(This past weekend, I had a lot of musical excitement! So much I'm doing it in two posts. Here is the first part...)
I don't really have favorites. I enjoy a lot of things, and I feel like ranking them devalues the inherent enjoyment in some way. If you ask for my "favorite" anything, the best I could probably give you is a top 5 list in no particular order. The major exception to this is that Pink Floyd is my number 1 favorite band ever-- not that my other "favorite" bands are lesser, but that the 'Floyd is just that much greater. So when I tell you that this weekend I saw a stage adaptation of Pink Floyd's The Wall, you can understand my excitement.
Holy. Crap.
It was, well, a stage adaptation of The Wall! It actually reminded me a little of the live version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where it's kind of a play and kind of a rock concert. Or maybe a play disguised as a concert. The plot and imagery were the same as the movie-- it actually used some of the movie's animations ("Goodbye Blue Sky," "What Shall We Do," and of course the infamous flower sex.) They used camerawork a lot, too; there were some pre-recorded sequences, and at least five camerapeople running around shooting different angles of the show. This stuff was shown on two big (12'x 9') projector screens on either side of the stage.
The stage stuff was mostly very faithful to the movie, although there were some artistic interpretations of certain scenes. All the characters were quite faithful... the one that deviated most was Pink himself. The actor was a guy in his 50s, slightly overweight, unshaven and with hair that was long and disheveled for most of the show. He worked really well, though. The Mother was excellent-- the part in The Trial where she ran down the stage singing "Baaaaaaaaaaaabe!" was perfect! And the Schoolmaster was spot on. He seriously looked just like the guy in the movie, mustache and angry Scottish accent and all! And he very obviously had fun with the part.
Musically-- oh man. So good! There was a 5-piece band (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard) and a full 25-or-so-piece choir to back them up. The choir had excellent soloists, including one really lovely tenor and one guy who sounded a LOT like Roger Waters. The lead guitarist was fantastic-- his sound was very, very similar to David Gilmour's. His solos in Comfortably Numb were gorgeous. (And he also played the recorder during "The Trial," which was hilariously fitting.) The whole performance sounded almost scarily close to the album! Having a rock band backed by a choir is really the only way to do justice to Pink Floyd. And they all obviously loved it. I was watching the band at the transition moment into "Another Brick in the Wall pt. 2," and as they ripped into "We don't need no education!" the bassist had a huge grin on his face. The choir, also, did a lot of head-bobbing and dancing in place.
What else to say about it? There was a high platform at the side of the stage from which Pink shouted at the audience during (both versions of) In The Flesh-- and during the second one, two uniformed choir members started marching up and down the aisles, and then attacked a woman and started beating her with batons! Stage "beating," of course, but I'm still not sure if she was a plant or not. They built a wall across the stage right before the intermission, each brick probably 4' x 3', and until "Comfortably Numb" (where they knocked a hole in it) they just used the cameras and shot the action going on behind it. Which was mostly Pink standing facing the wall playing the guitar, or sitting in the armchair looking crazy.
At the end, they did an encore, playing "Comfortably Numb" with the whole ensemble onstage singing and encouraging the audience to sing-- and I'm pretty sure that everyone in the room made the same little finger-flick gesture simultaneously after "OK! Just a little pin-prick!" If you know the song, you know what I'm talking about. (*Ding!*) They then ended with "Another Brick pt. 2," during which the Schoolmaster chased the little boys around the audience and threatened audience members (including me!) while the cast danced onstage and everyone sang and clapped. I really can't stress how much fun the whole thing was. And musically excellent. I would have felt I got my money's worth even without the play, the band was that good.
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes, you'll just have to claw your way through this disguise...
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