A silent gesture can convey more in a flash than a minute of spoken dialogue.

And, just for the record, this production offers both prologue and epilogue, and uses recitative, not spoken dialogue.

There's less than 40 minutes of spoken dialogue in 142 minutes of running time.

In such works, music and spoken dialogue typically alternated, although the music was sometimes also used to accompany pantomime.

Not all of the score was used; the opera was, instead, presented as a sort of operetta, with spoken dialogue between the main numbers.