This spellbinding, Cirque du Soleil–style production at Ho Chi Minh City’s Municipal Theater, also known as the Opera House, turns to rural Vietnam for its inspiration. Mixing muscular acrobatics, visual artistry, juggling, and modern dance, the show employs the materials commonly found in villages as the basis for its routines. Recurring motifs include the bowl-shaped coracle-style boats still widely used in the country, and bamboo poles (used for balancing and as tracks during one particularly confounding, Rube Goldberg–style, conveyor-belt-type passage). As memorable as the nonstop action on stage is the live music, dominated by the haunting sounds of the dan bau, or gourd lute.
