Based on Philip Barry's comic 1928 play Holiday and its subsequent 1930 film adaptation and better known 1938 remake, it focuses on hedonistic young Wall Street attorney Johnny Case who, driven by his passion to live life as a holiday, contemplates abandoning his career for a carefree existence by marrying wealthy upper class Julia Seton.
Porter successfully had transformed Barry's 1939 play The Philadelphia Story into the 1956 musical film High Society, so Shevelove pored through the composer's catalogue in search of tunes that would fit Holiday's plot.
When the show previewed at the Stratford Festival in Canada, the score consisted of lesser-known Porter songs, and Shevelove decided to eliminate most of them in favor of music more familiar to audiences.
Directed by Shevelove and choreographed by Donald Saddler, the cast included Michael Scott as Johnny, Kimberly Farr as Julia, William Roerick as Edward, and Leslie Denniston as Linda, with John McMartin as the narrator and Richard Bekins and Lara Teeter and Tim Flavin in supporting roles.
Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press (1991), pages 220-21 (ISBN 0-312-06428-4)