ShareThisBy ERIKA GONZALEZ
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Less than a month after graduating from college, Wes Day entered a brave blue world.
Armed with a degree from the North Carolina School of the Arts, Day landed in New York ready to conquer the world of acting. The first stop on his get famous tour? An audition to join a troupe of performance artists known for banging on PVC pipes while coated in cobalt paint.
"I had never heard of them," remembers Day of his audition for The Blue Man Group. "I was auditioning for a bunch of things and it was just another audition."
Despite his ignorance of the troupe, Day got the gig. And after spending the past nine years performing in the Blue Man Group's hit off-Broadway show, Day is hitting the road as part of the company's second headlining tour. "How To Be A Megastar 2.0" is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to overblown stadium concerts.
"We're writing a love letter to the large stadium tours we were around as kids. We're doing it in vein of KISS, The Who, Pink Floyd," explains Day. "But we're also making fun of the formula that exists in stadium rock."
To make its point, the Blue Man Group starts the show by downloading a rock concert instruction manual. With help from an eight-piece band, the blue men follow the handbook religiously, even guiding the audience through such patented concert moves as the fist pump and head bob.
"It's amazing when you see an entire room "raise the roof," laughs Day. "They feel ridiculous doing it and yet, they do it."
But make no mistake _ all kidding aside, the blue men put on a pretty serious rock show. Employing large video screens and a set designed by Marc Brinkman (a former director for Pink Floyd's tour productions), the performers take on 15 percussion-driven tunes, many culled from the group's well-reviewed album, "The Complex."
The blue men also deliver in the technology department _ broadcasting the action on three large video screens and allowing audience members to text message to a certain number to receive messages throughout the show.
"I think the junior high and high school kids really love it," said Day.
For die-hard fans of the group's theater shows, the troupe offers certain standard crowd-pleasers. The trio, for example, takes their famous marshmallow-catching act on the road. They also spit paint onto canvases, creating Jackson Pollack-style results.
There's plenty of audience interaction as well.
The group brings an audience member to the stage at the end of the show to read all the performers' names from the manual, during instrumental solos. In addition, the how-to-guide is downloaded using a patron's credit card.
"It's more fun to do it with women because sometimes they offer up their purses," says Day. "One night we had a woman who had a hair pick in her purse and one of us took it and put it in another audience member's hair."
Of course, there are those gags that don't weather the transition from the theater to the arena. Day says the blue man's cereal crunching bit didn't fare well when the troupe tried it before a Stone Temple Pilots concert several years ago.
"One of the guys got a beer bottle thrown at him," says Day.
Day has had his fair share of mishaps as a blue man. Breaking character, he says, is a bigger potential pitfall than tripping onstage or failing to catch a marshmallow in your mouth.
"It's rare that guests speak. But we pulled a woman up who was Japanese and she got really excited and started speaking in Japanese onstage," recalls Day. "Well, the three of us just bowed our heads and tried to hide our laughter."
Not that Day isn't open to laughing about his unusual job. He says he was a fan of the recent Blue Man story line on "Arrested Development," which featured a character who mistakenly thought the troupe was a support group for depression. He also took great pleasure in seeing "The Simpsons" skewer the group.
"In one episode, Homer joins Blue Man and says, 'Tell Marge I'm the fat one," cites Day proudly. "I think it's flattering. If 'The Simpsons' is making fun of you, then you know you've made it."
