Pink Floyd fans still floating on the sprawling ambition of Roger Waters’ restaging of the group’s 1979 grand opus “The Wall” at Staples Center last week (and moving to Anaheim for a pair of shows next week) can keep the feeling alive with an equally stimulating if very different enterprise that’s running for a couple more weeks in Hollywood.

It’s the Open Fist Theatre’s staging of British playwright Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” in its Los Angeles premiere.

As a long-time admirer of Stoppard’s work, and having read F. Kathleen Foley's largely enthusiastic review in The Times, I attended a recent performance and couldn't help but wonder at the remarkable coincidence of the timing, having taken in “The Wall” just a few nights earlier.

Stoppard’s play, which runs through Dec. 18, focuses on a young Czech man, Jan, who, like Stoppard, moved from his native country to England in his youth, where he reveled in the cultural revolution going on around him. Jan is particularly drawn to the music that acted as catalyst and soundtrack for so much social change, and the play is rife with recordings by and references to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and numerous other classic-rock acts, including Pink Floyd. In particular, Syd Barrett-era Floyd.

 
Everyone else in the music business may be content to think smaller these days.

Not Roger Waters.

Pink Floyd’s erstwhile lead singer and songwriter not only remembers when rock music could also function as grand-scale theater, he helped arrange that whole marriage.

In an era in which grand-scale ambition at times seems to be diminishing hand in hand with record sales, Waters wants to perpetuate the notion that rock can offer not just eye-boggling spectacle, which has become the alpha and omega of so many of today’s big-budget pop-R&B concert tours, but spectacle coupled with equally big ideas.

So Waters, 66, has resurrected his old band’s 1979 opus in excelsis “The Wall” for a new generation, and Monday at Staples Center, at the first of five Southland performances over the next few weeks, he made it bigger, broader, harder, louder and more dazzling than ever. And that was just the first two pyrotechnics-heavy minutes.

But neither Waters nor “The Wall” offered much in the way of nuance to begin with.

It’s a brooding, blaring, fiercely proud wallow through the roots of youthful fear, anger and alienation,  one that touched a deep nerve with legions of listeners. You have to believe most of them let its dark themes unfurl in the privacy of their bedrooms where they sat alone, late at night, probably in the dark.

All the lonely people, however, ultimately formed a global nation of their own, pushing “The Wall” over the last three decades into a tie for third place (with “Led Zeppelin IV”) on the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s list of the biggest selling albums of all time, logging a comfortably mind-numbing 23 million copies in the U.S. alone. (Only Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits/1971-1975” have outsold it, with 29 million copies each according to the RIAA.)

Waters has said in recent interviews that he’s come a long way from the fearful 36-year-old he was when he wrote most of the songs for the album. But whatever he’s gained in the way of self-understanding hasn’t softened his hammer-over-the-head way of putting a message across.

As an idea man, Waters is as subtle as a goose-stepping mallet, one of many blatant images of a monolithic and militaristic society that flashed on the literal wall that was erected out of what looked like giant cardboard Duplos across the broad Staples stage as the performance unfolded.
“The Wall,” then and now, is the Who’s “Tommy” without Pete Townshend’s poetry, or most significantly, his wicked sense of humor.

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd knows the artistic potency of an image on a wall.  But his recent campaign to wheat-paste an anti-war quote from President Eisenhower across American cities to promote his touring revival of the Floyd staple “The Wall” unexpectedly proved his point, after his employees pasted the quote over the storefront of Solutions speaker repair in Silver Lake. The wall has served as an impromptu fan memorial to the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith for nearly a decade.

Smith passed away in Los Angeles in 2003, and fans have left personal messages and quoted lyrics on the wall, the backdrop to the cover art of his album “Figure 8,” ever since. But as of Monday night, fans noticed that the wall also featured Waters’ image of a soldier cradling a child with the Eisenhower quote nearby.

Though the oft-abused wall has also been a favorite target for taggers and is frequently overwhelmed by non-Smith-related writing, local reaction to Waters’ wheat pasting, including an L.A. Weekly blog post,  was swift and critical. In a phone interview Tuesday evening, Waters apologized to any Smith fans who found his choice of walls callous.

“It was absolutely an accident,” Waters said. “I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed (the team) to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.”