Here's The Thing with Alec BaldwinChris Wink, Philip Stanton, and Matthew Goldman created Blue Man Group in 1989 as a performance art piece and it has since grown to become a worldwide phenomenon. What started as a small show at the Astor Place Theater in New York City went on to tour worldwide three times and take up residency in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orlando, and Boston. But all good things must come to an end, and the lights go out on their Astor Place run this February, making Blue Man Group one of the longest running off-Broadway shows. To date Blue Man Group has released five albums, received a Grammy nomination, performed on numerous TV shows, and appeared in many memorable commercials. In this conversation, Chris Wink and Philip Stanton share how they, along with Matt Goldman, came up with the idea for the Blue Man, who brings what to the table, and how Blue Man Group took shape and evolved over time.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. That's PVC IV, a song featuring PVC pipes being played by three men with their flip flops. My guests today are some of the most famous performers in the world, though you've likely never seen their real faces nor heard their actual voices. Created by Matt Goldman, Chris Wink and Philip Stanton in nineteen eighty nine, Blue Man Group began as a performance art piece inspired by nineteen eighties counterculture. The show would eventually grow into the worldwide phenomenon we know it as today. In addition to the original Astor Place theater show, Blue Man Group has staged three world tours and taken up residency in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orlando, and Boston. The group has released five albums, received a Grammy nomination, and performed on numerous TV shows and in some of the most memorable commercials. This past weekend, Blue Man Group's original New York City show closed after seventeen thousand performances over three decades. They're synonymous with creativity, ingenuity, and of course, a distinct shade of blue paints.
My name is Chris Wink and this voice is the voice of Philip Stanton.
Where'd you grow up?
Well, I grew up in New York.
Actually, my dad came to Union Theological Seminary by Columbia, became a minister. We were in Texas for five years. He was in a parsonage, but then he got hired back because he was a linguist guy, and he became a professor.
So I grew up by Columbia. It was a really interesting Union.
Yeah, and what about you.
I was born in Lubbock, Texas. Group in Savannah, Georgia. My father was a minister also weirdly, but my father also built churches, I say, a group in Savannah. But I really, you know, I grew up until I was eight in Texas, So I'm kind of half and half in a way.
So when you were growing up, what was theater art? Creativity? Performance art? I mean, people could be doing what you're doing, which is considered this highly creative thing. I'm not just saying this for your benefit. I moved to New York in nineteen seventy nine, and by the time I was in New York and you guys opened up on Lafayette Street, which was before LaMaMa. When you were and when you had the he were staked out there at the Lafayette. I mean everyone in New York went to go see Blue Man. Now, prior to that, to this highly creative thing you guys came up with, especially at that time, we hadn't seen much like that at all. What was your diet creatively? What were you into? Well?
I moved to New York to be kind of a traditional career in film and television. I wanted to study acting and audition and everything. I didn't really know about performance art. I was pretty innocent. Chris was actually the first person I met on the first job that I had when I moved to New York for a catering company, Glorious Food, and so we kind of hit it off right away somehow, and I kind of learned about performance art in the downtown scene through Chris, and having grown up a minister's son, I kind of inherited this feeling that what you do has to say something to the world. But I didn't want to be preachy, like my literally preachee.
Like, especially back then, a lot of the performance art was like intolerably preachy and just you know, some of it was great, but I would say most performance art I don't like, even back then, and at a certain point we're saying, don't call us performance art because I like Larie Anderson, you know what I mean, she's a performance artist. We're trying to come buying a bunch of different forms, including vaudeville. You know, we do comedy. We're not trying to get into the gallery. We're taking Captain crunch and we're eating it. We're trying to be outsiders, to have some sort of exploration of the world. But when I was young, and I think Phil is like this too, watching those Marx Brothers movies was a.
Bit oh yeah, yeah.
And I had graduated from what Bugs Bunny and Bugs Bunny's true for real. I had explored all these things at Wesleyan, but I wasn't up that's where it went. Yeah, it was great because I I was a drummer. American Studies was just a way to get to stuff. I studied film, lots of drumming there.
I was a DJ.
But when I got out, I was like, well, now how do I get a job? You know, I liked technology and science, but as a layman, you know, so I was like, well, I guess I'll work in advertising or marketing. And I got on a track for that, and I probably would have been you know, it was kind of traditional. I was good at it, you know, and I would have been a regular. But I was like, this is not making me happy. I quit that and I said, I'm just going to be a waiter. And then, you know, with my friends, we're going to create this stuff that combines comedy, acting, drumming, technology, design, lighting, and art.
And you know, it's not going to make us a living.
So we got to take this catering thing very seriously and we just started doing it literally just as a joy, as a bliss, you know. And you know, one thing, we'd have to find places to do it. So it'd be like lea Mama or p S one twenty two whatever. We would work for three weeks straight, you know, Phil and I would do like fourteen hour shifts. And so Matt had a job in a software company, and then we would take off a week and we would build this thing. And then we'd go and we do one night and about eighty percent of it would suck, but there would be like a little bit in there that was good.
Little nugget, you know, And so we were.
Like, yeah, so we'd grab we'll keep that thirty seconds, We'll keep that thirty combined it with another thirty seconds.
And the thing is, our performance art friends would have been like, no, it's your art. If the audience doesn't understand it, then there it's their problem. We're like, no, we're about villions. The audience matters, you know, and I love that, and yes, vaudeville, you know. And in fact, a lot of our early pieces were kind of we needed to make fun of the pretend justness of performance art a little bit, like when we catch these marshmallows and we put them on a pedestal and we say five thousand dollars, it's like, you know, really, you know, and we make the painting at the like the first two three pieces of the show, even to this day, are kind of spoofing the pretentiousness of performance art in a way that the audience doesn't even get anymore, but they don't care. And what we found too, is like the jump cut to Burning Man, you got a piece of art and you got a dude on a bike that's all tricked out, and I think they're both art.
You know what I mean.
To me, I don't care how much the museum has blessed it, you know what I mean. I think it's just creative expressions are awesome, but the whole pretentiousness of arts never really appeal to us.
I had this image of you with the catering company and one of you has got your back to him, and you come over there and you go, Chris, why did you paint all the eggs blue?
Right?
Everything starts getting blu erry.
Well, we wrote that piece where we're sitting at the meal with the guests and then stuff starts shooting out our chest all over the at a catering gig because we're sitting in our text.
And I was thinking, like, wow, the only reason.
This is possible is because it takes so long for the food to get to our anus. If it came right out, hopefully it would, it would make this whole thing impossible. So we said, well, what if the blue man had a really short loop in that regard, and if he ate something it came right out, that would be interesting, at least to us. So remember how many times have people tell us so you can't do that piece?
Oh? Yeah, every time? Whenever we opened a show, they'd say, no, you can't do that in.
People think that's too gross.
And we do that piece and everyone goes everyone goes ew.
And then they go, yeah, that was great. Yeah, I mean it's true. Every every step of the way they'd say like, no, you have to change that. Yeah, nobody in Vegas will like that, nobody in China will like that.
Do that in France. But so you're catering together, and where's Matt.
Well, Matt had a software job, and so you knew each other from where, oh, from seventh grade?
Yeah, I was the odd man out coming from.
You with Anna and you knew him from seventh grade? What's cool?
Fieldston with the field step in Riverdale.
We went to the school and there's all these like celebrity kids and stuff, rich kids and all, and we felt like outsiders. But on the outside we looked like we fit in perfectly. There was sports and all we were outside. Well, you know, he was like the captain of the soccer team, but we felt like imposters. They were like, all right, we're just trying to make sure no one notices that we you know, we don't have the money these kids have, and we don't. We don't feel like we fit in. So we created a character that embodied on the outside how we felt on the inside because we had managed to pull off a great disguise. We were walking through the high and we weren't getting bullied, you know.
So it was art performing any of them? How did it?
I was a drummer, first rock and roll and yeah, well new wave punk kind of, and I wasn't supported at all. I feels I remember, couldn't do it there. I had to get lessons outside, and to do theater. You couldn't do theater during the day, so if you were on a sport, you couldn't do theater. And then there wasn't really any art I would I didn't have any painterly art talent, so if you'd asked anybody there, they wouldn't have said, oh, you know, he's likely to be an artist. But I think we all shared the idea of like, well, we don't need to be an artist capital a, but we have this creative impulse. We just don't have any like specific thing that's like, oh, this is really talented. But what if we combine different arts together and used our mediocrity to an advantage.
The three of you together would riff about this.
Well, we talked about like because Matt was like the same thing, Like, he hadn't even done any training in art. I had studied art history and stuff, but I couldn't draw a bird, you know, I have a nine year old level drawing ability. And so we were like, maybe if we kind of mixed different mediums together we could find a form of expression. And Phil was like, well, I'm an actor, but I'm also a builder. And he was the one with a saw on the screw built the drums, and they were like, you know, that's just as much a form of creation as anything else.
I think it's an important story about the creative impulse. Going back to the kind of art stacked at the top of the show, the spoof on art, there's another layer to it that I think it's important to mention. It's it's like this simple, out of the box sort of creativity. You know, you take a gumball on make a painting. It's not a great painting, but it's a creative impulse. And I think that's one thing to mention about that at its core, Blue Man is sort of a celebration of our human attributes, you know, our creativity, our curiosity and our innovation and our innovation in our desire for community. It's kind of those you.
Take a gumball, make a pinion and you're actually innovating.
It's not a miss misuse exactly, and that's misappropriation.
That's what could be more human than that.
That's what's gotten us here, is that like tinkering with stuff that's sort of divergent thinking.
As Sir Kit Robinson.
I just want to say, if you hit that more time, how does it start? How does it start? Covering yourself in blue paint and going and having a nervous break down our stage.
So we started with the characters like, all right, let's see what it's like to be blue, and we would just do socials.
We walk around blue, yeah, blue, the way you ended up in the show. Yeah.
At first we talked a little bit, just so we wouldn't get beaten up or something arrested. Yeah, So we would just be like and the people say, what's going on, We're like, we're trying to find figure that out. And then we would go to a bar and like people were like, you guys look interesting. And what we found is if it had just been one of us blue, people would have been like, oh, that's weird. I don't even but the three of us identically, they're like, oh, now this is interesting. What what what do you got here? I always said, well, we're hoping you'd buy us a drink, and they'd be like, all right, I'll do that, and then they would buy us a dream and would talk to them all.
The best thing though, is when people would just kind of like shake their head yes, you know, as if they got something, and they were like, I don't know what they're something's resonating.
But we wanted to go inside because it got cold, and let's start creating pieces. So we'd create five minutes of something out of time. And we put the drums in pretty early on. I mean it was selfish because I was a drummer, but also we wanted so we have an outsider character, but we didn't want it to be like a robe or an alien with like theorem and tech music. We also had this idea that the blue Man maybe came from our ancient past, Like we wanted there to be a tribal primal quality so that maybe people go as an alien, but actually that's me that's the tribal past that we've left behind as we've become so modern. That's as about as intellectual as we would get. But that's why when you go to the show, it isn't sort of techno music, even though I like some of that, you know, it's this tribal, primal thing that is this undercurrent.
We have comedy and this and that, but there's a boom doon to kadom to katoom.
So it was kind of another impulse that we had that we shared was this sort of sense of here we are in this city, walking around feeling weird, and like where's the damn cave? Where's the fireplace with the drums? You know, like what do we do as a culture? Why do we throw all that stuff out? I mean we we left behind organized religion but there's no well it would be Christianity and that was Jewish but we and there's nothing against religion, but just didn't work for us as an organized thing. But so we didn't have any where do you go for like, you know, you go to a rock show, but like where's but I.
Don't know, you know, we should make a fomentary where, you know, And just since since blue mant there have been like six new species discovered. We should make a documentary because of bla right, because we should make a documentary as if as if we were discovered as a new species.
Species was there, but it was hiding. Let me ask you this, though, seriously, which is that this notion that mad for me in acting and so for when you when you love something and what you'll give because you guys wind up giving a lot. You have to put the appliances on and do all this stuff all the time for years and years and years. But you want to get to that. What was it about this early on that you invested in? Yeah, no, it's a big committment every night for the years.
Years because you know, we were really doing it out of a love of this thing. We'd seen Bill Moyer's interviewing Joseph Campbell and heard that shot that was heard around the world to follow your bliss was the theme of a lot of the you know.
The thing it wasn't is a hope that we would ever make a living from it.
Yeah, we had no idea, but we were finally being able to finally had an outlet for the disparate things that we were interested in and we had a way to hang out together.
And it was really pleasant.
When does it become a show, Well, it starts out as bits, you know, and then little by little somebody invites us to perform somewhere up in Rochester or La Mama. This by the way. At La Mama. One of your brothers came. He was with Oliver Platt, my brother Billy's very good films. Yes, yes, So they came together very early on and were very supportive, and it was really nice to see people being supported. They kind of encourage you. They were like, you know, I get it. A lot of it didn't work, you know, but keep going, you know. And you could see that even people that had gone on to do films and stuff, I understood the gestation period, you know. Dustin Hoffman came Yea and invited us to come to his office and he said, you know, all my work is about how actors have to work, and I love that you guys. I could just tell it. You're like, you were just doing this out of your love. And we were like, you're right, you know, and he's like, well, keep going, and then all right, that's the end of the meeting. And then we never saw him again, but it was so sweet that he took a little bit of time to just say. It reminded me when I was young, he said we would go and do all these things. It's just because we.
Loved worked hard, and we worked hard.
There's been a couple of times over the years where someone will come up to me and they want to get the secret.
Ah, you guys made it up here. What's the secret? You know, how did you do it?
They want me to give them an answer so they can just take it, and then like, okay, I'll do that, and it's like a shortcut, and I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. Follow what you love and work really hard and who knows what will happen.
I mean, but that's all I can offer because I can't say, here's the recipe. We didn't know it would work out. It could have easily not worked. Yes, you know what I mean.
We were having fun and you know a lot of them is just trying to crack ourselves up. Yeah, but we took cracking ourselves up seriously.
Now, what about yourself? Like if you said to me, what is the ultimate extension? Maybe that's the wrong phrase. What is the truest. I mean your artists. Was this your artistic expression, whether other forms of artistic expression you were playing with, dreaming of, thinking of, and this is how it ended up.
Well, what I discovered through it is a love of Even though I had it in my background, I disregarded it as important, the ability to work with tools and understand hardware and you know, pipes and things like that. Yeah, I thought, well, I'll leave all that behind, that's useless. But through Blue Man, I discovered my love of like making shit and being a creator of stuff, you know. So that's kind of what I'm embarking on now is I have a lot of ideas for like useful objects, and I'm just going to try to execute all of that stuff that's in my head. I'm trying to follow the the way that Blue Man started to follow what makes me happy right now, you know. And so that's it for me. I'm kind of pursuing what I found through Blue Man to be sort of my real pursuit.
Blue Man groups Chris Wink and Phil Stanton. If you enjoy conversations with eccentric Las Vegas performers, check out my episode with Penjelette of the world famous Penn and Teller.
You have to know that my mom and my dad never said hell or damn or any absent in the house. Hardcore, no alcohol, no heller, damn. When I started doing card tricks, my father was like, you won't be gambling though. You can do card tricks, but I don't like having a deck of cards in the house. I would say, Dad, I'm just doing manipulations and tricks. Well, that's fine.
To hear more of my conversation with Penjelette, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Chris and Phil talk about debuting Blue Man Group in Las Vegas and how an unlikely series of computer ads helped explode the group's popularity. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing That's drum Bone from Blue Man Group's nineteen ninety nine debut album audio. When Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink first began performing, there were only three Blue Men. Eventually, the original trio would train and hire other performers to don the Blue Cape. I was curious what was involved with running Blue Man Groups organization off stage and what projects they've been working on since.
Well at blue men. We were trained, we were writing new material, we were directing, and well actually wandering a company.
One of the reasons I left is that we remember the earlier story. I went into marketing and advertising, and I got to get the fuck out of this.
I don't do my art. Jump cut to twenty fifteen.
I'm the fucking marketing guy, right Phil, and I'm like, what the fuck happened?
I'm begging marketing. They tricked me.
Of course I gotta get the So I wanted to go back to being a scrappy artist a little bit. So I started making shit in my bathroom. I made this sort of infinity room with hanging neon stuff, and that ended up turning into wink World, which is a psychedelic funhouse. So I've been doing and it's all the things I learned to bluem and it combining kids.
I have kids.
How old are they?
They're twenty and sixteen and I stepdaughter who's eighteen.
And when you were in the house and doing your things, they just go.
Dad, there it goes again. They won the jackpot and they don't know it. I'm like, come on, let's get all this shampoo and genius and We're like, oh, that's just weird. Don't do that, dad.
You have kids, yeah, fifteen and seventeen, you might have young kids. Yeah.
But to answer to the other question is that absolutely it was was my fan. I couldn't think of a better fantasy than Blue Man and what I'm doing now, which is to synergize things together symphony right, the word implies sort of like bringing things together, right, and so bringing disparate things. You know, what's the phrase something bedfellows, uncommon, bed strange, strange, bed friends. That has been the best reward of all this. It's great that we've had this whatever success, but the fact that we got to work for many years, you know, doing something we loved.
And then the joy of performing in front of people.
It's like, that was the fun thing about last I haven't performed in a while and I missed that and that has a drummer.
I like that too, So.
What have you been doing that? Just all individuals.
We create these I've got these things in Wink world.
They're like, it's like a psychedelic ride at a tripped out acid carnival.
Not that I ever have done drugs are psychedelics.
I actually haven't seen Wink World. Yet when did it start right before the pandemic? No, right in the middle of it, in the middle of it. So, yeah, I got out of travel most by accident.
It was the perfect thing for you know, social distancing.
But you guys are out of time. Once you are questing, the things become really really huge, and you're gonna go out on the road. Now, describe to me if you I'm assuming some of you were all if you were involved in some casting sessions, who's going to go out on the road or who's going to replace you eventually on the show? What's that like?
Well, we didn't have understudies for the first We did the first three years without an understudy, or at least the first two, and then after a certain point the stage matages like you know, you guys should have an understudy, right, No, No, we're really the only ones.
Yeah, we thought of ourselves as a band, you know, like the beating.
Because well, I'm going to train the drummer just in case, and so we go whatever, But we're not going to help you.
You can train the drummer if you want, but he's not going on.
He's not going on ahead, so then fills at home, you know, as you do before a show, using a router to just do something, and apparently he routed his finger almost all the way off.
It shows up. It's like hanging by a thread.
You can't go on and no, I did, I did this?
Did the show?
I see? Then you went to the hot and I needed surgery. So so weirdest thing about it, Like, like I said, we thought of ourselves as a band. So the first moment that we saw someone else play the character, it's like, duh. We created a bald and blue character who is anonymous, and you know, other people and other races should play this character.
We were. We would go around what it's about.
We would go around and brag about how much we didn't have a big ego because of the blue man, but we had this this thing. We're the only ones that could do it. And then this guy comes in. He does it great, Like fucking a man is always so humiliate. And also, you know, when you fail at a piece like this business that we're in, you can kind of get a big ego, but ultimately it's humbling, right like because you at some point you realize like all.
Right, yeah, and then we thought we realized hey, we can beat the McDonald's of them.
No, But it was funny because you remember when Pin and Teller came and they were like, God, you guys.
Are so lucky because you could get other people to do the show.
And we're like, no, no, we could cut the I'm the blue Man on the laft.
But something Actually, Penn and Teller we call him up. We're like, hey, you remember what you said about us.
We think we wanted to open a show in Vegas, and it's like, yeah, come on out. So they were the ones that showed us around Vegas, introduced them to their manager, and then he got us the basically set us up.
And so we owe that to Pen and Telly.
So I can't think of anything slightly more disparate here, but enlightened me, which is to go from Lafayette, cross the street from the public doing that show to go to Vegas. Different crowd, so different.
By the way, By the way, we thought we'd gone on the Tonight Show a couple We thought we were sort of, you know, known, But we get out there. We open up as a headliner in a big theater and empty and we're like, oh, oh, when you're a headliner people supposed to know you are ship. We left one thing out. The one thing we left what happened. So we're like, all right, we gotta do something fast. We got something fast. We're like, oh, we got to get on some more tonight. We went on tonight. You helped a little bit. First, we get a call from the Lakers, we want you to perform at halftime, and we're like, we'll do anything.
We got to get keep this show up. And he goes, yeah, how.
Many is it on TV? Like non, they don't really televise the half timething. Then why are we doing it? Well, you know it's la and there's people. I'm like, well, okay, we'll do it. And he goes, but one thing, do you mind being gold and purple? That wouldn't be the blue mag up right, Yeah, but you know it's the Lakers. You know those are colors, you know, And we're like, what are you talking about? And we couldn't believe it. So we were just hung up, you know, and we didn't do it. So then Intel calls, can you guys want you to do our ads?
Oh?
Yeah, because your logo is blue. You know, there's more to a blue man than the blue color, you know. So we said no, and then the guys says, no, listen, I'm the head of the whatever. I always I want to I want you to say no to me in person. And as he comes in, why'd you say no?
It's just blue? And I don't know.
We were at the blue Man group and we appreciate it, but like and he goes, no, no, it's not because it's blue. We're trying We don't have a product. We're selling the chip inside the computer. But our brand, what we're trying to represent is smart, innovative, fun, and we think that's what you represent. And we go, well, that's interesting, and I said, but we'd have to have our name in every ad.
Is oh shit, we can't. We can't do that. I said, Well, he comes back, is all right, we'll do it.
So every single Intel commercial had our name in it at the beginning for four seconds, contractually, and they played it around the world and about three months later sold out every night in Vegas.
Wow.
Yeah. But but there is one thing a cultural context to keep in mind too, is that there was no precedent for artists being in the advertising world at that time, right, you know, right, not even musicians didn't really even license. Everybody avoided that to commercials.
Now when we were in my business, you go to Japan and do Suntorial week commercials, they give you a million dollars for one week.
We were proud of those bits. I mean you should. Yeah, people, you can google them into it.
It was a great like thirty second medium toward.
Oh, you know, it reminds me something. I want to tell you about Vegas really quick now.
Now I want to hear a lot about that. Yeah.
So I remember a time when we started out in the East Village and downtown and then there we were one night in Vegas, a couple a little bit into the run and it was Rody a week and there are all these guys in the audience with their hats on kebo heyes, and they didn't take them off. It's like, no, it's I'm gonna fucking sit here in the audience with my cowboy hat on and no one's gonna tell him not to.
These guys are like steal, you know, done, and they.
And the show's over and we were directing at that point that people are walking out and this.
Guy comes by and he goes, I don't know what that was. But I locked it.
And we're like, all right, this is a new chapter, you know what I mean, Like like we were glad that we were getting to different group.
So you're in Vegas, and how do you change? Meaning I have a picture of you like in your room. Now you're in your dressing room in Vegas, the other place to paint this feeling. And now you're like on the phone with your decorator going, this is not eagles Nests the small paper, I said, eagles Nest. What happens?
Well, we didn't.
I mean, we passed it on to the local crew and you know, cast and everything. The fun thing about Vegas was that the challenge was it was a bigger stage.
And so we're like, all right, how do we make.
This bigger without losing you know, the intimacy and the real creative idea behind it.
And so we said, well, let's see, shadows could be really big, and so we.
Started playing with lights and a scrim kind of old old school stuff, you know, but like, all right, let's make this. And so we made the character really big just by standing in front of lights and like you know, drumming and the drumming on a scrim from behind. You know, big this is pretty cool. So we had fun. And every time we've done a different kind of venue or even the rock tour or whatever, it was fun to learn, like, all right, what is this venue?
What are the challenges?
Actually, if you the aster when we were at La Mama and we moved to the Astro place, they had this balcony.
The balcony is ah, God, the balcon's kind of a bummer, Like, you know, how do we deal with it? And then we're like, well, we can actually have a guy go up there. We can connect things, you know. So that's we always looked at the saw.
Them as creative opportunity.
That's right. Yeah, So I'm gonna I'm going to jerk us in a different direction, which is now that Matt's out here, let's talk about Matt. Matt on the things about Matt we want to say, I.
Don't know how he got food poisoning, but good thing he didn't have it before the show.
Last night.
I was so wonderful, so magical, and we weren't planning on doing Someone just said, you know, this guy is this last show.
He's Larry.
He's been playing since the beginning and we were He's with us from the first thing we did.
Wrote a lot of the music with us, and he's.
Been in and out of the show on and off for years.
But so someone's like, his last show is coming up, I'm going to go in the drummer you guys want to go into and we're.
Like, I why not?
So this all came together really last minute. But it was fantastic, so much fun.
Uh did you have to cours?
No.
I would have never thought in a million years I'd be back on stage though, and I'm glad I did again.
The theater, the immediacy, people, the routine, you know. So what's interesting, especially for any show that is musical comedy, not always necessarily the case with drama. Because when I did Street Car Name Desire, I'm Broadway in nineteen ninety two, you were thinking the show, if this isn't going over, this isn't working well, and then you realize they were listening. Oh, they were listening intently. So when the show was over, they all burst out sobbing and applauded and stood up and went crazy. But during the show, nothing but with you and comedies and musicals, you know exactly what you're gonna do you know exactly how they're going to react. I mean, it's all such a wonderful toy.
But it's true.
It's funny as humans. It's a weird quirk when we are laughing. When we're with something funny, we make a sound and we don't like complain that other people are making this weird sound. If an alien came down and what are they doing. Oh they're laughing. Something's funny. But with something sublime you might go, but pretty much you're silent. So the actor has no idea that they could just be bored or they could be being moved deeply. And so we've had a similar experience our show. We like, we hope that it's from the ridiculous to the sublime once.
In a while, but we don't know. You don't know the way you do it.
Comedy Chris Wink and Phil Stanton of Blue Man Group. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Chris and Phil talk about what it's like to create a world famous show but still remain anonymous in their Daily Lives. I'm Alec Baldwin.
And this is here's the thing.
That's the founding members a Blue Man Group performing Rods and Cones from their nineteen ninety nine album Audio. One of the many innovations from Blue Man Group was the creation of musical instruments made from PVC pipes. I was curious how such a unique idea took shape.
We were down on Canal Street and there was like, I don't know, we were just going to build something, and we started playing with these pipes and we're hitting them, like these make a pretty good sound.
In those days, there were like industrial supply places on Canal Street, so we would go down there because we.
Like to the other than niche hotels.
But yeah, we were just playing with them, and then we started hitting them with flip flops, and you know, I wanted to as a drummer, We wanted to drum musically, but xylophones and celestis they have weird overtones that I didn't like, and the PVC has a pure single tone.
The show numerous times, yeah, a couple of times, the final show yesterday, they're they're coming to They're out.
Of town, right now.
They got to come in for the Yeah, and it's gonna be the end. They're not gonna do it anymore.
Well, there's still Vegas show, but we're not planning to do anything else, so this probably must.
They pay you one billion dollars. Get up there at the Royal alber Hole. Now you've had artistic triumph, but anonymity, and then you became very famous people from doing the show. But do you find that that's made you comfortable or I mean, because you don't seem the people who were like fame seekers on the onset.
I mean, it's wonderful to be able to just ride the subway and move around and the character is famous, but we're not. There's times when it's annoying. I want to get into a club or something and like now who are you? I'm like, forget it.
Now, your wives had to raise a family. And I think about this because I still love doing plays. I love theater. I love it. It's the most fun. Movies are challenging, but they are rarely fun. They're challenging to fit it together. And then you do a play and you're like, well I didn't like the way I did that. I'm gonna do this tomorrow.
It's fair in my room and make no right iterative, which is wonderful, luxury, all this stuff.
But you're away from your family every night. What was it like for you all of those years where you're you're doing a show every night forever.
Well, when we first did the run, I was I didn't have kids yet.
Same for me, it was it was more.
Yeah, no, after our long run, we had more flexibility.
That runs how long?
Well that was we did twelve hundred shows in a row without a break.
And then we still perform for years, but not every night because yeah, we have more abilities.
My kids were young, we were we were able to pull it off. But yeah, it was, it was. It was crazy. But but you mentioned though we opened the show and we kept working on the bits for the whole three years, like but the most year. We got a lot of the best nuances that you don't write them in a writer's room, you know, you write them on stage. I always wonder about that because I, you know, I haven't had a film experience, but man, as an actor in film, you get one or two chances. We got a chance to like work out stuff over and even even last night, We did stuff that was in the show when we opened way back, and we added some iterations just because we knew a lot of the people there would have seen it all. But it was so fun to like try a couple of different things out, you know, like they call it a play, but where's the play. We're trying to put the play back in play, you know, like the iteration and the play of like, no, you can't do that with a you know Shakespeare, I'm gonna I'm gonna play with his words. I mean, I can do something better.
I did a play once about Puccino. The play was written by a friend of Pacino, about Pacino, and I did the play and I played Pacino. Oh Wowchino comes on to just exhaust and just to completely malign the director. He's doing a scene and in the scene, the character reads Shakespeare, but he changes all the words. Director goes, what are you doing? And the Patina car goes, I just sold I'd riff I'd do a little riffing. I'm gonna riff on Shakespeare. That's what I'm gonna do, is share. And this is in the play, and you're fucking crying listen to this anyway, In the time you have. I think got one more quick question, which is that what stuff you saw back then? Because you guys are known as one of the most original shows. It's so original, and everybody they loved you. I was in a New York where everybody in the whole fucking town saw you. Everybody came down there to see that. Just with your cred now and who you are creatively, one of the things you saw that you've been impressed with you, Man, that's really cool. I like that.
The most recent thing that really blew me away was Hamilton, right, very I mean that's not unusual.
And I liked Firs, the Brutus stuff. Where's a bruta was margin? They did some really nice stuff, I thought.
But I mean, god, there's there's a lot of good stuff out there and little bits and pieces. When you go to Berning, man, you just see some dude on a bike that's inspired.
Yeah. When we first started, Broadway was not the place for innovation. No, you know, we were Downtownwntown, Lovetown was very separated, you know, and downtown was the place for innovation and creativity really, but now you know, Broadway is a place for great innovation.
I would count On one hand, the shows I saw that were super creative and really really knocked me down, and yours is one obviously that's for a lot of people. And the other one, I mean, it's gonna sound with Lion King. When I saw my.
Mouth was on, My mouth was on that opening sequence is one mouth was open greatest.
Julie Taymour, and then Michael Curry was the Oh I built the puppets, but she visioned them genius stuff. And then my kids make fun of me because I took them when they were younger to gazillion bubbles. Oh all right, so this is the cheesiest show of bubbles everywhere lasers are. But I was just at the end, you know, I just like, look at all these bubbles and they looked over. I was crying a little bit because it was just beautiful. Bubbles are amazing. They're perfectly round. I mean, and my kids like, dah, that's that's crazy. You were crying at gazelle bubbles.
I'm like, it was. I know it's cheesy, but there was a gazillion of them. Man, there was a lot.
What's the stuff you put on yourself to turn grease paint? Regular showiness? Because showed probably grace. Yeah, and it comes in a bucket or a tube or a big big tub pail, big tubs. If someone applies it to you, we do I just out and makes it look.
Yeah, if we kind of do it.
We were never trying to go for blue skin. It's like we actually.
Opened the show without a wardrobe person. I believe they cut that cost. We were on our own completely. It is a crazy thing. When we first opened, we would have to wear neutrial gloves on our hands and then we would take other We couldn't put the blue in our hands because they would get everywhere. Yeah, So we had to wear these, you know, surgical gloves or whatever, and so people would have to dye them with this writ dye that was nasty and and they have to try to keep it from getting on the inside. Because so at some point someone called the new Trial company and glove company said, hey, can you guys dye these fours.
They didn't have blue gloves back then.
So they made blue gloves for us because we were ordering so many and and we said we ordered for three cities.
And we're ordered like three years worth.
If you'll do this, they did it, and then they decided to make him available to the public. And when you go out and see all the people in Ozzen wearing the blue gloves.
That's us.
It's true.
That's so funny.
It didn't happen before that.
My thanks to Blue Man Groups, Chris Wink and Phil Stanton. You can still see Blue Man Group in Boston, Las Vegas, Orlando and internationally. I'll leave you with Club Nowhere, from Blue Man Group's nineteen ninety nine debut album, audio by Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that's brought to you by iHeart Radio.
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