Blue Man Group’s 34 -year -old New York race ends

After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of painting, Blue Man Group hangs up his bald caps at Astor Place Theater on Sunday. He arrived there in 1991, when George HW Bush was president, mobile phones were rare and the World Wide Web was in two years. (The first profile of the group in the New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of cramped artists without hairs, without ear, silent, blue and black, which spit paint and carved GUIMAMES, Twinkies and Gobble drum The primary colors have unexpectedly became an infiltrating feeling of culture.

They have reached it – with programs in more than a dozen cities around the world, several concert tours, three studio albums, a Grammy nomination, many television appearances, a book and a story of an indelible sitcom – Without changing much about their approach. Throughout one of the longest races in Broadway’s story, they have been proudly on the silly side of the art of performance. Even without account, they also connected viscerally with the public, winning a legion of megafans. “We love the idea of ​​a sublime show And ridiculous,” said Chris Wink, one of the founding artists.

Blue Man Group, which belongs to the Cirque du Soleil since 2017, does not disappear: long -term emissions remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return concert is planned for Orlando, Florida, but the closure New York production, where it all started – as well as another production old decades in Chicago – is the end of a chapter. (In a statement, a spokesperson said that Cirque du Soleil was proud of the history of Blue Man Group and that he made the “difficult decision” to shutter it after “we reassembled our current classification”. After having Declared bankruptcy in 2020, Cirque du Soleil, the live entertainment giant based in Montreal, is controlled by investment capital companies.)

Emerging from the artistic scene of East Village, the group Blue Man Original served as a monument to the possibility: DIY creativity – or madness without hindrances – could still flourish in New York. That for 34 years, he occupied the same piece of desirable real estate, near downtown Mecca of Astor Place, and opposite the Landmark Public Theater, gave him a majestic foundation – even if his underground space of 281 Places was, almost by design, a little humid. Photos of the bald and blue were held outside, part of the urban architecture.