Three Blue Man Group hopefuls given rare chance to prove they're worthy

The stage is bare, the drums silent, the video screens blank.

Three figures stand in the glare of the stage lights. They couldn't look less alike — one gaunt, another stocky with dark stubble, the third lithe and a little bug-eyed. They are individuals, not the mute, well-oiled mechanism they need to be.

One thing they share: the jitters — as though at any moment a bucket of paint might come sloshing at them from one of the wings. They all saw the show the night before, with its thundering drums, splattering paint, the actors stalking across seats into the audience, the marshmallows.

And all three are now standing in the Briar Street Theatre, hoping to become — in mind and body — a Blue Man.

For the first time in Blue Man Group’s history (the show was first performed Off Broadway in 1991 and opened at Briar Street six years later), the production's eight-week training course is taking place in Chicago, during which time the trainees will learn the nuances of being a Blue Man, as well as the role skills they'll need to perfect.

They must become expert drummers. They'll also learn to spit paint onto a spinning canvas, catch a dozen or more rapid-fire marshmallows in their mouths and then be prepared for absolutely anything the audience might throw at them. Hundreds audition every year across the globe. Only a handful ultimately get hired.

Being a Blue Man is like patting your head, rubbing your stomach, juggling ...

"And riding a unicycle and baking a cake all at the same time," says Scott Bishop, a Chicago Blue Man who has performed in thousands of shows.

In two weeks, the blue face paint will go on the trainees — covering everything but their eyeballs — and they will slip unnoticed (the stage crews hope) into and out of a live show. The true test is seeing how they do with an audience, some of whom may refuse to play along.

Even then, it's unlikely that all three trainees will be offered a job.

"This is a long, slow audition and it may be that you're at week seven and we've learned that this just isn't the right fit. ... It can be devastating," said Matt Ramsey, the show's associate artistic director.

But it's only Day 1, and the trainees — Alejandro Rodriguez, Maxim Bouffard and Brian Byrne — all look hopeful. They look nothing like Blue Men, though: no blue face paint. They aren't even standing properly, their trainers politely point out.

In a sense, Blue Man is a misnomer. Ramsey leaps up on stage and explains to the trainees that the character they all hope to play isn’t really a man at all. The character never speaks. The Blue Man is like an animal or a man-child — endlessly curious, uninhibited. In the show, the character explores the world through art, music, connecting with others — an experience that "transcends language and culture."

“You want to avoid anything that looks like human judgment, ego or humor,” Ramsey says.

The Blue Man never smiles. The trainees aren’t smiling — perhaps because they’re nervous. They’re also too limp.

Blue Men must always look ready to pounce on the next idea or activity. They stand on the balls of their feet, knees bent, chest out.

“There is an energy in every cell of your arms,” Ramsey tells them.

This is the Blue Man “neutral” pose. From here, the blue creatures might spring into action — drumming, loping across theater seats in search of a victim, er, volunteer to take part in the show, or tossing marshmallows into a fellow Blue Man's mouth.

Rodriguez, Bouffard and Byrne all have experience drumming (musical ability is a prerequisite for the job). Bouffard, originally from France but based in New York now, is an actor but was also a drummer in a band. He's never caught marshmallows in his mouth, though.

One of the highlights of the show is watching one Blue Man hurl marshmallow after marshmallow into another's gaping mouth. Some nights, two dozen or more may hit the target.

On this day, veteran Blue Man Tom "Boomer" Galassi is coaching Bouffard.

"I have no idea how I'm going to do that. I'm waiting for them to tell me the secret," says Bouffard, 25.

The trick, Galassi says, is not to lunge and snap at the marshmallow; that’s after marshmallows bounce off Bouffard’s chin and nose.

Eventually, Bouffard gets the hang of it. His cheeks are “chipmunking,” as Galassi puts it, with white goo — so much so that he has to pack it in with his fingers.

He manages to mumble, “I’m definitely gagging.”

Galassi reassures him: “In the show, there is so much adrenaline, you won’t even feel the choking.”

Byrne, a Los Angeles-based actor who specializes in clowning and other physical theater, has lucked out. His job at this moment is to toss paintballs into Galassi’s mouth.

Galassi has been a Blue Man for 27 years. In that time, he says he's unintentionally swallowed "hundreds" of the small paintballs (non-toxic and key components in the show), and had paint swirling behind his contact lenses.

"You just roll with it," he says.

Galassi's mouth is like a vacuum. His record with marshmallows, he says, is 40.

“If you get it into the right spot, they will just start to stick to each other,” he says.

He’s traveled the globe with the Blue Man company. It’s a job he still loves: "This is my career. In some odd way, it becomes your family,”

Then something deeper: "Once you get sort of good at this, who I really am is that Blue Man — more so than even talking to you right now. [In life], we hide parts of ourselves. ... When you're a Blue Man, you can just be yourself."

Galassi never aspired to be a Broadway star; that’s good, because being a Blue Man means never being the star.

“The character is very much three as one. They are part of this trio trying to figure something out,” says Tascha Van Auken, Blue Man Group's senior artistic direction manager. That’s one of the reasons why all of the Blue Men must be between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2.

Although there aren't currently any women among the 70-some Blue Men worldwide, there have been in the past. The role isn't "gender specific," according to the company.

Veteran Blue Men say they are rarely recognized when they’re out on the street and makeup-free. Smear on the blue face paint though, and they’re likely to get mobbed, they say.

It’s not easy being Blue

Later in the day, Rodriguez, a trained dancer originally from Mexico, is in the alley behind the theater. Paint — bright blue — trickles from his mouth like alien blood. He reaches for a paper cup on the ground and knocks back yet another mouthful of that darned paint. He doesn't swallow. He blows it out onto a square of blank canvas, which, thanks to a wheel on the back side, is spinning in his free hand.

Mostly, what Rodriguez gets is a big blue blob. What his mentor, Michael Dahlen, wants is something more artistic: a spiral. Rodriguez is determined to get it right. So he rinses, gulps and spits — again and again.

After a dozen or so tries, Rodriguez produces an acceptable spiral. He beams a blue smile.

The trainees are finished for the day. They gather on the stage, slumped, as if someone has plucked a rubber stopper from each of them. It has been a long day.

None of them is having second thoughts, they say. For Rodriguez, the Blue Man role is a natural extension of his love of physical theater, he says. Bouffard, who has performed Shakespeare, says he's not worried about having no lines.

"All the better," he says. "It kind of distills everything down to just the emotion of what's happening."

Finishing touches

The three figures on stage are hyper-alert, ready to pounce. No one has to tell them how to stand.

It's no surprise. Bouffard, Byrne and Rodriguez have been living and breathing the Blue Man ethos for the last two weeks. Byrne says he dreams in blue. In the shower, Rodriguez gulps and then spits water, practicing his paint spiral.

"Luckily, I'm exhausted enough at night to fall into a deep sleep and not dream," jokes Bouffard.

It's mid-September, and in just a few days, Rodriguez and Byrne will each be in a show in front of a live audience.

They're ready for a partial run-through. It's just Byrne and Rodriguez — because they'll be up first in the show. Bouffard is watching today, taking notes.

When the scrim goes up, Byrne and Rodriguez and a veteran Blue Man — all without face paint — are banging out an urgent rhythm on various drums.

The actors move from one segment to another, including the famous synchronized Cap'n Crunch cereal chomping scene.

And then at some point, Rodriguez and Byrne stand on the edge of the stage and stare out into the audience. This is usually when timid audience members shrink into their seats and hope they'll be ignored. The focus on this day is on Byrne and Rodriguez. Byrne's Blue Man persona is anxious, ill at ease, while Rodriguez's is more menacing. And that's just fine.

"Just like anyone who plays King Lear, you're not going to get the exact same performance," Ramsey says. "Those little idiosyncrasies are fantastic."

On this occasion, Byrne and Rodriguez haul a snaking, black cable — with a light and a tiny camera at the tip — into the audience. Some lucky visitor will have his or her innards probed with the "esophagus cam." It's an illusion, of course, but the Blue Men still must coax the volunteer (in this case, a recently trained Blue Man) to open his mouth to make it look real.

"Kind of have a private moment," Galassi advises Byrne and Rodriguez. "Secure their head a little bit. You don't want to come in all hot."

Says Bishop: "Get them all caught up in the weirdness — have them embrace the weirdness."

To the casual observer, Byrne's and Rodriguez's work on stage on this day looks crisp, in sync and, frankly, impressive after only two weeks' training.

But they're not there yet. In the green room, perched high up at the back of the theater, Ramsey and others in the crew explain that Rodriguez doesn't have the drumming crescendo quite right, some of Byrne's movements are too mechanical — not organic enough. Other movements aren't as sharp as they must be, making the story "muddy."

"The lack of words and a spoken script mean we have to be very clear with how we tell a physical story," Ramsey says.

At day's end, Rodriguez sits near the front of the stage. He's feeling overwhelmed, he says, but also twitchy — as though the Blue Man still inhabits his body.

"The hardest part of acting is to have the ability to keep calm. ... If I overthink, I'm going to screw up everything else," he says.

He's exhausted at the end of each day, but he makes time to chat on WhatsApp with his parents and siblings in Mexico.

"Of course, they have a lot of faith in me, like, 'You're gonna make it,'" Rodriguez said.

Before coming to Chicago, Rodriguez lived in Berlin, where he was doing experimental theater and finishing up a master's degree in theater. He auditioned for Blue Man in Germany, beating out several dozen others to be invited to train in Chicago. He gave up everything to come here, he says, including his girlfriend.

If he doesn't make it, he has no Plan B.

"I don't know if it's a characteristic about the artist, but I said I'm going to play all [the cards] that I've got," he says.

It’s show time

It's a Friday night and the seats in the cavernous former Marshall Field carriage house that is Briar Street Theatre are filling up. The party crowd in the first two center rows are pulling on their (provided) ponchos because they know what's coming; a couple is visiting from Poland; a little blond girl sits on her daddy's lap.

A drum beat, like a call from deep in the jungle.

The audience is suddenly plunged into darkness. Water spins cyclone-like inside two glass columns, one on either side of the stage. Otherworldly percussive sounds boom out into the audience. Then from behind a scrim, giant silhouettes of three figures pounding their alien instruments.

The scrim rises, and the larger-than-life figures loom at the front of the stage. They're all in the same black uniforms, same blue face paint. Even so, Rodriguez isn't hard to spot. There's a nervous energy to his Blue Man: all darting eyes and twitchy neck, like a nocturnal hunter.

And it works, contrasting nicely with Bishop (center Blue Man on this occasion), whose stage presence is bolder, more theatrical.

In perhaps the show's best-known bit, the Blue Men are clustered on a raised platform. Bishop beats out a drum rhythm, while Rodriguez and third Blue Man, Callum Grant, squirt paint onto the drum's surface. With every strike, the paint shoots geyser-like into the air, much of it splashing Rodriguez's face.

Laughter erupts in the audience.

This isn't Rodriguez's big moment. It's about to come. It's the sequence that he's been practicing over and over — the one in which he catches paintballs in his mouth and spews the paint onto a canvas square. A few days prior, the blue paintball exploded on his face, leaving him with just a trickle in his mouth as he spun the canvas to try to create a paint spiral.

Grant plucks a red paintball from a giant glass bowl. He turns to face Rodriguez, who is stage right. All eyes are on the trainee. He opens his mouth. Grant lobs the first paintball, a red one.

Plop.

It lands cleanly in Rodriguez's mouth. He spews a diagonal line of red paint onto the canvas.

Grant throws the yellow one.

Plop.

Now the blue one.

Rodriguez opens his mouth. He bobs, he weaves.

Plop.

Rodriguez spins the canvas, spewing out a splattery blue spiral.

A burst of applause. Rodriguez thrusts his masterpiece into the air in triumph.

A little later, Rodriguez is replaced by an official, seasoned Blue Man. Up in the green room, Rodriguez is giddy from the adrenaline surge and the fact that he nailed the paintball bit.

He feels as though he's finally becoming a Blue Man.

"I started to enjoy the character and stopped being so worried about the technical stuff. I didn't feel nervous," he says.

Does he think he's going to get the gig?

He shrugs. Probably best not to say with some of his trainers within earshot.

He, Bouffard and Byrne have about a month more of training to go.

Then, in Rodriguez's case, he'll know if he should book a flight back to Mexico or get ready for a life in blue on the Briar Street Theatre stage.

Note: As this article was being prepared for publication, the Sun-Times was informed by a show representative that Brian Byrne did not "complete the program." We felt it was important to retain his journey as part of this story.