The Surrogate Band

The Surrogate Band builds The Wall, brick by brick

After four months of rehearsals, the Costa Rican Pink Floyd tribute band played The Wall in full, start to finish, at the Teatro Auditorio Nacional.

Some albums get played; others get built. What The Surrogate Band did on Saturday, October 17 was the latter: The Wall in full, start to finish and in order, at the Teatro Auditorio Nacional inside the Museo de los Niños in San José. That meant 28 songs in two acts, including “What Shall We Do Now?” and “The Last Few Bricks,” the pieces Pink Floyd added when it took the work to the stage in 1980. Four months of rehearsals for a single night.

The story of The Wall starts with an invisible wall. In Montreal in 1977, at the end of the Animals tour, Roger Waters spat at a fan who kept yelling at the front of the stage. That breaking point, the distance between the musician and his audience, became the idea for a double album released in 1979: the story of Pink, a rock star who builds a wall between himself and the world, one brick at a time.

Since 2011, The Surrogate Band has set out to faithfully recreate Pink Floyd’s music live, with musicians who have played in Pneuma, Hijos, Sincrónico, Gëntry and the National Symphony Orchestra. For this night they brought everything the work demands: backing singers in black suits and dark glasses, red armbands with the crossed hammers, lasers cutting across the hall from side to side, and giant screens with the wall animations, the screaming face and the falling pig.

The staging followed Pink’s story almost scene by scene. The teacher puppet, eyes glowing, presided over “Another Brick in the Wall.” An armchair sat alone under a beam of light, wrapped in smoke, and from it the lead singer sang the character’s isolation; at another point, the lights projected a brick-wall texture onto his face. A rag doll lay slumped at the edge of the stage, and in the final stretch the leader appeared in a black coat with a megaphone: Pink turned dictator in “In the Flesh” and “Waiting for the Worms.”

And as at any self-respecting Pink Floyd show, the inflatable pig flew over the stage, crossed hammers painted on its sides, while the guitarists traded the solos David Gilmour made immortal, from “Another Brick in the Wall” to “Comfortably Numb.” After “The Trial” and “Outside the Wall,” the band came back for an encore: “Wish You Were Here,” “Have a Cigar” and “Sheep,” a trip to the two albums Pink Floyd released just before The Wall. At the end, the whole band knelt on the stage floor for the photo, with the hall on its feet behind them.

There is an irony no one who knows the building can miss: the Museo de los Niños is housed in San José’s former Central Penitentiary. That night, a work about the walls we build around ourselves rang out inside what was once a prison. And in the end, just as the album says, the wall came down.