was a sight to behold.
And if simple is better, then the all-blue makeup gives Kiss a run for its money.
