During a bus ride through the Andes, two seminarians encounter with a woman named Manon. Immediately, one of them falls in love and the attraction is mutual, so they decide to flee to capital city to start a new life. But the love of Manon ambitious drags this man to leave his vocation and commit criminal acts to maintain a life of luxury and extravagance.

Adonai is an lunatic poet. He lives in an abandoned neighborhood of Caracas where he runs an underground radio called "Radio Pandemonium", he lives with his mom, his grandmother and a young lady who she calls very endearly, 'whore'. They survive among the corrupt, the death and the rising upheaval of the oppressed.

Fidel, a deaf mugger, sees the possibility of a new life after he start attending to a school for the deaf. However his chances are getting shorter as the a police officer is after his trail.

This Wagner opera is rarely performed because of the scandals that engulfed the Magdeburg Theatre when it was performed in 1836 under the title The Novice of Palermo, and became known as a cursed opera from which the composer had to distance himself. Wagner's adaptation of the story reflects the rebellious mood of a Revolutionary Germany, vindicating sensual love and attack the fanatical repression of sexuality by a puritanical and hypocritical authority. As the prose says, "Shame to him whose cruel striking/Kills for faults of his own liking!". One of the most extraordinary musicals based on a text by Shakespeare, especially worthy of a new performance as it is four hundred years since the death of the Bard.