BY FISH GRIWKOWSKY, EDMONTONJOURNAL.COM MAY 28, 2012
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| Roger Waters performs the Wall at Rexall Place in Edmonton on Monday, May 28, 2012. |
EDMONTON - Fittingly, Roger Waters’ The Wall Live was a concert with four sides: spellbinding, nostalgic, unnerving and political. Add “decadent,” but no one’s complaining.
The simple concept of playing the biggest album of the 1970s was taken to its extreme Monday night at Rexall Place – to reproduce a complicated, convoluted narrative 33 years later in a way that’s still relevant – especially considering the lack of semi-estranged Pink Floyd member David Gilmour. The gonzo spirit of original vocalist Syd Barrett certainly hung heavy enough in the show’s hallucinogenic imagery, but let’s leave the deeper symbolism behind for the purposes of this snapshot.
Building brick-by-brick an enormous white-stacked wall, which literally hid the band by the end of the first act, this act of deliberate theatre was frankly about the coolest thing I can ever recall seeing in the NHL rink. It’s possible I might remember something better later, but the atmosphere was especially distracting, what with the two bros on the floor beside me finding their way onto the next level with a spreading octopus of contact high.
In terms of a play-by-play, The Wall’s first act (we called them records once) was immediately politicized in a valid yet helpless criticism of murder in the name of war. Opening with an audio sample from Spartacus, ironic critiques of capitalism were projected alongside Nazi-looking soldiers rising on a platform, an absolute waterfall of sparkling fireworks ending with an airplane on a wire knocking down a section of the wall in a ball of fire. No, really.
“So yeh, thought yeh, might go to the show,” Waters sang with that insistent nasal knife he calls a voice – on a few songs knocked a keys down, but not all. He was especially himself on One of My Turns.
By the way, every second I’m telling you about this thing, I’m missing more details – the second half is currently playing Nobody Home, but duty!
Projected faces of soldiers from any imaginable conflict built bricks of the wall while Waters talked to the crowd about Jean Charles de Menezes, who was killed by police who thought he was a terrorist.
For Another Brick in the Wall (Part II), children from Edmonton’s Ecole Greenview School senior choir – Grade 5 and 6 students – came out and danced, singing the unforgettable “we don’t need no education” under a giant inflatable schoolmaster with piercing red spotlight eyes. Again, really.
Confusing the politics some, sexual images of a topless dancer followed flowers penetrating and ripping each other to pieces, the terrifying Don’t Leave Me Now, the precise moment of story protagonist Pink’s mental demise. Of course, it’s about a girl, but opens up one of the classic questions of this yarn – if Pink is crazy because of his fatherless, rising-Thatcherite totalitarian surroundings, plus a “dirty woman,” is he a reliable narrator? Or were you more interested in how the guitars sounded (great)?
Of course, we all know how this story ends, or should. The wall comes down, starting with the reprise of the opening number In the Flesh, which soon found a red-black-white-adorned Waters firing a fake machine-gun into the audience as a giant inflatable pig floated overhead tattooed with “everything will be all right” and “trust us.”
Just totally off the rails, a blur of giant puppets, walls of blood, screeching lyrics and imagery of corporate, ideological and religious symbols raining down from the sky. Subtle it was not, every second asking us in the most direct way to perhaps give the slightest consideration of how much control we casually let slip over to governments and police in an increasingly technological state.
If you can get into this show at any point in the future I suggest you do so. It’s an incredible spectacle, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to watch the finale. Don’t worry, everything will be all right.
POSTSCRIPT: The wall comes down, ticker tape falls, the war is over. The confetti is in the shape of corporate and religious symbols. It’s the little details.
Photos by john Lucas
From: www.edmontonjournal.com
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