El gran teatro (Spanish "The Great (or Grand) Theatre") is a 1979 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Laínez, part of his Buenos Aires series. The whole action of the novel takes place during a performance of Wagner's Parsifal at Buenos Aires' famous opera house, the Teatro Colón. The Colón is, emblematically and par excellence, The Great Theatre, a giant and impossibly splendiferous jewellery box built, in an improbable bygone age, for a glitteringly self-assured class of leaders (or, alternatively, disgusting show-offs) to show itself off.