Comedy in three acts by Franz Arnold and Ernst Bach
Time: Present. Place: A medium-sized town in the province somewhere in Germany. Where exactly, we do not know. But what we do know is: In the old days, when he was still young and much more full of life than he is today, the mustard factory owner Ludwig Klinke had a torrid affair - secretly, that goes without saying. A dancer named Rosita, who also called herself the "Spanish Fly" after the aphrodisiac of the same name, had turned the gentleman's head - precisely because she had an effect on him like the notorious powder made from the ground-up bodies of the green beetle of the same name of the genus Lytta vesicatoria from the oil beetle family, which primarily increases male potency. Klinke's wife Emma, of course, was not allowed to know about the affair. Under no circumstances! And even today, 25 years later, she still knows nothing about it. If only for "official" reasons. Because, as businesswomen are wont to do, the strict-minded lady is involved in social affairs - as the local president of the Federation for Maternity Protection. What a scandal it would be if it became public that her husband Ludwig, of all people - well, you know...
In the meantime, however, the time for clarification seems to have come! When the son of a Chemnitz acquaintance turns up, whom Emma intends to marry off to her daughter Paula, Klinke suspects that the young man is none other than his illegitimate son, for whom he has been paying alimony to Rosita for years. Secretly, of course. And although this is actually enough reason for foolhardy mix-ups and all kinds of misunderstandings, it turns out in the course of the turbulent comedy, which for more than a hundred years has been an indispensable part of the stages in German cities of all sizes: Not only the cider manufacturer has made acquaintance with the dancer.
