Where does one start?

(Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

What an evening at the theatre! Our seats were fabulous (for me anyway). In the orchestra row Y straight on to the stage- I could see all the splendors that were "Satyagraha".
I was a tad hesitant about it being Phillip Glass whose music I usually love but it can be discordant or a little more difficult to listen to than the more lyrical music of say Puncini. Then the fact that it was sung in Sanskrit- never having heard that sung I was unsure especially given my response to "The First Emperor" music and lyrics. On top of all this I knew the production used giant puppets, was about the early life of Gandhi and had titles projected onto the set. All being said I was slightly unsure as to whether I would last beyond the first interval.
That was before it started- all indications that it was going to be as different and unusual as I had predicted were affirmed when the curtain went up and there stood Gandhi ( Richard Croft), no overture had been played no sound for what seemed like minutes. Then Richard Croft began to sing and the music began and the most fantastic production that combined so many magical components of theatre it is difficult to describe.
A review in the New York Times enlightened me a little with the folowing:-
The focus is on the period from 1893 to 1914, the years Gandhi spent in South Africa. Tolstoy, the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. each figure in an act representing witnesses from Gandhi's past, present and future.

"Satyagraha" is the middle work in Glass's trilogy of operatic portraits, sandwiched between "Einstein on the Beach" and "Akhnaten." The libretto is drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text, and bears little direct relation to the action, which plays out in a series of tableaus that crisscross time. There are no subtitles, only projections of sentences from the text and references to scenes and dates.

I was entranced by the whole thing.