If you gaze long enough at the cobalt blue paint smeared across the respective domes of Blue Man Group, your mind begins to wander.
You start thinking of the promotional possibilities for that indelible costume effect. Why not paint the Blue Men some other color, and paint a logo somewhere on that unused cranial territory?
Like, a black head, with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo on one side. Or, a yellow head, with the famous Green Bay Packer “G” scrawled across both temples.
Great idea?
“It would never happen,” Matthew Banks says, laughing at the concept. “We are blue, always.”
Banks is one of the longest-standing Blue Men. He was summoned to open the original Las Vegas Blue Man Group production show back in March 2000 at the Luxor. Even as the Blue Men would emphatically resist — probably while slamming PVC pipes with drumsticks — any logo placement on their famously blue heads, they will be participating in Sunday’s Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas.
Three of the more veteran, or maybe “bluer,” Blue Men are performing at the official Super Bowl XLV Tailgate Party, with Banks representing the Blue Man Group show at The Venetian. The others are Orlando, Fla., Blue Man Anthony Parrulli, also a member of the Blue Man triumvirate that opened at Luxor; and Zach Buell, a member of the Chicago company who performed with Banks during BMG’s How to Be a MegaStar world tour, which crisscrossed the globe from 2006-2007.
The Tailgate Party is a Texas-sized parking lot festival staged in the hours leading to Sunday’s Super Bowl kickoff (which is 3:15 p.m. Pacific Time on Fox). Maroon 5 and Keith Urban are the featured performers.
BMG is set to perform four 20-minute sets on a stage positioned just in front of the main entrance of the behemoth Cowboys Stadium, where about 100,000 fans are expected to watch the Steelers and Packers in this year’s edition of the ultimate game.
“We’re going to blow it out,” says Banks, whose hometown is Toronto, where the Argonauts play the CFL’s version of football, where the scope is smaller but the field is larger than the NFL. “We’ll be doing variations of some of the MegaStar tour, turning it upside down, making it very Super Bowl-specific.”
Fox NFL Sunday is going to be cutting away to the Tailgate Party during Sunday’s performance, and Banks says the boys from BMG have been granted extra-special security clearance to visit NFL Network’s broadcast team during the run-up to the game.
Not sure how that interview would work, exactly. Maybe Banks can regurgitate marshmallows in the form of the Lombardi Trophy for Rich Eisen and the crew.
Banks is one of a half-dozen Vegas Blue Men who rotate between six and eight shows per week. Aside from BMG’s founding members — Chris Wink, Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton — few can boast his more than decade-long tenure with the company.
“I’m available, which is important,” he says. “I know the material really well. I just do a lot of the big gigs. I’ve been around for so long, I can do these types of shows.”
Banks auditioned for BMG in Toronto almost on a whim, at the suggestion of a friend who saw the advertisement for an open call and said, “Hey, you’re 6 feet tall, you can drum, you’re an actor, go to that.”
“Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone,” Banks says. He left BMG briefly to embark on a personal project with his wife, only to return in March. He missed the paint, the BMG crew, performing live several times a week and the Blue Man affiliation.
But even after more than a decade as a Blue Man, Banks says the show remains challenging. Initially, he says, “The hardest thing for me, onstage, was maybe not laughing.” And even after sharing the stage with dozens of other Blue Men, he says he still needs to focus on fitting in as one member of the greater whole.
“The most challenging thing now is trying to be as one as possible with the other two guys,” he says. “The whole motto is, ‘Three as one.’ You see them as three individual entities, but actually Blue Man Group is one organism operating. It’s easy to just say that, but to do it is completely different. The show is written, to a certain degree, but from Point A to Point B, how we get there is different, all the time, depending on the audience, depending on the guys you are in with.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Blue Man Group is far more nuanced than its customary thrashing of plastic pipes, the incessant flashing of strobes and its frenzied splattering of paint.
“We have to allow for fluidity as much as possible,” Banks says. “Otherwise, the show will stop. It’s subtle, but it’s challenging.”
And so, in its own delicate way, is the Super Bowl.
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats.
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