| The musical "The Last Teaching of don Carlos" is the surreal journey of a young Gen-X slacker named Don, who finds himself lost in a parallel universe (called non-ordinary reality) where all emotions and states of being exist as sentient creatures. Having lost much of his memory, he has no idea how or why he got there. However, he carries with him a toybox (a duffel bag filled with masks and other objects that are the different sides of himself) to help solve this mystery. Accompanied by a harlequin, named Distraction (his own tendency to wander off into tangents of curiousness) he recovers his memories, and finds out that he has already come across Guilt: a bear-like bully named Oso who tries to lock him in a cage of his own cowardice, as well as Laziness: a gypsy named Piper who tries to keep him in a trance with the hypnotic images he creates with flute. Complicating the journey even further, is a malevolent, raging beast named El Diablo, who has kidnapped his mentor Carlos (Casteneda); his only ticket to escaping the psychedelic realm of non-ordinary reality. As he sets off to find Carlos, he slowly remembers more and more, while using the "selves" in his toybox to outsmart or defeat any of the "creatures of non-ordinary reality" he comes across, which include the slave-driving "Overlord of Addiction" and "Venus" (his ideal woman who manifests in three different personality/characters: Jenny the innocent, Harriet the matriarch, and Goddess the dominatrix). He triumphs over his own issues as he runs this mysterious yet nightmarish gauntlet, but before can rescue Carlos from some unspeakable fate at the hands of El Diablo, he must succeed in unraveling the biggest mystery of all: who he really is. The powerful score features music that ranges from traditional musical theatre to pop/rock and electronic. |
