The question should not be, “why blue?” or “who is that underneath the paint?” Instead try “Who is the Blue Man to me?” According to Blue Man Mark Frankel, the Blue Man is the inspiration for all of us to dig deeper into ourselves, to discover who we really are underneath it all. He is there to remind you of your inner self and all of your childhood happiness, hopes and dreams. The Blue Man is the untainted beginning in all of us.
Creative Loafing: How long have you been a Blue Man?
Mark Frankel: About three years.
And what’s your background before becoming a Blue Man?
I was doing a bunch of different things, but I’ve been a drummer my whole life. I’ve played some professionally, but then I went to NYU for recording engineering.
What school?
NYU. New York University. Sorry, I said it real fast. I was in the music technology program there. And so I got into recording engineering as a career and did that for awhile. And then I ended up teaching at NYU, teaching recording engineering at NYU and that’s when I started auditioning for Blue Man through a weird sort of coincidental meeting at a party/industry event. So it was basically drumming, then recording engineering, then part time faculty, and then Blue Man.
So you had a meeting at a party that made you want to audition?
Yeah, I was at one of Blue Man’s creative spaces in the East Village in New York City. They were having a party celebrating the release of a CD, and I just overheard a conversation about how there were people who were looking for a new Blue Man. I asked, “what does it take to become a Blue Man?” and that’s what got the ball rolling. It was all on a lark. It was the longest of long shots and it just seemed to happen.
So would you say that you were familiar with Blue Man before?
Yeah. I’m from NYC originally, or the suburbs of NYC, so I definitely knew what it was about.
In terms of personal artistic satisfaction, you get a different side of that than you ever had before becoming a Blue Man.
Yea, I get to play drums professionally because there is a lot of drumming in the show. And it’s a primal style of drumming. I was playing a lot of gigs as a drummer before where you have to be very sensitive to singers. I was doing a lot of cabaret stuff where essentially you’re there to color, you know you’re there to provide a certain [backdrop] to whatever song is being sung. But this is no holds, you play as loud and as hard as you can. It’s a very primal, very visceral style of drumming akin to the Kodo style, the Japanese style of drumming. So it’s kind of a thrill to come full till every night, you know?
Where the drumming really takes center stage?
Yes, definitely. In this show, we are playing on drums that are at the very front of the stage so the drumming is a feature rather than an aspect of the performance. If you’re into drumming at all you will definitely get your fix by coming to this show
Tell me about the acting side of it for you.
Well, I grew up in a theater family. My mother is a retired Broadway actress; she had a long career performing in the ’60s. My sister is currently in Spamalot on Broadway, and my mother runs a dance studio where I took lessons as a kid. So I kind of grew up around getting up on stage and performing in various ways, you know. I was in The Nutcracker as a kid, just skipping around, not really dancing (laughs) … I was familiar with the art form and I guess at the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, it was just something that came naturally. And it felt really good to be able to express myself. It’s a fantastic limitation to be able to act in this way, I think, to not be able to communicate verbally. So whatever emotions you want to convey, or you feel you are conveying, you can do it through subtle ways of — the way your physical body is aligning itself — or the way your eyes are looking without being extreme or without overstating anything. You want the audience, when they come to see the show, you want the audience to fill in the story — they watch us — subconsciously, they want to watch us and have their own story that’s appropriate for them. And thus, if we are as open and as honest emotionally as we can be then that allows that. If we demonstrate too much it sort of interferes with that process. I think that’s one of the keys of the Blue Man character, that before we get into the specifics of this particular show, it has this universal appeal to every human. It’s sort of like if you were able to take away your business outfit, and your house and everything else and just get down to what it was like when you were just starting as a kid. Blue Man is a personification of that in a sense and I think that’s one of the charms of the character, one of the attractions of the character.
Performer/director Brian Scott says, “The most important thing to becoming a really good Blue Man is to be honest, honest about what you are doing rather than trying to put it on and manufacture something that isn’t authentic.” What are your comments on that?
Brian’s absolutely right, and maybe that’s something you either get or you don’t. You learn quickly when you learn to do this character. It’s very difficult to portray this character — for instance … the big curtain drops and here we are 3 guys in an arena of 10,000 people — any human being would be lying if they said that moment doesn’t have some sort of [impact]. In the Blue Man’s case … we’re different from you. We’re different beings in one sense or another and so we don’t know what you’re going to do. We don’t know what the reaction’s going to be. You could be in a room full of Vikings about to kill us … if you just relax for a moment and let that run through you, you’re going to have a moment of, “holy cow.” You’re going to feel that. And if you let that happen and don’t sit there and force the moment and feel that it’s amazing then it will be clear.
Did you do a lot of live performances of this magnitude before becoming a Blue Man?
No, actually this is my first time doing a tour of this scale. In other words, I’ve played in arenas here and there, I opened the Amsterdam show for Blue Man. We did some pretty large performances throughout the Netherlands. So I had moments where I performed in front of large crowds, but to do it everyday, it’s definitely a bump up in performing this character. This is new for me.
What is it like performing for this large of an audience and being so center stage? How is it different from being in front of live audiences before you were a Blue Man?
It’s like playing in bands in NYC, it’s more, you feel more exposed in the intimate venues. There could be five people in the room and if it’s a small enough room, they can hear everything, even the smallest mistake, whereas when playing a venue this big, I feel more a part of the whole.
The Blue Men too, we’re all sort of watching the show, saying well this is what we do, we nod our heads when the beat gets us, we pump our fists … there’s a voice of God essentially instruction us — this is what people do at a rock concert. It sort of thrusts you into that experience where we’re all there together and the sidebar is that it also happens to be a great rock concert. So it’s an interesting experience. As a performer, I get to walk that fence between being on the stage and being in the audience.
What emphasis is there on the theatrical aspect in this show?
Well, as much as there is an 8 piece live rock band behind us, the way they’re slamming on drums, and playing modified PVC stuff and there’s this primal element, there are moments in the show where it’s just the 3 of us standing there. And let me just say we’re doing nothing — in other words there are moments where the character is allowed to just be the character — there’s comedy, a fair amount of comedy in the show. The Blue Man doesn’t know he’s being funny but he gets in these quirky little moments with the other guys where there’s conflict — à la Vaudeville or the Three Stooges. You know there’s 3 guys, 2 against 1 sort of thing. There are moments of that, theatrical moments — in other words, the sit down productions that we have in the other venues across the country — they explore the character side of the Blue Man to a larger extent. I don’t know how well it would work in an arena to have these subtle moments that the Blue Man usually has. It’s a little too big so you have to … the Blue Man doesn’t change, but his environment does. So at any rate there are elements of the theatrical character … it’s just different. If that makes any sense.
You emphasize the rock music more so purely because of your environment. You work with what you’re able to portray to this large of an audience.
There are elements to this Megastar show that people may know as certain staple elements to the character. We have the skills, the throwing and the catching, that we’re known for — that’s still there.
The Blue Man … I find that you’re not identified as individuals. Why is that?
Right. I guess the idea with the Blue Man Group is that you don’t want to look at the stage and say, “oh, that’s the tall one and that’s the cute one, that’s the young one,” … ideally, the physical manifestation of the character is not really important. Who’s underneath the makeup … I grew up a huge KISS fan and everyone over the age of 30 knows they didn’t allow to be photographed without their makeup — and it was an ingenious idea because, like Santa Claus, it develops this mystique that you want and don’t want simultaneously. And I think there’s a lot of people who see the Blue Man Group and don’t really want to know what I look like, or what I sound like, or the fact that I hang out and can be a goof ball after the show and not have this other worldly, serious, alien-like persona. And at the meet and greet after the show, when people come up and meet us, I think there’s generally a feeling that they just want us to be Blue Man … we don’t interact with audience members without makeup unless it’s coincidental, unless they see us after the show and recognize us … it’s essentially up to each Blue Man how much or how little they want to talk about themselves and it’s not for anyone to judge, it’s an extension of their version of the character. I think the idea, though, is to keep it as curious as possible.
What is the goal of the performance?
I think that’s up to the individual audience member … I think what we’re aiming for is towards the end of the show when you feel a collective feeling … the idea is we go to see entertainment to get carried away, to leave your mundane life behind, you don’t want to be thinking about, “there’s gonna be a traffic jam on the way home” … you want to just be one with the experience. And I think when you first sit down to see a show, it’s the initial excitement, you know, “here they are, they’re starting, it’s the Blue Man!” But by the end we want to see the front you put on sort of peeling away and I personally find the moment when I see what looks like a successful businessman, father, smiling like he is six years old, when it wasn’t so much about proving how important you are as a human being and instead just being a human being. The idea of the show is really for everyone to get back to that careless kid — at least that’s one way to see it.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.
