WILD Rice's Hotel is one of the most ambitious and richly-imagined plays in the history of Singapore theatre. It's a milestone production that ranks all the way up there with Kuo Pao Kun's Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and TheatreWorks' Lear - even if it belongs to a more populist genre compared to the other two.

Audacious, exhilarating, splendidly funny and at times heartbreaking, Hotel sets a new benchmark for Singapore theatre that will not likely be surpassed by any other soon. How could any when the five-hour epic tells 11 incredible stories spanning 100 years in more than seven languages and 80 characters?

Premiering at the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Hotel starts in 1915 and tells one story per decade to finally arrive at 2015. Yet this whirlwind journey through history is played out on a small canvas - specifically, in a room in a hotel. Also, its characters are mostly women and men who don't typically appear in government-sanctioned history books - such as a "comfort woman" from the Japanese Occupation, transgender prostitutes of 1970s Bugis Street, a Malay man railing against post-9/11 racial-profiling and a Chinese mother struggling to accept the idea of her daughter marrying an Indian man.