Award-winning Blue Man Group bringing physical-theatre extravaganza to Macau

On stage and in publicity photos, Phil Stanton, a member of the award-winning Blue Man Group, is so slathered in blue greasepaint that no one can recognise him offstage. This anonymity serves the 57-year-old well.

“That’s the great thing about this project. I can walk around and live a life like anybody. I say that, but I am anybody,” he says.

The joys of being everyman is something Stanton often returns to in a conversation about the group he is best known for. The Blue Man Group have thrilled audiences across the US, as well as in London, Tokyo and, more recently, Singapore. They will take their act to The Venetian in Macau from August 11 to 28.

Trying to explain the group’s popularity, the co-creator stresses the childlike singularity of his blue persona. What makes Blue Man so attractive, he suggests, is a paradoxical ability to be the same, but different.

“We have a unique way of talking about the ‘Blue Man’,” says Stanton, “[when] it should be grammatically correct to say the ‘blue men’. We wanted to express this idea of the tribe. There are three of them, and that’s the smallest number of people to be a tribe. Often they would act as one, and they had one common goal, and that’s the way we did it. It’s almost a poetic way of saying they’re aligned and a tribe. We always think of them as only three, even though there are many different shows going around the world.”