Credit: Dangerous Minds / The Blue Man Group

Few things show you can make a show out of anything quite like the Blue Man Group.

Picture the scene, you’re a talent agency, and someone comes in saying they have an idea for an act. It’s a bunch of guys playing percussion instruments. “Are they playing their own music?” You ask. “Sort of!” they say. “Sometimes it’s covers, sometimes it’s their own music, no vocals though.” “So just drums?” “Oh no, mostly it’s bits of plastic tubing and the occasional bin lid.” “Uh-huh. Anything else?” “Yeah, actually, they’re all painted blue.” “Get the fuck out of my office.”

Yet, the Blue Man Group are a worldwide phenomenon. Due to a mix of music, magic, physical comedy and sheer showmanship, the group can comfortably sell out any theatre in the world, have had several tv specials and, in the ultimate achievement for any group, performed the soundtrack for the 2008 movie Space Chimps. At this point, the group are an entertainment institution on the level of anyone you could possibly think of, but how does a group like this begin?

As alluded to previously, this wouldn’t be the kind of project cooked up in some showbiz suit’s office to con people out of their hard-earned cash. It’s too thrillingly weird for that, so there must be a grassroots beginning for the Blue Man Group. Well, without wanting to expose the truth behind the Blue, that’s exactly how they began. Not with an enormous financial backing behind them, but as three guys with one completely bonkers idea between them.

How did the Blue Man Group begin?

The group begins with three friends in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Chris Wink, Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton. Each of them was an aspiring performer and a creative, yet their big break came from a refreshingly simple idea, one that a friend of Wink’s put to Vulture as nothing more than “Wouldn’t it be cool to see a bunch of blue men walking down the street?” It would be, and that’s how the Blue Man Group began. Not as a band or even an act but as a series of happenings.

At first, it was a lot more than three. The first major Blue Man Group happening in 1988 saw eight of the bastards, this time in blue masks, carrying a coffin full of eighties tat like a Rambo doll, paper figures in suits representing yuppies and bags of white powder into Central Park. The group deposited the coffin into a metal drum before setting it on fire. An azure Viking funeral for the decade. Needless to say, it got people’s attention.

The group performed more of these guerrilla gigs until the attention they were getting, aided by Kurt Loder of MTV covering them for a slot on MTV News, got them more official gigs in clubs and theatres in Manhattan. Eventually, they got set up in the Astor Palace Theatre, the venue that would become their home for the next three decades. By the early 1990s, the group had gone from the art project of Wink, Goldman and Stanton to a fully fledged business, and has gone from strength to strength ever since.

What’s more, they’ve gone from strength to strength without ever having to change themselves. The surroundings might be different, but there is always the same anarchic, somewhat dangerous spirit fuelling the group in 2025 as there was in 1988. Let’s hope it’ll continue to fuel the project for decades to come!