Good morning, all! I have my first day in two weeks with the McGlinnventory and I am happy to be busy. I don't know if my colleague Billy will be there as well, but I understand thast he left plenty of things for me to look over from the sessions last week when I was in DC. After that, I have a stop at Toyland, since the two offices are not that far from each other, to pick up some music I left there yesterday.
Last night I accomplished two pages on the 1902 WIZARD OF OZ; I don't believe the orchestration is the original but something done in-house by the Witmark Music Library to get the show ready for amateur-stock release. It's possible, too, that this was the reduction of the orchestration for the second-class tour, but we'll never know. A lot of it is really poor scoring and it's mentally exhausting trying to get your mind around it. Since this version was essentially buried by the stage versions of the 1939 film by the late 1950s, these rental parts haven't been played in over 40 years and they are filled with errors: oboe and clarinet play the same part, there's too much writing for the brass during vocal sections, and God knows how many cues for missing instruments have become real notes after the part was recopied several times as each earlier part disintegrated. I also think there may have been a harp in the show on Broadway but there's no harp in the rental version.