While I keep thinking the dates were March 5 and 6, 1986, the actual dates were March 2 and 3! So, thirty years ago today, my reconstruction of the 1935 Cole Porter-Moss Hart musical comedy
JUBILEE completed its second concert performance at Town Hall by The New Amsterdam Theatre Company, conducted by Geg Dlugos, with a cast including Paula Laurence, Robert Fitch, Alyson Reed, Reed Jones, Carole Shelley, Rebecca Luker, Patrick Quinn, Davis Gaines, and Roderick Cook. The late great Bill Tynes was the producer who commissioned the reconstruction on the advice of author Ethan Mordden, who was on the New Amsterdam Theatre Co. board.
I had been involved as music editor, fill-in orchestrator for the New Amsterdam Theatre Co. since its founding by Bill and Evans Haille, and when Bill asked me to score JUBILEE, I assumed the Cole Porter Trust would give me a copy of the vocal score and i would take it home and orchestrate it. Well, everything was lost. It all vanished after a 1948 production at the St. Louis Muny. The performance materials never made it back to the Sam Harris office in Manhattan. All that existed were the copyists’ 1935 rehearsal scores.
I agreed to orchestrate a score for a flat fee, but I had to create that score first, writing dance and vocal arrangements and all the utilities as well as determining the keys for a hypothetical cast. It was hell and took me most of August-November to arrange a new vocal score, then December to February to orchestrate it and copy it for the March performances. The Cole Porter Trust asked Tommy Krasker to work with me, and his new book, which incorporated material cut from earlier drafts ended up longer than the Ring Cycle. In September, I asked The Drama Book Shop for a leave of several months, found some wonderful people to help me copy the show for very little pay. I think I went about $3,000 in the hole to finish it. Joel Craig, the original dance captain for HELLO, DOLLY!, and I copied most of it, but there were at least three other copyists who helped me through the ordeal.
At the first performance, I ran into John McGlinn who had tried to block the reconstruction (only John McGlinn is qualified to reconstruct a lost musical, he yelled to several folk who gleefully reported it back to me) and he asked me to help him with his 1986 performances of NO NO NANETTE at Carnegie Recital Hall. I accepted his offer and orchestrated “Take A Little One Step” for him. McGlinn was treating me the way he treated everyone. It took a further fifteen years for his personal demons to do him in. I also made a lasting friend of one of the cast members, the beautiful new-to-New-York soprano Rebecca Luker, who very soon became McGlinn’s favorite ingenue.
Since those 1986 performances, my reconstruction has been performed by Indiana University Opera Theatre, the Lost Musicals in London, BBC Radio-3, 42nd Street Moon, a 1998 Gay Men’s Health Crisis benefit at Carnegie Hall, and other places. I had heard via Robert Kimble that Kitty Carlisle had pushed for performances in the early years of its existence, but Encores! has continued to ignore it for 22 years.
And back to March 3, 1986: here’s the Overture, conducted by Greg Dlugos.
https://soundcloud.com/user5614139/jubilee-overture-new-amsterdam-theatre-1986 
