In the 1930s, successful Hungarian playwrights Sandor Turai and Alex Gal, collaborators for twenty years, arrive aboard the luxury transatlantic liner SS "Italian Castle", which is about to sail from Cherbourg to New York, where they are to present their latest musical comedy, "The Cruise of the Dodo". They are accompanied by their young French composer, Adam Adam, a former actor who was forced to end his stage career after contracting a strange speech impediment brought on by the return of his terrifying mother from prison.