A satire in the style of Offenbach at his best, Kurt Weill’s lively operetta about love in a banana republic spent a long time in hibernation before making a celebrated come-back in an adapted version a few years ago. 

At its centre is a cow. She is the pride and joy, and financial life insurance, of Juan and Juanita, who are about to be married. But the political situation on the idyllic Caribbean island where they live takes a turn for the worse, thus ruining the couple’s wedding plans: an arms dealer sows dissent in order to drive his business up. New taxes are to pay for the arms race. The cow has to be sold… 

Weill’s operetta about the links between grand-scale politics and private lives was written in 1934 in Paris, before his flight into exile in America. Its music represents the finest operetta tradition: the sort of snappy song numbers one wouldn’t immediately expect from the composer of the Three Penny Opera.