I La Galigo

I think calling it a musical, even a "musical" with post-modern scare quotes, isn't very appropriate. I thought it was very interesting that the reviewer is not one of the Times theater regulars or even Margo Jefferson (she wrote a feature about it, among other Lincoln Center Festival productions, on July 8th); he seems to mostly write about visual arts.

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Ooooo! Semantics! I just think that the label of "musical" comes with too much baggage here to encompass something as avant-garde as this production. I think the Times referred to it as a music-theater piece, which sounds kind of odd but doesn't impose so many probably inappropriate expectations on it.

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Expanding the borders of musical theater is fine with me. I seem to recall someone asking on this board a month or two ago if Piazza is a "play with music" instead of a musical, so obviously some people here interpret musical extremely narrowly.

I went to a Chinese opera last year that could be possibly called a musical, but so little of it was translated and explained I couldn't tell the role the music was playing in the story, which I mostly didn't understand as I don't speak Chinese, the program notes were very sketchy and surtitles non-existent.

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I saw it on Friday. I was almost 3 hour show without intermission. It was a musical and it was a ballet. Yet, the actors rarely sang, it was the band who sang. Oh, what it reminds me was actually NOH of Japan.

First it starts very, very slowly but now you are totally amazed by the story and performance, and 3 hours went by fast.

I am not sure I could say it contained authentic dancing and movement since I don't know, but it felt that way.

I really did not know who Robert Wilson is. Only name I knew. Does anyone tell me about him? It was created someone who knew the story and culture deeply. It was amazing.