The reason Roger Waters never turned ‘The Wall’ into a theatre show: “Then what?”
Most of the biggest rock operas of all time are begging to be played out on the live stage. Even if the people aren’t 100% invested in the final product, the art of telling a good story can get its second wind when it’s told in a different format than across two slabs of vinyl. But even though Roger Waters has taken The Wall into different territory every time he plays it onstage, there have always been pieces that would have never translated had he taken everything to Broadway.
Then again, it’s not like it was going to be a walk in the park bringing any of the versions to life. The album itself had already cost them millions and managed to get Richard Wright fired from the band, so it wasn’t like Waters wasn’t under a great deal of stress before he even laid a finger on the live show.
When he did bring the album to the stage, though, the band gave us the definitive version of what the story was supposed to be. It was already a gamble trying to get fans who wanted to hear ‘Money’ to go along with a storyline of all original material, but when listening to the live documents of that time, songs like ‘Young Lust’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ go over incredibly well onstage, especially when David Gilmour appears at the top of the wall during the show’s climax.
The only problem is the fact that the band didn’t have enough moving parts to justify it being one of the biggest stage shows of all time. Even when they made the movie companion piece, there were always going to be limits on where they could go, whether that meant something that was too risque for casual movie fans or making animations that were meant to show what was going on in Pink’s head.
But there are also parts of the show that seemed tailor-made for the Broadway stage. Much like Pete Townshend made his own version of Tommy, songs like ‘Young Lust’ wouldn’t have that much trouble translating, and when opening the entire production, hearing ‘In The Flesh’ would be enough to put every other rock opera to shame as soon as those opening guitar riffs start.
For Waters, though, the entire scene in ‘The Trial’ is the reason why he could never manage to get any Broadway show off the ground, saying, “This is why I haven’t done the piece for musical theatre yet. It’s because up until now, I haven’t known how it ended. I certainly didn’t know 20 years ago, which is why the ending is so enigmatic. ‘Tear down The Wall,’ then what?”
Even if there are a lot of unanswered questions about the album version, fans are being robbed of one of Floyd’s greatest pieces onstage. And since Waters was able to get legends like Tim Curry to perform pieces of ‘The Trial’ when he played the album in Berlin, it’s not like he couldn’t direct seasoned pros of the stage on how the whole thing could be blocked.
But maybe the core of The Wall is that it doesn’t have a set ending. ‘Outside the Wall’ leaves things on an ambiguous note, but since all good art is meant to make people think, maybe it’s up to us to figure out if Pink is finally free from his exile or compelled to repeat his mistakes for the rest of his life.
