Direct from the Mongolian State Academic Theatre in Ulaanbataar, a cast of 70 storms the Coliseum, London’s 120-year-old “People’s Palace of Entertainment” (now better known as the home of the imperiled English National Opera). Set in the period of the Hunni Empire, which predates Genghis Khan by over 1,000 years, The Mongol Khan is historical fiction in a flamboyant Shakespearean key. Awash in exotic spectacle, the show is a smash back home but has never traveled—not even to the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, where (boo, Beijing!) celebrations of ancestral identity are in official disfavor. Six decades ago, the U.K. was the first Western nation to recognize Mongolia as a sovereign nation. How fitting that it should be London where Mongolia claims a place in the theatrical league of nations. —Matthew Gurewitsch