The Blue Man Group first started banging on paint-filled drums in New York City in 1991. The group has closed its original show but has permanent shows in Boston, Las Vegas, Orlando, Berlin and Shanghai, plus a few touring versions of the show.
It’s as popular as it is hard to sum up. And many parents wonder, can I take my kids to see Blue Man Group and at what age?
We saw the original New York show with 9YO Tiny Traveler. She thought it was weird and almost impossible to describe to her friends. But she also really liked it and was laughing out loud for parts of it.
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What Age Is Best?
The BMG website says kids ages 3 and up are allowed in the theater. But I would strongly advise against taking most preschoolers. For one thing, the show is 90 minutes with no intermission, a long time for little kids to sit still.
There is loud music, lots of drumming and strobe lights. And those weird blue guys climb into the audience from time to time.
A young child might think parts of it are funny but won’t get all of it. And it could scare the heck out of at least some preschoolers.
The youngest I saw in the theater was 7 or so, and I think that’s about right. Maybe you can try age 5 if the child has older siblings who want to go.
Teens really enjoy the show, too, and can appreciate it on a different level from younger kids.
What To Expect
Blue Man Group is loud. Knowing this and knowing that our kid doesn’t do well with loud, we brought protective headphones with us.
Even with them, there were parts of the show that she found almost too loud. And I kind of wish I had brought earplugs for myself.
While there is a lot of drumming on drums, cans, pipes and other things, the loudest decibels came from a house band that favors grungy rock sounds.
Tip: When we came in they asked us if we wanted earplugs for Tween Traveler. So if you don’t have your own headphones, ask for earplugs for your kids (and maybe for you).
What You’ll See
The show itself is quirky and fun; a series of vignettes that rely entirely on physical comedy, which kids always love.
I think that the biggest change from city to city will be the size and shape of the theater and how they adapt the show to different spaces. I would expect the Las Vegas show to be in a bigger space and probably the splashiest.
The threesome express a lot with their eyes, mostly surprise, bewilderment and satisfaction. The routines that kids liked the most revolve around the group trying to accomplish something and things repeatedly going wrong for one of them.
For example, one might curiously lean over a drum rim full of paint and wind up with a face full of green, red or yellow splatters when his companion unexpectedly hits the drum head.
They’ve updated parts of the show as they’ve gone along. For example, they’ve added a vignette that involves the blue guys interacting with human-sized cell phones that do cool things but don’t always cooperate.
At the beginning, they get the audience wound down and ready for the show with a scrolling video screen that issues the usual pre-show requests and then calls out members of the audience by name to make fun of them.
A Bronze-medal Olympic swimmer was in the audience the day we visited and the screen assured her she shouldn’t feel bad at all about coming in third.
They bring two or three audience members onstage during the show, but as far as I can tell, they don’t call on kids.
Toward the end of the show the crew lets loose reams and reams of toilet paper while strobe lights flash and the cast climbs around the theater watching the activity.
I thought the strobes mixed with loud music might freak Tiny Traveler out, but she loved that the lights made her dress glow. and she thought the prospect of burying an entire audience in toilet paper was fantastic. What kid wouldn’t?
They give people sitting in the front rows rain ponchos and warn that it’s the wet section. At our show those eager front-row-goers seemed disappointed to walk away with no more than a few dots of paint.
Tip: The three blue guys don’t talk at all, which makes it a good theater option if English isn’t your first language (or if you don’t speak it at all).
In Short
There really wasn’t anything Tiny Traveler didn’t like. Rich and I enjoyed it a lot too; it was the second time for both of us, but it has been a while for us and the show changes.
We all could have lived without the house band’s heavier taste in mood music, though.
Tiny Traveler was excited to tell her friends about it and her biggest challenge was trying to explain her first foray into performance art to her fellow 4th graders.
In the end she settled for explaining that three all-blue guys do stuff and it’s weird but funny, too, and they should go see it.
I guess that’s all you need to know!
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* Photos are courtesy of Blue Man Group.