Roger Waters Points ‘The Wall’ Toward Abuse of Power
Roger Waters projected his message stadium-wide, literally, when he brought his new production of “The Wall” to Yankee Stadium on Friday, starting a two-night stand. A white-brick wall, which is both an ideal video screen in concert and the central metaphor of the rock opera he wrote for the 1979 album by Pink Floyd (with additional music by the band’s guitarist, David Gilmour), spanned the stadium and towered 40 feet high.
The message Mr. Waters hammered home — with images including animated regiments of goose-stepping hammers on the march — was distrust of power and authority in many forms: parents, schools, celebrities, corporations, countries, ideologies. Throughout intermission (as elegiac music played), and at points during the concert, the names and faces of people killed by wars, terrorism and government actions were shown on the wall. Quotations from George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Dwight D. Eisenhower also appeared on it. At one point, animated bombers dropped corporate logos and religious symbols; “Run Like Hell” included a WikiLeaks video from an American helicopter firing on Iraqi journalists. Early in the concert, Mr. Waters deplored “all the victims of state terror all over the world,” and preached that giving governments, police and soldiers too much power was “a very steep and slippery slope to tyranny.”
To him, bigger and slicker did not mean better. Except, of course, at his stadium show.
The video wall, which his promoters have billed as “the largest projection surface ever toured in live entertainment,” isn’t the only huge special effect in “The Wall.” It’s an impeccable, stadium-sized show, magnifying even further what began, decades ago, as very private torments for what Mr. Waters, smiling broadly, called his “poor, miserable,” messed-up (he used a stronger term), “little Roger.” There are marionettes as tall as the wall, bursts of pyrotechnics, surround-sound effects that simulated fighter planes buzzing the stadium, a group of 15 children dancing through “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and — a Pink Floyd essential, even if it was from the cover of a different album — a pig-shaped balloon, now a black boar with tusks, painted with mock slogans. When animation warped and crumbled the wall, with flying bricks and metamorphosing colors, it was dazzling.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/roger-waters-points-%e2%80%98the-wall%e2%80%99-toward-abuse-of-power/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120709
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