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After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of hairless, earless, silent, blue-and-black clad performers, who spit paint and sculpt marshmallows, gobble Twinkies and drum in primary colors, unexpectedly became a culture-infiltrating sensation.
They achieved this — along with shows in more than a dozen cities across the globe, multiple concert tours, three studio albums, a Grammy nomination, many TV appearances, a book and one indelible sitcom story line — without changing much about their approach. Throughout one of the longest runs in Off Broadway history, they remained proudly on the silly side of performance art. Even without a narrative, they also connected viscerally with audiences, earning a legion of megafans. “We love the idea of a show that is sublime and ridiculous,” said Chris Wink, one of the founding performers.
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Blue Man Group, which has been owned by Cirque du Soleil since 2017, is not disappearing: long-running shows remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return gig is planned for Orlando, Fla. But closing the New York production, where it all began — along with another decades-old production in Chicago — is the end of a chapter. (In a statement, a spokeswoman said Cirque du Soleil was proud of Blue Man Group’s track record, and that it made the “difficult decision” to shutter after “we re-evaluated our current standings.” After declaring bankruptcy in 2020, Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based live entertainment behemoth, is controlled by private equity firms.)
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Emerging from the East Village arts scene, the original Blue Man Group served as a monument to possibility: D.I.Y. creativity — or unfettered lunacy — could still flourish in New York. That for 34 years it occupied the same bit of desirable real estate, near the downtown mecca of Astor Place, and across from the landmark Public Theater, gave it a stately foundation — even if its 281-seat subterranean space was, almost by design, a little dank. Photos of the bald and the blue loomed outside, part of the urban architecture.
