UPDATED REVIEW: Blue Man Group is new, blue and still in touch with the times

 
The GiPad is part of a newly revised show aimed at the current generation.

As Wink, Stanton and Goldman understand, few things in the arts have a shorter shelf life than meditations on current technology. Pen a novel, or film a movie, about the perfidious influence of bloggers and you're fine for a couple of years until bloggers stop being so influential. Write a play about relationships formed in Internet chat rooms and you're burned-out toast — maybe in just a matter of months — when the whole generational conversation moves to Twitter.

Deeper changes come just as suddenly. Take the concept of the information overload — a state of modern being that was, until recently, the central theme of the Blue Man Group.

The trio has just been smart enough to figure out that people, especially young people, don't really complain about being overloaded with technology anymore. They don't even necessarily feel overloaded. Not in the same way. They have been taught, instead, to multitask.

Or, to put it another way, over the last decade our pervasive sense of “too much, too much” has somehow been brilliantly fractured and repurposed by a cultural-industrial complex into an array of critical, profitable apps now deemed essential to modern life.

And thus, the new core of Blue Man Group — which has been brilliantly revamped in recent weeks — throughout its empire is a trio of giant “GiPads.” At the Briar Street Theatre in Chicago, these devices — one per ever-curious blue man — descend from above like manna from heaven. Or maybe we are instead watching the trifurcated fall of Satan. You decide.

These new set pieces resemble something of a hybrid between phones and tablets. This was surely purposeful, because their dualistic dominance of the communicative marketplace is akin to the way Coke and Pepsi split up carbonated beverages. The intent of the new Blue Man show is to hit on the common foundation of the new technological moment. And it's pretty clear what they've decided is the modern rock upon which all else is now built.

The touch screen.

Virtually unknown when Blue Man Group set up shop in Chicago, the touch screen is a tricky business in the Blue Man world.

Blue Man always has been about the two-dimensional inadequacy of technology — as distinct from the three-dimensional fun of spraying paint and shooting breakfast cereal out of your mouth. But in a weird way, companies such as Apple have drawn inspiration from Blue Man and the very things Blue Man has been performing about all these years — the overload of two-dimensional information — and created better ways for people to reach out and touch their technology in separate pieces. Smart phones don't shoot Captain Crunch — yet — but you already can play drums on them. For anybody who was around when Blue Man started and takes a moment to ponder what's happened, you get a remarkable sense of an instance where a satirical entertainment about technology has actually changed technology itself. (And that's not even getting into the influence of the Blue Men on education, given that the founders started their own charter school in New York).

So that leaves the Blue Men, the primal reps of we bewildered Homo sapiens, where, exactly?

Well, that's the point of the rehab. The brilliant response — now on view in Chicago — is that the ever-curious, ever-hopeful, ever-restless Blue Men must be sent on a deeper and deeper journey inside the touch screens that now give us both access and, in a weird way, a hard set of boundaries.

If you are of the pervasive view that these screens — with which most of the new material in the Blue Man Group show is involved — are soon to be replaced by some kind of holographic images that will dance in the air before the user, then you'll see here that Blue Man is already getting ahead of that particular curve. As they try to pass items — including their own bodies — in and out of the devices, probing what it means to feel, to touch, to change, they seem to be anticipate some kind of future total melding of work, play, communication, being.

All that might sound like a heady interpretation of a show where the front rows get plastic coats and that ends with a dance party. But even that famous final moment where the audience is subsumed by floods of paper (as the strains of KLF's “Last Train to Trancentral” pulse from the speakers) has been scrapped.

That sense of being communally buried in a disposable good doesn't fly any more — partly, no doubt, a consequence of our growing lack of comfort with seeing so much paper wasted.

But that rush of forced touching — the audience had to move the paper along — also doesn't sum up the new show as well it did the old one. This is no longer a show about our need to touch — we have screens for that now. It is about how we touch. And its limits.

In the new show, modest amounts of clearly recycled paper appear — even at Blue Man, you can't totally erase your signature moments — and then seem to vanish as quickly as they arrived. And then giant balls descend from the ceiling, as the audience dances to a Blue Man Group original song called “Booty Shaker.” The mood was truly joyous at the Briar Street last Saturday night.

The use of communal touch balls isn't new. Cirque Du Soleil's “Mystere” in Las Vegas (which is more than 17 years old) floats something similar. So does a nouveau-cirque piece called “Slava's Snowshow,” which played at the Chicago Theatre a few years back. And in less sophisticated hands, the exhortation to shake one's booty would hardly seem remarkable. Fun, though.

But Blue Man is all about metaphors and its ever-savvy show now ends with us trying to negotiate touch with our (maybe taller) community members, rather than being buried in it together. Perhaps the Blue Men are saying the world has become more competitive. Or maybe they just think that the shaking of all aspects of our three-dimensional selves might just be the next touching frontier.