Training to become one of the Blue Man Group army is a long, arduous process. "It takes months -- maybe, honestly, six months till you can get your legs," said Mark Frankel, who recently celebrated his third anniversary covered in blue makeup. "They watch you do shows, and then they throw you in with the lions and see how you fare."
Frankel, a 33-year-old New York native, is one of the members of Blue Man Group, which combines performance art, clowning, music and comedy to create elaborate, energetic stage shows. Each show features three men in blue makeup. Some shows are small, intimate affairs; others fill stadiums. Frankel is one of four performers who take turns being the three Blue Men during the tour, which will make a stop tonight at Joel Coliseum.
Being a Blue Man, Frankel says, draws on various performing traditions. "First and foremost there's Vaudeville," he said. "And there's clowning -- the Blue Man is a version of a clown, but an extreme take on the art form. I don't want to get too much into the arty-farty side of what we study in training. But without sounding too ridiculous, we say, 'Let's peel back the mask, get inside this character, figure out what the idea behind him is.'
"It's all about your interpretation of this enigmatic character who's hard to describe," Frankel said. "He can't talk, there's a ground rule. But I can't give any other hard-and-fast ground rules. It's kind of trial and error."
And it requires three actors who are carefully in synch with one another on stage.
"The Blue Man is the character I portray, but the Blue Man is never alone, he's always with two other Blue Men. In the show, the idea is that those three Blue Men have always been together, they've never been apart."
And why are there three of him ... er, them?
"The basic idea is, a group of three is the smallest number you can have with a disagreement that's not an impasse," he said. "If you have three people, you can have a majority. It's the only way you can have one guy that's an outsider."
And that outsider role changes constantly during the show.
"The Blue Man, though he's smart and he has a sharp learning curve, has this childlike curiosity, and sometimes he will gleefully misstep. And the other two guys can go, 'I'm not sure that's the way that was meant to go.'"
And, of course, they have to do all that without saying a word, while coated in blue greasepaint that never dries. "It's like having a big ink stamp for a head," he said. "You have to be careful."
But he doesn't like to complain about the makeup.
"It's a grandiose comparison, but it would be like becoming elected president of the United States and complaining you had to wear a tie every day," he said.
"You adapt to it. It's nothing worth complaining about, that's for sure. It's a catalyst for getting truly inside the character. I'm no longer ashamed to admit that I'm a huge Kiss fan. And doing this character has led me to understand more the transformation those guys underwent to become Kiss."
Though the uniformity of the character is part of the show, the performers themselves come from various backgrounds.
"Some of the people I work with come more from the world of acting," Frankel said. "And some more from music. And some have just wandered into this character from the darkness."
Frankel grew up in a theater-oriented family, with a mother who had a long career on Broadway and a sister who was in the original Broadway cast of Spamalot. "I grew up in that world," he said. But he didn't plan on a stage career. He had been a drummer growing up, but became a recording engineer until the fateful day that he was invited to a party where members of Blue Man Group were. "I started talking to them," he said. "It was the longest of long shots, and suddenly it happened. I didn't expect to be doing this for a living."
Blue Man Group started as a trio of street performers in Manhattan in the late 1980s. They gradually began doing stage shows, and recruited more members to put on shows in other cities. There are currently standing productions in such cities as New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Berlin, Orlando and Tokyo plus the touring production that is coming here, "How to Be a MegaStar Tour 2.0."
The "How to Be a MegaStar" tour, Frankel said, "is not for new Blue Men." He has previously performed in shows in New York, Chicago and Amsterdam.
"This show in particular is music-driven, and we have an eight-piece rock band behind us.
"Essentially, what we're doing is a satire of a rock concert. But without being boastful, it's also a great rock concert on its own.... It demands a certain level of musical ability you have to draw upon."
In the show, The Blue Men have ordered a manual on how to become a rock star and set out to learn how to rock out on stage -- when to strut, when to pump their fists, and so on.
"There's still the Vaudeville aspect that Blue Man is famous for, like throwing things and catching them in our mouths. There's high art, low art, comedy on society and how it relates to collective experiences, and without being too heady, the shamanistic experience of going to a rock concert and getting carried away by the music, forgetting about your life and what the traffic was like on the way in and your family.
"That's what we're after. We go to see live entertainment to find a blissful feeling, and when you find it, when you feel it, there's nothing like it."