In 1885, Hollingshead wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette, "Mr. Gilbert is somewhat severe on a style of burlesque which he did much to popularise in the old days before he invented what I may call burlesque in long clothes. … Mr Gilbert never objected to the dresses in Robert the Devil nor to the dresses in Thespis." In 1879, Sullivan, Gilbert and Carte were in the midst of a legal battle with the former directors of the Comedy Opera Company, which had produced H.M.S. Pinafore. Sullivan wrote to Hollingshead, saying: "You once settled a precedent for me which may just at present be of great importance to me. I asked you for the band parts of the Merry Wives of Windsor... and [you] said, 'They are yours, as our run is over....' Now will you please let me have them, and the parts of Thespis also at once. I am detaining the parts of Pinafore, so that the directors shall not take them away from the Comique tomorrow, and I base my claim on the precedent you set." Modern productions After its last performance at the Gaiety in 1872, Thespis appears to have remained unperformed until 1953, although an attempted reconstruction from the 1940s has been discovered. Tillett and Spencer, who discovered the ballet music, identified twenty separate reconstructions of Thespis between 1953 and 2002. About half of these use music adapted from Sullivan's other works; the others use new music for all but the surviving songs, or, in a few cases, re-compose those as well. No version has become predominant in recent productions. Theatre historian Terence Rees developed a version of the libretto that attempts to correct the many errors noted in the surviving libretto. Rees also prepared a performance version, based on the libretto, which included a few interpolated lyrics from Gilbert's non-Sullivan operas in an attempt to replace the missing songs. A score was supplied by Garth Morton, based on music from lesser-known Sullivan operas, and this version has been recorded. A version with an original score by Bruce Montgomery (other than the two Sullivan numbers) has been performed several times, including in 2000 at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. An original 1982 score by Kingsley Day has been used in several Chicago-area stagings. In 1996, another version with new music, by Quade Winter, was produced by the Ohio Light Opera. In 2008, a Sullivan