Peter2 wrote: “Apologies for pestering you with questions (and to everybody else for flogging a subject not very interesting to most people, it seems), but may I ask where the Pincus score was found? I have wondered about her, and Chelsea Music, and where all that material wound up. It's one of the avenues Suskin doesn't go down in his book, so far as I recall.”
Occasionally I see one of the Green Books for sale on eBay, and the complete set that existed at Chelsea Music has dwindled from theft, unreturned loans, etc. Chelsea does still have quite a few in their office and gladly lends them to Encores! Mathilde was a wonderful lady, a violist from Philadelphia whom Don Walker discovered when he needed a copyist in Philadelphia on a show in which she was playing in the orchestra. He brought to New York and she set up shop. She established many rules on copying and worked with Walker and Frank Loesser on establishing Music Theatre International. She copies shows for George Abbott, Harold Prince, Meredith Willson, Frank Loesser, Stephen Sondheim, John Kander, and many others. By the time I met her, around 1984, she was the “earth mother” to all her clients and a wonderful friend.
“By the way, I find I want to defend Suskin a little bit. If he didn't correctly report what the the complement of musicians was for the original Broadway production of this show, it had nothing to do with his not being a musician, it's just that in this particular instance he didn't go far enough in his research”
Well, there we disagree. He’s an enthusiastic amateur whose heart is in the right place and there is much to value in the book. It’s his lack of musical scholarship that paints him into corners.
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