The organisers of Manchester’s new International Festival promised to give the city a cultural jamboree unlike any other in the world – 25 premieres, no less. If they all hit the spot like this opening show, the world will come flocking to Manchester.

Billed as “Damon Albarn’s opera”, the enchanting Monkey: Journey to the West is no closer to opera (at least as understood in the West) than it is to circus, dance, mime or a martial arts movie. Indeed, few of the 45-strong Chinese cast do any singing.

But genre distinctions don’t really matter. Brilliantly masterminded by the Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng – and with live action dovetailed into fantastical cartoons by Jamie Hewlett, the visual brains behind Gorillaz, Albarn’s “virtual” band – Monkey is simply a piece of music theatre of the most spectacular kind.

Based on a 16th-century Chinese fable not unlike The Wizard of Oz, it tells of a magical journey to India by the Monkey King (a stroppy ape, portrayed with winning verve by Fei Yang) and a bunch of disparate companions to collect sacred Buddhist scrolls and rescue China from moral decline.

The saga clearly had a symbolic meaning in ancient China. And perhaps Chen’s use of film footage showing Mao and military parades in Tiananmen Square is intended to make a political point in 21st-century China too – possibly about the importance of individuality. But that’s incidental. The chief raison d’etre of Monkey is to be the vehicle for breathtaking acrobatics.

Ranks of jugglers toss spears or spin plates with scarcely believable insouciance. Contortionists turn their spines inside out. And lithe gymnasts, fantastically costumed as birds, fish or mythical beasts, cartwheel across the floor or twist on wires 20ft above the stage.

Imagine, if you can, an improbable combination of The Lion King, Cirque du Soleil and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And all this is placed by Hewlett in visual locations that are sometimes bulked out in full-scale sets (as with the vast Buddha that dominates the finale) and sometimes evoked with sophisticated lighting and projection, and which range in reference from video games to Monet, DalÍ and Hokusai.

Albarn’s music, played by an electronically enhanced pit band of Western and Chinese instruments, is equally eclectic. The influence of authentic Chinese opera is apparent not only in its pentatonic melodic contours but also in its punchy phrases: the aural equivalent of the “Zap! Pow!” in cartoon fights. But there’s a lot of minimalism here, too. It’s not an opera score that will be around in a century’s time, like Puccini’s. And, at 110 minutes nonstop, it runs too long. But it fits this spectacle like a glove.

What’s most encouraging, however, is the sense of something new and exciting being created from the melding of many disparate styles – pop and classical, Western and Eastern, visual and aural. The audience, about 50 years younger on average than the usual opera crowd, loved it.

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