Walter Wassermann

Sergeant Hans Albers, the terror of Chicago gangsters, is transferred South of the border to deal with bandidos.

The delightful Johann Strauss comic opera Die Fledermaus was mercilessly lampooned in this truly bizarre production. For starters, a framing device has been added: After appearing in 300 consecutive appearances of Fledermaus (which translates as The Bat) the lead tenor (Georg Alexander) imagines that he's seeing bats everywhere. Driven a bit over the edge by all this, he falls asleep and has a nightmare about the opera, with a group of non-singers cast in the leading roles. The original libretto about romantic assignations, political imprisonments and mistaken identity is burlesqued to the hilt: at one point, the hero finds out that his prison cell is surrounded by rubber tubes!

As a gang of classy jewel thieves hop from one European country to another, an engineer rescues a woman from their clutches.

"The Stranger" is Mrs. Clarkson, the wife of a wealthy American. Mrs. Clarkson has entered into matrimony for the express purpose of accumulating a great deal of money. No, she isn't a spendthrift: She hopes to use the cash to finance a campaign of revenge, levelled against the man who ruined her mother.

When linguistics professor Henry Higgins boasts that he can pass off Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle as a princess with only six months' training, Colonel George Pickering takes him up on the bet. Eliza moves into Higgins's home and begins her rigorous training after the professor comes to a financial agreement with her dustman father, Alfred. But the plucky young woman is not the only one undergoing a transformation.

Tenor Mario Monti is searching for his wife Bianca's daughter, who is believed to be dead. Before Mario, Bianca was married to Carlo Scarpia, Mario's patron. When Carlo discovered that his wife and Mario were having an affair, he left them both and, as he was leaving, told Bianca that their daughter Mary had died. In reality, she grew up without knowing her real parents. Mario tracks Mary down in Munich, where she works as a ballerina at the State Opera.