Three men walk into a stadium — and learn to be rock stars, all in one evening.
That’s the basic story line behind the Blue Man Group’s Megastar World Tour, which runs until Sunday as part of the 2009 Deaflympics’ arts program. The musical theater troupe arrived in Taipei earlier this week and held an extra performance on Thursday afternoon, donating all ticket sales to the Red Cross for the victims of Typhoon Morakot.
The Blue Man Group, which features three bald and mute men covered in blue paint and dressed in black, has become a global franchise, with permanent shows running in Las Vegas, Berlin and Tokyo. They gained wider fame for their appearances in a series of Intel advertisements, and a tour with Moby inspired the group to step onto larger stages.
This weekend’s performances take place in a setting suited for a megastar — the 10,000-seat Taipei Arena (台北小巨蛋), but the Blue Man’s core character is still drawn from the group’s roots as street performers in New York.
“The Blue Man just shows up some place and spends the next hour and a half trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Blue Man Group Director and performer Brian Scott, after a press conference in Taipei earlier this week.
“So with the Megastar tour, it’s the Blue Man unwittingly thrust into the world of rock stars, but he doesn’t really know what this rock ’n’ roll business is really all about, because the Blue Man character is not a rock star.”
The show both satirizes and celebrates the rock ’n’ roll concert experience. The Blue Men, innocent and curious by nature, stumble upon a “how-to manual” that teaches them the basics of being a rock star. They go step by step through the manual, which includes clinical instructions on how to gyrate their hips and lip-sync.
While the Blue Men draw laughter with their awkward attempts at becoming rockers, they impress audiences with their musicality. Backed by a five-piece band, the Blue Men pound out rousing, hypnotic rhythms on a variety of specially designed percussion instruments: PVC pipes, drums that spit out paint, and an old grand piano that’s flipped on its side with the mallets exposed and is struck like a bass drum.
“There’s an aesthetic to the music that’s tribal. It’s very tribal but it has a modern vibe to it,” said Scott.
And even though the group’s Megastar show, its only touring performance, has a tighter script than its small theater shows, Scott says there will be some room for the Blue Men to engage in playful interaction with the audience.
Their quest to become rock gods often falls into parody, but at the end the Megastar show still carries all the elements of a great rock concert, said Scott. “It’s a good vibe, it’s the kind of thing that makes feel people feel closer.”
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS