British prog-rockers Pink Floyd visited just two American cities with the original tour for 1979 double album “The Wall” before pulling the plug on a venture that proved too costly. But local fans finally got to witness one of rock’s most celebrated operas Saturday night as chief architect Roger Waters presented his magnum opus to a packed Tacoma Dome.

This is the second iconic album that Floyd’s bandleader has given full concert treatment following the “Dark Side of the Moon” tour that stopped in Seattle in 2006. But this trek has deservedly generated a bigger buzz. For my money, “Dark Side” is a better, tighter album, but “The Wall” is more uniquely Waters’ vision. He wrote most of the songs, sang more leads. And the main character, Pink, is based on his experiences – losing his dad to World War 2, being humiliated in school, his eventual disillusionment with rock stardom.

Sure, singer-guitarist David Gilmour is key to some this album’s best moments – especially “Comfortably Numb,” a song that, Rolling Stone reports, Gilmour will join Waters for at one random tour date. (Sadly, it wasn’t Tacoma.) But “The Wall” doesn’t lose quite as much with his absence. And the four guys tapped to fill the void – vocalist Robbie Wyckoff and guitarists Dave Kilminster, Snowy White and G.E. Smith – do a spectacular job.

The biggest reason for the hype, though, is that Waters is recreating one of the most mythic spectacles in rock history. “The Wall” tour was the most ambitious stadium rock show of it’s time, its legend only magnified by the relatively small number of people who witnessed it.

Sure, giant props are a dime a dozen these days. But the scale of Saturday’s production was still quite striking, with menacing, 30-foot-tall marionettes, aerial props – a replica fighter, the inevitable floating swine – and a towering, white wall that stage hands assembled brick by man-sized brick.

The last brick slid into place with the final, world weary line of “Goodbye Cruel World,” symbolically sealing the off from the audience. This lead to a strangely ironic call and response as the second half of the show began, fans howling and pumping their fists wildly as Waters called out listlessly, “Is there anybody out there?”

With the band variously obscured for most of 2 ½ hours, the show was increasingly dependent on projected visuals, many familiar from Alan Parker’s 1982 cult film, “Pink Floyd: The Wall.” Fans saw students being ground into hamburger during “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” fascist thugs terrorizing the streets for “You Better Run” and, of course, Gerald Scarfe’s grotesque animations, the flatulent Judge handing out his verdict before the wall came tumbling down.

“Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!”

I’m guessing a lot of the show was true to the original production. (I think Waters showed a snippet during “Mother,” but I was in transit from the photo pit.) But some imagery was updated in a way that reinforced the timelessness of the rock opera’s themes – alienation, totalitarianism, the futility of war.

Early on, for example, fans saw biographical info for E.F. Waters projected onto a circular screen above the band. Waters father died in Anzio, Italy in 1944, an event referenced throughout the album.

But while much of the album’s imager is drawn from World War 2, subsequent in the live show commemorate the victims of New Millennium conflicts, from soldiers killed in Iraq to Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian national who was mistakenly gunned down as a terror suspect in London in 2005.

“The Wall” isn’t an album that I dust off very often. But seeing the show live reinforced just how relevant and poignant the music remains today. And Waters production is a fitting tribute to an album that looms so large in the annals of rock history.

Here are a few scenes from the early part of last night’s show.