About halfway through this five-act extravaganza there’s a tableau of a theatre audience: bejeweled matrons in brocade gowns [...] creaky mandarins in quilted robes. Just the sort of throng that might have greeted the house-counting eyes of a 1920’s Peking Opera actor onstage. [...] The Chinese government spent a lot of pre-devaluation RMB to buy this crowd.