THEATRE REVIEW:
BLUE MAN GROUP
22 JUL/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4/5

TORONTO - For Kermit the Frog — remember him? — it was apparently never easy being green. But with all due respect to our amphibian friends, it seems that being blue isn’t exactly a cakewalk either.
 That said, on a good-time scale, cobalt would seem to trump chartreuse on many fronts, not the least of which is the fact that in a pinch, a blue man could be called upon to pull a green frog puppet’s strings.

If you doubt it, swing on by the Princess of Wales, where Blue Man Group is currently encamped for a limited run, featuring a trio of the hardest working — and certainly the funniest — indigo-hued wing-nuts you’re likely to ever meet outside of a February in Yellowknife.


They are not, of course, the same three Blue Men who took up a limited residency in the then-newly revamped Panasonic Theatre several years back — but they are apparently cut from the same cloth and certainly part of the same dye lot, thanks to the assured direction of Marcus Miller and Blue Man Group (it’s a quality control thing, one suspects). Much of their shtick from that earlier visit is unchanged, of course — silly, sensational flights of fancy that demonstrate time after time that while these clowns have a firm grasp on the world of science and technology, they only have enough mathematical proficiency to reduce absolutely everything to its lowest common denominator in the blinking of an eye. 


But while the three boys in Blue on duty on the night currently under discussion (Kalen Allmandinger, Kirk Massey, Patrick Newton and Bhurin Sead apparently alternate in the roles), are charged with reprising much of the material that made up the company’s original Toronto engagement, they’ve also added just enough new material that anyone who has ever been a 10-year-old boy (or ever loved one) should consider a return engagement. All this — and loud music too!


Throw in the fact that in the six years since whatever spaceship it is these delightful aliens use for their commute touched down on these shores, stage technology has given them a whole new toy box that allows them to make a bigger splash as they explore being little boys. And yes, there is a lot of splashing involved — so much so that patrons seated in the first three rows are given complimentary rain ponchos to protect their summer best from assorted assaults from everything from paint to Cap’n Crunch. They might even come in handy for a new form of Twinkie defense, it seems and a prove suitable protection against what we can only hope is a whole lot of banana puree. 


Difficult as it may be to believe, Blue Man Group is not a show that will delight absolutely everybody — but if you (or someone you love) has ever laughed so hard at the Three Stooges that you’ve shot milk out your nose — or taken a certain fiendish delight in the obvious discomfort of others — chances are, this show is going to be right up your alley.
 It may not be easy being blue or even all that respectable, one suspects — but for a certain segment of the population (and I suspect you already know who you are) — it’s a noble profession nonetheless.