Play «Ông Già Đoàn Lô Tô» (The Old Man of the Lô Tô Troupe)

   A travelling Mekong Delta lottery show is rebuilt on a stage in central Ho Chi Minh City: a shelter for people the world has dropped, and the place where a stepfather has spent years walking behind the troupe looking for his wife's lost daughter. Called-out numbers, laughter and grief share the same evening.

   Tickets: the 12 September show is sold out; the next available performance is 25 September at 20:00.

   The script is drawn from the short story «Ơi Cải về đâu» by writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư; Bùi Quốc Bảo wrote and directed it, with Trần Đại and An Thi as production directors. Quang Tuấn plays old Hai Lân, who follows the troupe with a missing-child sign hung on his chest and pours everything he cannot say into the songs; Khả Như plays Thắm, the daughter he is looking for. As the newspaper Sài Gòn Giải Phóng describes the plot, the grown-up Thắm has renamed herself Mỹ Ngọc and hires another woman to impersonate her at the reunion so that the search will stop, because she wants her poor past erased before marrying a wealthy businessman.

   Worth knowing beforehand:

• — the cast also includes Hồng Trang, Huỳnh Phương, Hữu Đằng, Lâm Nguyễn, Dương Thanh Vàng and Lim Phước Sang, alongside the theatre's younger actors
• — the costumes were made by the lô tô troupe Hương Nam, credited on its own line of the poster
• — the same short story has been staged before by the Nụ Cười Mới and Hoàng Thái Thanh theatres
• — only one performance is currently scheduled; further dates are announced separately

   This one is for you if you like character-driven southern drama, if you are looking for an evening of theatre to share with family, or if you are curious about a subculture that guidebooks rarely mention. Expect a family story rather than a folklore demonstration.

   Lô tô itself is a Vietnamese lottery game with a strong performance element borrowed from bài chòi: the host draws a number and announces it not as a figure but as a verse whose final word rhymes with it. Vietnamese Wikipedia dates its golden age to the 1980s in the south, above all in the Mekong Delta, where troupes toured villages that professional companies never reached; the hosts were traditionally men in women's dress and transgender performers, long stigmatised in the press and written about far more sympathetically in recent years.

   Sân khấu Thế Giới Trẻ belongs to the Sài Gòn Phẳng company, runs several different plays in a single week and brings each of them back in short runs. According to the theatre's own site the production was part of its entry list for the Ho Chi Minh City Theatre Festival in 2024, and in March 2025 it was staged on three evenings within one month.

   About the schedule: one performance is announced so far, and the theatre's own calendar currently runs only up to this date, so the next evenings will be published later. Besides the number in the details, the box office also answers on 0869 047 971.

   The play is performed in Vietnamese and the theatre says nothing about subtitles or translation. There is singing in it, but the story is carried by dialogue.

   A rural fairground troupe rebuilt on a city stage is not something the season offers twice, and this evening is where to find it.