Anybody who insists that their stage musicals come with an easy-to-follow plot and instantly memorable tunes had better stay away. For the rest of us, this extraordinary entertainment - conceived by the guys behind Gorillaz, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, in collaboration with the Chinese-American director and choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng - is well worth a trip to Manchester, or wherever. Why Albarn perseveres with rock bands as conventional as his latest, the Good, the Bad and the Queen, while simultaneously engaged in musical crossovers as bold as this ambitious marriage of East and West is a mystery.
It was the breathtaking scale of the spectacle that had the most impact on opening night. Based on an ancient Chinese folk tale - a sort of Buddhist Pilgrim's Progress, which inspired a cult 1970s television programme - the show had far too much happening over and above the stage, and in the orchestra pit, for the tale of the Monkey King to make much sense. His quest to retrieve some holy scripture on behalf of the devout monk Tripitaka was, in the end, less meaningful than his endearing fondness for scratching his scrotum.
Throughout the 90-minute show, subtitles flashed translations of scraps of the Cantonese dialogue. But messages such as "Let's make love like fish in the water" and "He is a virgin by the reincarnation of a golden cicada" reminded you to keep your eyes on the action, which was, by contrast, anything but inscrutable. A cast of about 50 quirkily costumed aerial acrobats, contortionists and martial artists turned the Palace into an oriental circus, while Hewlett's kaleidoscopically shifting set and lighting designs made cult Chinese movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look tame by comparison. Just when you thought that Monkey must have exhausted its repertoire of stunts, on came the fire jugglers, performing what might or might not have been illusionist tricks. Were those flaming brands tossed in the air real, or back-projected images? By this point, Monkey's aura of enchantment was so powerful, you could believe what you liked.
Albarn's music was no less magical. Featuring a vivid blend of clanking or thudding percussion, spiky Chinese strings and regular bursts of rudely farty horns - some, apparently, generated by a "Klaxophone" Albarn invented himself - this was several cuts above the polite homage to Malian music we heard on his last excursion abroad. Ranging in style from wobbly folk airs to an inspired oriental ska stomp, the score repeated itself only in the odd moments when Albarn attempted a pastiche of the looping arpeggios of Philip Glass. For the rest, it ploughed its own furrow, bolting western beats and brass onto a Chinese harmonic chassis in ways that will garner Albarn no hits, but should win him serious attention in compositional circles.
Never mind its cargo of visual thrills: Monkey stands as the boldest detour ever undertaken by a been-there, done-that rock star in search of pastures new.
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Palace Theatre, Manchester