Eric Henwood-Greer: I had never really thought about how the two different worlds of Sondheim, his game playing and creation, and his musical and theatre writing, actually share so much in common.

Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. I'm your host, Barry Joseph. Today's episode is well, rather special.

Puzzles and games appear as leitmotifs throughout the musical work of Stephen Sondheim. Party games, board games, treasure hunts, word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and even an escape room. Most of my book looks at Sondheim's engagement with games and puzzles. Making, solving, and playing. But one chapter is focused on the role these played within his musical output. This topic is big, so big, we need to split it into two episodes, and I needed a guest producer. So I am so excited to introduce you to her now. Wherever you are at home, at work, in your car, at the theater, please give it up for Gail Leondar-Wright. Hi, Gail.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Hey, Barry.

Barry Joseph: Welcome. Would you please introduce yourself?

Gail Leondar-Wright: Sure! I'm a lifelong lover of Sondheim's work. And for the past six years, I've been really fortunate to be able to study and teach about Sondheim full time.

Barry Joseph: should also add, there are over a hundred people who supported me in the creation of my book, but there are only a handful that I think of as my Sondheim Angels. They were always there for me with advice and detailed knowledge and connections, super generous with their time, always rooting for it to succeed. And I don't know if you knew this, Gail, but you sit towards the top of that list.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Oh, no. I did not. That is so nice to hear, Barry. Thank you. And I really had a great time supporting you as this book came together. And I really love the finished product. given me insight into how Sondheim created this body of work that's so important to so many of us. Insight that I could never have possibly gotten anywhere else.

Barry Joseph: One of the things Gail did early on was help me create a crowdsourcing project to invite Sondheim fans to identify, through all of Sondheim's oeuvre, the role of games and puzzles. And now, thanks to her, it's in the book. So, listeners, it is that chapter we'll be exploring in this two part special. Rather than share clips from my interviews, I will read from that chapter, working through Sondheim shows and invite a wide range of guest hosts to discuss. Gail, shall we start bringing them on?

Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah, yeah, here we go.

It's my pleasure to introduce my friend, Eric Henwood-Greer. Eric holds an MA in English Literature. He's presented at conferences and conducted interviews on a wide variety of subjects, in particular, musical theater. Eric has been obsessed with the work of Sondheim since he was 10 years old. He has a lifelong interest in playing and thinking too much about games and puzzles, especially in fiction and the arts. And Eric and I met, I don't know, maybe six, seven years ago, when we started chatting in Sondheim Facebook groups and commenting on each other's stuff and then developed out a better friendship.

I think Eric and I probably talk to each other about Sondheim like once a week. It's really wonderful.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Thank you for the introduction, Gail, and it's nice to be here with you and with Barry.

Barry Joseph: Up next, please help me welcome Mark Halpin. Mark is a professor of set design at the University of Cincinnati and a scene designer. He is also the constructor of hundreds of original puzzles for publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and his own online puzzle hunts. Mark is a lifelong Sondheim fan whose cryptic crosswords Sondheim enjoyed.

In fact, on Mark, Sondheim has said, "this guy is brilliant beyond anyone else". Welcome Mark.

Mark Halpin: Hey, Barry, it's really great to be here.

Barry Joseph: And it's great to reconnect with you. In putting the book together, you were an invaluable source for me in understanding cryptic crossword puzzles. And when it came time to testing treasure hunts, you were always game for getting on Zoom with me and others and trying to figure out what was Sondheim up to.

Mark Halpin: It was really a treat to be able to do that. And in particular, to be able to play through some of the reconstructed events that Sondheim had originally created.

Barry Joseph: Well, I'm so glad you can be with us today. And last but not least. Welcome, Natalie Gerber.

Natalie has brought linguistics to bear on the intricate structure of verse lyrics, publishing a piece on power rhyme on Sondheim and has worked on the structure of Robert Frost's and Wallace Stevens' verse. She teaches English at SUNY Fredonia in New York State. She loves nothing more than finding "play" in Sondheim.

Once upon a time, Natalie studied "play" in the movie Last Year at Marienbad, a film of which Sondheim was a fan. Today, she plays Spelling Bee in the New York Times.

Welcome Natalie.

Natalie Gerber: Thanks, Barry. It's a joy to be here with everyone.

Barry Joseph: And for those who don't know, Natalie and I go way back, way before we started each doing our own research projects in Sondheim. In fact, 30 years ago when we started both as young graduate students at NYU.

Natalie Gerber: And it's such a joy to reconnect. I am so grateful to Jane Klain when I was doing research this summer, that she just happened to mention someone writing a book and my jaw fell open.

Barry Joseph: All praise to Jane. And Natalie, can you say where Jane is?

Natalie Gerber: Sure. Jane is at the Paley Center for Media, and has done so much to, make available resources, especially TV, movie clips for everyone, and has a great handout that is available on Sondheim on TV.

Barry Joseph: And we're talking about, an episode of a TV show that Sondheim wrote in the 1950s, an appearance of Stephen Sondheim on a game show in the 1960s, that without her, none of us would have ever seen.

What a powerhouse of a team today, right? Thank you all so much for joining us. Shall we get started?

Mark Halpin: Absolutely.

Barry Joseph: All right.

So today we'll be looking at seven shows from 1960 to 1984. First will be an unrecorded song that was for a TV show called The Fabulous Fifties, done in 1960. Another TV show, Evening Primrose from 1966. Company from 1970, Pacific Overtures, 1976, Sweeney Todd from 1979, Merrily We Roll Along from 1981, and finally, Sunday in the Park with George, 1984. I mentioned earlier, for some of the shows, we'll be looking at games and puzzles within the music and lyrics of the shows. For others, we'll be looking at them within the structure of the show itself. However, we're not going to discuss them in chronological order. We'll be bringing a little stochasticity, as known in game design, or randomness, , into the process. To play with the topic, if you will. I would like to present to you all the Sondheim-O-Matic. Can someone please share, since this is an audio podcast what you're seeing on the screen right now?

Mark Halpin: We're seeing a colorful Wheel of Fortune with a picture of young Sondheim in the middle of it, and various show titles arranged around the perimeter.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Mark. This wheel is going to determine what we're going to talk about in what order. So before I click it for the first time, and it tells us which show we're going to dive into, is anybody rooting for any one in particular?

Eric Henwood-Greer: I'm always rooting for Company myself, so there you go.

Natalie Gerber: I feel like we should be saying, Wheel! Of! Sondheim!

Barry Joseph: It looks like we're getting The Fabulous Fifties. Oh, is it?

Gail Leondar-Wright: Oh, no it's still going.

Barry Joseph: Oh, it went to Evening Primrose. So Evening Primrose was a TV musical that Sondheim worked on in 1966. Many of the songs have entered the canon of really beloved Sondheim songs. I'm going to read three paragraphs from my book that talks about the unusual role that bridge played. both in the plot and the lyrics of the song, which really showed his early brilliance. Evening Primrose was a made-for-TV musical with a book by James Goldman written with Sondheim for the television anthology series, ABC Stage 67. One of its songs, "When?", is a romantic duet between Anthony Perkins' character, Charles and Charmian Carr's, Ella. However, and here's the twist, The two are at a party and their forbidden love must remain hidden. The song is a duet that only the audience can hear as each privately declares their love for the other in the solitude of their own mind. Meanwhile, the lyrics are intercut with spoken dialogue between Charles and a table of characters playing bridge (primarily with Charles' bridge partner played by Dorothy Stickney) meticulously structured so that words from the game transition into the private love song lyrics. It is all the more complicated because in real life, neither Perkins nor Stickney knew the rules of the game. In 1989, Anthony Perkins reflected on this scene in a panel at a Museum of Television and Radio seminar in Los Angeles. "Steve, in the middle of this maelstrom of time consuming, tried to explain to Dorothy and me how to play bridge, so that we could get these lyrics straight. It was all about the trump cards and making tricks." None of it was making sense, which, as Perkins reported, Sondheim found very amusing and funny. "And it's clear, says Steve, that these two people who are playing bridge in this scene have no idea about the game of bridge". Perhaps Sondheim, to Evening Primrose was a made-for-TV musical with a book by James Goldman written with Sondheim for the television anthology series, ABC Stage 67. One of its songs, "When?", is a romantic duet between Anthony Perkins' character, Charles and Charmian Carr's, Ella. However, and here's the twist, The two are at a party and their forbidden love must remain hidden. The song is a duet that only the audience can hear as each privately declares their love for the other in the solitude of their own mind. Meanwhile, the lyrics are intercut with spoken dialogue between Charles and a table of characters playing bridge (primarily with Charles' bridge partner played by Dorothy Stickney) meticulously structured so that words from the game transition into the private love song lyrics. It is all the more complicated because in real life, neither Perkins nor Stickney knew the rules of the game. In 1989, Anthony Perkins reflected on this scene in a panel at a Museum of Television and Radio seminar in Los Angeles. "Steve, in the middle of this maelstrom of time consuming, tried to explain to Dorothy and me how to play bridge, so that we could get these lyrics straight. It was all about the trump cards and making tricks." None of it was making sense, which, as Perkins reported, Sondheim found very amusing and funny. "And it's clear, says Steve, that these two people who are playing bridge in this scene have no idea about the game of bridge". Perhaps Sondheim, to emphasize the characters' lack of knowledge, included esoteric terms from the game, such as bidding conventions- "Goren or Culbertson?"- and conventions for the bidding stage to determine the trump suit- “pass,” “one heart.” For example, after Charles says "pass" in the game, the word spills into his private love song, repeated and extended into, "I pass the hours planning things to teach you". When Charles establishes the trump suit with "one heart", the verse soon blossoms into, "one heart is beating wildly". In the end, the interplay between dialogue and verse becomes a rich and delectable confection, best enjoyed within today's contemporary habit of repeat viewing on the internet emphasize the characters' lack of knowledge, included esoteric terms from the game, such as bidding conventions- "Goren or Culbertson?"- and conventions for the bidding stage to determine the trump suit- “pass,” “one heart.” For example, after Charles says "pass" in the game, the word spills into his private love song, repeated and extended into, "I pass the hours planning things to teach you". When Charles establishes the trump suit with "one heart", the verse soon blossoms into, "one heart is beating wildly". In the end, the interplay between dialogue and verse becomes a rich and delectable confection, best enjoyed within today's contemporary habit of repeat viewing on the internet

Gail Leondar-Wright: I just love that he allowed these technical terms to actually take on a prosaic meaning to talk about what's going on with the character's feelings. It's very, uh, early Sondheim, but doesn't it feel like things that he's going to do time and time again, you know, throughout his career? It's just beautiful.

Mark Halpin: Well, one thing it demonstrates really early on that he'll do forever, that is, that feels to me very much like sort of a puzzle and game thing is, he's playing this game with himself. Where he's setting up this ridiculous challenge that, that a mortal, you know, could barely write two lines of, and then he spins this into an entire realized song. So it's not just a sort of prosaically competent, polished song, but it also has this layer of this incredibly elaborate and constrictive rule set that he is working within. Uh, So as I say, from very early on, this feels like this game he's playing with himself and allowing us to sort of, observe if not exactly participate in.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And Mark, the rules that you're talking about is, he says to himself, "I'm going to use the conventions and the terminology of a bridge game". rule. Right?

Yeah. It's beautiful.

Mark Halpin: Yes. And what's so lovely about this too is he has developed this set of rules, right? So it's not arbitrary. He's using that esoteric rule set in terms of game terminology as kind of a stand in for a private language, uh, which is what these characters must have themself. So he's using it sort of metaphorically. So, again, when he's setting this constraint for himself, he's not simply doing that to dazzle,

he's doing it very deliberately to make a point.

Eric Henwood-Greer: He's also really playing with the form, the new medium, of writing for the screen, because he vacillates between the card game and what people are saying, and then the interior thoughts are done all in voiceover. So he's really playing to the strengths of this new medium that he hadn't written a musical for before.

And in fact, later on he'll do, he'll write a musical that never gets made called Singing Out Loud, which is all about writing songs where people say one word and then it becomes a voiceover song lyric.

Natalie Gerber: And it's so fun to see how some of these pieces trace forward, right? Because he talks about wanting to do a musical for TV and do what you can't do on the stage, but we can also watch in Pacific Overtures, which I know we're getting to later, he does have characters who say the thoughts in Tamate's head, her thoughts versus what she says aloud, so we'll see that. And we do get bridge again also in Anyone Can Whistle in the song "There's Always a Woman", after they start besting each other, Cora and Fay, with dancing, they go to bridge. I still haven't found someone to explain this to me because I'm not a bridge player, so the terms go over my head, but it goes "bridge, two hearts, three clubs, I pass", and it sounds so similar to the "I pass" in this scene.

Barry Joseph: When I hear these lyrics, I think about how often Sondheim spoke about how important it was to write lyrics that could be heard by an audience, hearing it for the first time. I think about how the attention span of people watching television must have been presumed back then to be less. And I think how demanding these lyrics are. That makes me feel like, "oh, these are early Sondheim lyrics". This is when he was pushing so hard to see how hard he can challenge himself, hadn't yet fully integrated his later understanding of what it meant to write for an audience and to help them hear complex things that were new for them. had to find a bridge expert to help me understand what the words even were, let alone what it all meant. I could tell it was flowing back and forth through the game, in general, to the love lyrics. They always made sense in the love lyrics. I just couldn't follow the game. But maybe I didn't need to. Nonetheless, I feel like some of his early songs, like this, he didn't take the simple route.

He made a complex puzzle for himself to solve and then enjoyed solving it, but he made one that was maybe too hard for an audience to follow at the time.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, and to add context to that, Evening Primrose happened during a very dry period. He wasn't getting his stage, his shows put on stage at all. So he really had something to prove and he really wanted to show off, which later on, I think he was a little bit less interested in. He wanted to be more clear, but yeah.

Mark Halpin: It's interesting that you say "he wanted to be more clear", because, uh, in his Finishing the Hat, Look, I Made a Hat books, he spells out some dictums for lyric writing, but I actually always pass those on in my classes for designers and everyone involved in theatrical storytelling. And one of those is, he lists his rules and then says, "all in the service of clarity, without which nothing else matters". So it's interesting that you mention that the interest in clarity there, maybe was not an early interest, but something he arrived at a little bit later.

Natalie Gerber: In a different scene, when they get together, they are meeting in the area of outdoor sports, which I find very interesting, right? Because sporting has its own sexual connotations. It's definitely a blood sport. And we're in this hermetically sealed environment, right?

We go into the department store. We leave out the department store. It has that artificial feeling of a game with its own delimitations to it. But also when they pan back from his singing to her and they're being overheard, there is literally a gun hanging in the wall. Thank you, Chekhov. So there, as Mark was saying, it's not just having, a lyric with full rhyme or having a lyric with clarity.

It's the ulteriority that he learned from Jerome Robbins. It's all of this detail.

Barry Joseph: All right. Let's see what the next show is going to be in the Sondheim-O-Matic. There you go, Eric.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Yay.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Company. Yay.

Mark Halpin: Okay.

Barry Joseph: The musical Company, is set within a surreal birthday party for the main character Bobby, as he struggles with the obligations of friendship and long term commitment. In the opening song, "Company", Bobby is introduced to the audience greeting his guests- "in comes company!"- followed by a list of what he can expect from them, "late nights, quick bites", and "party games". In fact, As there are no actual party games in Company, its inclusion in the lyrics highlights a key aspect of how Sondheim defined the benefits of friendship. When considering Sondheim's complete oeuvre within musical theater, not just in Company, but all of it, Something interesting stands out. In his personal life, Sondheim looked to parties as the context for games nights, treasure hunts, and other playful activities. Perhaps, it should come as no surprise then to observe that in nearly every Sondheim musical, there is some form of a party. Sometimes it's in the context of the show, Company's birthday party, Here We Are's breakfast slash dinner parties. Sometimes they are a scene in the show, West Side Story's school dance, Sunday in the Park with George's gallery reception. And sometimes they're referenced offstage events. The Prince's Ball in Into the Woods. Perhaps Sondheim and his collaborators drew from them because they are useful dramatic tools.

He knew them well, and he valued their power for delivering characters' both clarity and connections, while encouraging his audience, after returning home, to seek the same.

Gail Leondar-Wright: I mean, parties show up in musical theater a lot. As you said, Barry, it's a useful way to bring everybody to together. And in a traditional musical comedy of the golden age, we'd have a wedding, right? We don't really have a wedding in Sondheim unless you count the wedding that sort of happens off stage in Company. Because Sondheim's not looking at your typical kind of heterosexual narrative of love and romance and boy meets girl, but we have a lot of parties. And, I think it not only reflects something about Sondheim's personal life, which certainly we know that he was a big party player. But it's also a structure around which you can get a gang together. There's other ones.

There's everybody's going to eat Mrs. Lovett's meat pies. So there's lots of ways of bringing people together, but I think parties are probably overrepresented in Sondheim's work. What do folks think?

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, of course, there's Follies, which is all one party. So, a reunion party.

Mark Halpin: It's interesting too, that the parties might be a little sinister. Parties aren't just fun and games. You mentioned Sweeney Todd, but there's also the masked ball in that,

Gail Leondar-Wright: I mean, During which Sweeney's wife, Lucy, is raped.

Mark Halpin: I'm thinking too of Here We Are, which is a dinner party from hell, essentially.

Natalie Gerber: And it's interesting, right? The final scenes of Company, um, he decides not Bobby is not found by his friends. And even at the beginning, we're hearing um, answering machine messages, right? We don't know if these five couples actually know each other.

When we see people dancing, it's Larry not dancing with his wife. It's his wife, Joanne, propositioning Bobby.

But instead, we're getting some of these missed connections as Richard Schoch talks about beautifully in his new book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life in his chapter on Company, what we're seeing are the missed connections.

And we never get past language of turn taking. So much of it is "Bobby Bubi", these oppositives, or "come on over for dinner". We don't see the dinners. We don't see the weddings. It's all of this language, which actually in many ways lies outside regular grammar, but that would take us someplace else.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, I was wondering on what you were just saying, in fact, if people thought the song "It's the Little Things You Do Together" is about the games that couples play to make marriage sustainable. They share little "kinks together, drinks together", all these sort of behavior tactics they use, which are playing games in a way, "that make perfect relationships", as the lyric says.

Gail Leondar-Wright: It's also a bit of a game in the lyrics. It's an old joke form, how you have two serious things and then a punchline. a game in the lyrics how, um, you know, in that old, it's an old joke form, how you have two serious things and then a punchline. So for example, you've got, "try together". It would be "winks", "drinks", and the punchline "kinks". So it's joke structure, but it's playful.

Natalie Gerber: And Sondheim said that he always knew where something would land first, which is so hard to do, right? To have that punchline, "getting a divorce together" before you go back to, I can't think of the- "

Gail Leondar-Wright: Shouting till your hoarse together.

Natalie Gerber: That's the second. together."

Yeah.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah, so the punchline and is this a game or is this just playful?

Barry Joseph: Let's turn now to our Sondheim-O-Matic to decide what we're going to talk about next across Sondheim's musical creations. Ah, my favorite.

Merrily We Roll Along.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Along.

Mark Halpin: It's poetic that the wheel had to rotate backwards a little bit to land on that one.

Barry Joseph: For Merrily, I'm gonna first talk about a game within the show, and then of course the puzzle structure of the show itself. Within Merrily We Roll Along, there is a parlor game at a cocktail party. The character Gussie proposes a game to one of the main characters, Frank. She says she uses it when she wants to get to know someone very well and very fast. Quote, "I tell you something honest about me and you answer right away with something honest about you". She explains. "I call it trading hostages". In a scene set in 1962, this is exactly the type of parlor game Sondheim played at the time. Brutally personal games with names like "Hostilities". Perhaps this was Sondheim a few decades later, influencing the show's book writer, George Furth, celebrating the power of such games. and their danger. Merrily is told backward in time from 1981 to 1957, starting at the present after a friendship has dissolved and working its way back in time when, at the end of the evening, the main characters meet for the first time. The musical is a puzzle to delight audience members who are able to follow its complex construction. Chronologically, the effect is revealed before its cause, forcing the audience to put the pieces together, keeping audience members on their toes, scanning the scenes like a Where's Waldo book for the key information hidden in plain sight, or rather, in song. If you think about the score to Merrily We Roll Along, Mark, who's here today, told me, "you start to appreciate that not only is a story told backward, functions backwards." The first song in the show is musically a finale. The audience hears reprises of songs before they hear the songs on which they are based. They even are sometimes whole songs. For example, the song "Not A Day Goes By" is first heard by the audience in the context of a painful custody hearing. And it is only later that the audience hears it as a song full of hope and love when sung at the wedding. Says Halpin: "it's just this ingenious layering".

Gail Leondar-Wright: Great. So, maybe we should start with the first part, the game called "Trading Hostages". And Barry, you mentioned, and of course you're right, that this is so similar to the game that Mary Rodgers talks about in her book, Shy, called "Hostilities", the game that Sondheim and friends used to play. The way you play the game is everybody's got a piece of paper, and they write an impertinent question addressed to another specific person in the room. Now, each of these people have numbers assigned to them. So, let's say I'm number one and Eric's number two, and I am writing the question targeted to Eric. So, I write number two on the outside in light pencil. On the inside, I write my impertinent question, perhaps about Eric's private life or his opinion that might theoretically hurt somebody in the room. I write number two on the outside, put it in the middle, Eric gets that question, he reads it, he writes his answer, he erases the number two, so nobody knows who's answering the question, sticks it back in the middle, and then they're read to, I guess, great hilarity. And what, Mary said is the real purpose of this is to give players an opportunity to be nasty. So, does anybody else have thoughts about this game as it's played in Merrily, perhaps, or what it says about Sondheim and his friendship group, or what have you?

Mark Halpin: It's so interesting because the nature of a game like that is so fascinating because it's so different to what we think of as the function of games now, which is often to socialize in a cordial way. And that feels a little antithetical to that.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And Mark, does it feel of its era because we're into games like, reveal your inner kishkis for everybody, like group therapy kinds of made into playfulness- but you're saying The Nasty Twist also feels of its era.

Mark Halpin: I think that's what I mean. And maybe that's just a personal take on it. I fully admit. But yeah, the nastiness of it, the social- it's that the point of the game is sort of a social exposure, which feels, as I say, really different to the social bonding that we usually think of as games now. At least when I think of games, I may be hanging around with very boring gaming circles, but I mean, maybe I should give this a try.

Eric Henwood-Greer: I do agree that it's very much of its era, because when I read about that game, I immediately thought of the telephone game scene in The Boys in the Band. If people know that, which is very similar, it's to sort of reveal secrets that are going to hurt people.

Mark Halpin: There's a real "claws out-ness" to it

Gail Leondar-Wright: But I don't know if it's just of its era, or if it's also of its subculture? The idea, I mean, Boys in the Band, say what you will about what it says about gay subcultures, but Mart Crowley, the playwright, is talking about a particular nasty kind of pre Stonewall gay male culture. I'd also argue that perhaps the games that Mary Rodgers and her friends played are around a particular social class and a particular theater insight.

I don't know that you'd find other folks playing these kinds of nasty games at parties.

Mark Halpin: "Of its culture" is probably a much better way of saying it than "of its era".

Eric Henwood-Greer: I agree.

Barry Joseph: That's my question. I did theater in high school, I did theater in college . And when we played theater games... This has an echo of- how can you be brutally frank with people as a way to be honest and fully present? And even if it was hostile, as the name is called, at its core, it was about how do we be completely raw and vulnerable in front of each other? Which is often what I see theater games trying to do. And so I wonder when I hear how "Hostilities" is played, if it was, not a coincidence, it was being played amongst people who were in the theater community.

Mark Halpin: That's a great point in that a lot- yes, you're absolutely correct in that, a lot of theater exercises are designed to expose oneself, to be vulnerable, to be open to possibility and creativity. This feels like maybe exploiting that vulnerability a little bit for cocktail entertainment.

Natalie Gerber: Mark, I agree with you so much that it's exploiting that vulnerability. It's coming at the moment of singing the song "Growing Up", giving him choices that will ultimately take him away from his friends. Sometimes I think about the hit games in Sondheim, which we get to with Assassins, but it's Gussie's wanting to take work with Frank, make a hit rather than Take a Left with Charlie, that leads to "It's a Hit" and, making hits instead of hats, which is something I'm working on for an article. But he doesn't want to be a hit maker, he wants to be a hat maker, but he has over and over again in shows instances where people are taking hits because of choices that they're making.

I mean, Assassins does it the most, but here, the hit that he takes first from Gussie, that pulls him away from his first wife, from his child, um, from hit to hit to hit. Which seems like it's a good thing, but a la Hamlet, it's actually a palpable "hit" where people are dead on the stage at the end, or the friendships are dead on the stage, even if the people are alive.

Barry Joseph: Before we move on to the structure of Merrily, which of course we have to address, we can't leave this description of a game in the show that's based on hostilities without talking about the role that "Hostilities" plays. "Hostilities" in its very name sounds like a brutal thing to do with the people you care about. In researching 70 years of Sondheim playing and making games what I found most remarkable and taught me so much about the arc of his life was that I mentioned in the beginning that Mark and others played some of his treasure hunts with me. The language that came through when I asked them to give me a word to describe how the game felt , the most common word was "generous". The Sondheim who was playing "Hostilities" in the early sixties was a very different person than the one designing games in his 60s, 70s, and 80s. When you look at the games he played, and the arc of those games, they trace the shift in him dealing with, at some level, those inner demons, so that he could be more generous and connect with the people he was playing with later in his life

Eric Henwood-Greer: Barry, would you say that the games became less competitive and more ensemble?

Barry Joseph: That's an interesting way to frame it. So the most competitive game he played the most often was a version of the game of anagrams, which was called "Cutthroat Anagrams". And we are lucky because he not only played them with Leonard Bernstein, he played them with Leonard Bernstein's children, who grew up playing them in his house when Uncle Steve would come over, and were playing them with him until, I think, in the period before he passed away. And so they were able to see how he changed in playing the game. So when they tell the stories about what it was like when they were kids, they said it was like a a spectator sport watching Stephen Sondheim and their dad battling each other, it was like getting thrown in with the lions . It didn't matter if you were a teenager. When they were playing with him later in his life, they said he was just more relaxed. He would joke more. He was much more avuncular, they would say. And so, it was still competitive, but there was less at stake in that competition.

Mark Halpin: It's interesting when you talk about, for example, the treasure hunts, cause the treasure hunt is real- and those- being an expression of generosity in a way. Treasure hunts are more puzzles than games. And yes, there's a game element in that there's a competitive element in that, the first person to solve it gets some prize, although it's an honorary kind of thing, really. It's interesting thinking about "Cutthroat Anagrams" as a competitive thing. To think about... you in trying to reconcile a sort of gaming that feels a little nasty, and this notion of puzzling that is generous. It's interesting to think about one really fundamental difference between puzzles and games. In a game, it's two sides that are scoring points off of each other. So there's a winner and there's a loser, and you really want to come out ahead, both sides sort of equally. In puzzle. puzzle, one of my favorite descriptions of a puzzle is- it's a battle of wit where the puzzle constructor expects to lose. So, a puzzle isn't competitive. It's designed so that the solver is going to beat the constructor. And that's why I feel like that feels more of an act of grace. And I mean, not to over sugar it, but, um, it's interesting to think of Sondheim moving into puzzles, moving from games into puzzles, if there is that arc to be found.

Barry Joseph: That's beautiful.

Gail Leondar-Wright: The other thing that we were hoping to talk about is the way that the score works backwards in support of the narrative working backwards. And Mark, Barry had quoted you so beautifully, introducing that. I think you said it so well. Do you want to riff a little bit on that?

The way that the score works backwards, just as the narrative flows backwards.

Mark Halpin: Oh, I'm sure others can speak to this much more authoritatively than I can. It was simply the observation that, the score itself functions backwards. The traditional, uh, ordering, for example, things we sort of expect, an 11th hour number, that happens later in the show happens very early in this show. We expect to hear a song and then get that motifs from that song later. That happens in chronologically reverse order. The show opens with kind of a finale number. That kind of thing.

Gail Leondar-Wright: So when you're hearing the score as an audience member, you're hearing a reprise. And don't know it because it's not till an hour and a half later that you actually hear the song proper. It's just brilliant, isn't it?

Mark Halpin: It's brilliant.

And it makes me wonder if that's one of the reasons why this show has had the troubled history it has, because it feels like a show designed for a very particular sort of audience. For- like the show, I think, lands better with puzzly audience that is prepared to give the show the concentration it really needs to be a successful evening. I think it's not the kind of show you sort of sit back and let wash over you. You have to focus on it. As somebody has mentioned, you get the payoff first and then you get the set up in this show and you have to really be concentrating for that to make sense and land I think in a satisfying way.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, Mark, I wonder if the show would have been more successful if the audience had been clued in or told from the start to start looking for how this is going to resolve itself, how this is going to connect, because I think most audiences, they know it's going to go backwards.

But they don't really know that they're not going to really understand the relationship between certain characters until Act 2, for example. And maybe if they were told somehow to start paying attention and to start thinking about how people connect, how plot points connect, then they'd be more welcome to following along and not just give up.

Mark Halpin: It's interesting that you say that because he does ask that question. I mean the repeated motif is "how did we get to be here?"

Eric Henwood-Greer: That's true.

Mark Halpin: But you're right so he does pose the question, but you're right, he doesn't really follow that up with pay attention if you want to find out how we get to be here.

Gail Leondar-Wright: But that's true of a lot of Sondheim scores that you hear it the first time, you maybe get a little bit, maybe you get more. It's on repeated listenings that you, that the beauty really emerges. And I don't ask of Mr. Sondheim to make it easier for me. I mean, what Sondheim said is, so maybe you don't get that, and if you don't get it, that's okay, but if you get it, that's good.

I put it there for your enjoyment. I don't know. And I'm of the camp that that's really not why Merrily didn't work in its original iteration. I'm not sure that the backward structure was really the problem. We, all know of other problems. The people feel differently. I mean, I'm hearing that Mark feels differently.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Gail, I think you're quite right that the problems with the original production were due to the original production. We know now that it has become a success on Broadway. And so maybe people did have to catch up to it. And I do think there's also a point that people at the time weren't accepting very experimental, dramatic structures in musical theatre.

They were starting to in actual drama. You had Pinter's Betrayal. But with a musical, they didn't think that you'd have to pay attention to the structure of a show the way you did with Merrily. And maybe now, 40, 45 years later, they can accept that about a musical.

Natalie Gerber: I think the show brings together two things that are challenging in Sondheim, and we love him for being challenging, but one, that tendency to confront the audiences with things they may not want to be confronted by. The upper middle class audience that goes to the theater in, the, era of Rodgers and Hammerstein to escape their lives and instead are confronted by their lives in, this string of, Sondheim, Hal Prince, and collaborator shows. And then also the challenge of the backward structure. I wonder if part of it is that the audiences grew up along with the show and could recognize themselves in it because they had the reference points. By the time it came back successfully, they embodied the experience of youth, they embodied the experience of disappointed, frustrated middle age, and they could now trace the figure in the carpet. Sondheim he's always thinking about the entire show and its structure before he starts to write a single song.

Barry Joseph: I think it's time to go to the Sondheim-O-Matic. We have four shows left. Which one is the Sondheim-O-Matic going to deliver to us next?

It looks like Pacific Overtures.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Alright. In Pacific Overtures, 1976, the duet called "Poems", between the characters, Kayama Yesaemon and John Manjiro, functions as a game-like competition. Kayama begins the show as a samurai and minor bureaucrat. Initially a traditionalist; he becomes increasingly westernized once assigned as emissary to the Americans and tasked with negotiating with Commodore Matthew Perry. Meanwhile, Manjiro is a shipwrecked Japanese fisherman who, rescued by an American whaling ship, lives in the west for many years before returning to Japan. In the song, "Poems", the two compare Japanese and Western poetry, symbolizing the meeting of two cultures. format of the song is a type of game in which they playfully challenge each other, one providing a stanza and the next transforming it, building a poem together at each stage, prompting the other with "your turn".

Natalie Gerber: This is such a good example. So, there's actually a tradition in Japanese poetry known as Haikai No Renga, which is a sportive type of poetry, which samurais and- initially, I believe it was upper classes, then it trickle down to the middle classes- used to play. I believe it started with Bashō and trickled down.

But, people would build verses upon each other, but it had a different structure than trading simply haiku verses. It was trading, I think, a verse of five, five- seven- five, a haiku, and then two, a couplet of seven, seven, and having to keep something the same and change something. And we're seeing this here with the western versus eastern talking about "my lady" and the rain glistening or gathering and then turning it to "my lady, America", and the turn taking that's both a competitive play in some ways, but also this generous way because they're traveling and they're getting to know each other by playing this game together and sharing their worlds.

And of course it ends in a silent tragedy, which Manjiro isn't aware of.

Eric Henwood-Greer: I think it's quite right that it shows how playing games can build camaraderie, right? It shows the two opposing characters of the musical, who become the most important figures, and how they actually bond and find a commonality early on, through the two different cultures, that later on becomes lost.

Barry Joseph: I like to think about how when this sort collaborative rap battle was going on on Broadway, rap was being created uptown in the Bronx at exactly the same period. And then Sondheim pulled from his own musical traditions and what we just talked about here in Pacific Overtures in Sweeney Todd with "A Little Priest", where the two main characters are also doing this kind of verbal, poetic, rhyming battle back and forth.

And then of course, in the last few years, we got to see, not just in Hamilton, but in Freestyle Love Supreme, the practice itself being put on display on Broadway.

Natalie Gerber: The whole show, though, is this really interesting geopolitical brinksmanship, right? If we're talking about games. So "Please Hello" is both his outdoing Gilbert and Sullivan, which is not only a game, but it's a way of purging from his system, his annoyance at their lyrics, but doing it better with five or six different countries, their music, their rhythms. But everything is this, each nation threatening to blow up Japan with louder and louder cannons and bigger and bigger boats.

We're turning now to the Sondheim-O-Matic, and there's three left. We have Sweeney Todd, we have The Fabulous Fifties, and we have Sunday in the Park with George. Sondheim-O-Matic, what will you deliver to us next?

Mark Halpin: The tension.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Sweeney Todd!

Barry Joseph: Sweeney Todd. As I now read from my section on Sweeney Todd, we'll be referencing something that we just talked about, "A Little Priest". In Sweeney Todd, the vengeful title character and the conniving Mrs. Lovett try to outdo the other in the darkly comedic track, "A Little Priest", as they deviously devise punny phrases to describe how they might serve their customers, on the menu. It is a battle of witty wordplay, as with Pacific Overture's poems, but for a different effect. In both cases, while the audience thrills at the battle between two creative minds, it is always understood that, underneath it all, they are really examples of one mind, the lyricist, doing battle with himself. There is also a puzzle buried within Sweeney Todd's score. In the beginning of the show, we meet the Beggar Woman who is accompanied by a musical theme. Spoilers to follow, that appears in different forms throughout the show, associated with information that hints at her true identity, which is not revealed until the conclusion of the show: all the time, she was the wife whose abuse at the hands of Judge Turpin was the motivation for Sweeney Todd's vengeful slayings.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, I think one thing that's really interesting about "A Little Priest", is it comes after a previous competition, which is actually just called "The Competition", which is between Pirelli and Sweeney Todd himself. In that one, Sweeney doesn't even really participate. Because he knows that Pirelli is no match for him.

Pirelli's singing away while he's doing the shaving. And Sweeney just sort of holds back and wins the competition. Whereas with Mrs. Lovett, who maybe is a more worthy opponent, or partner anyway, to Sweeney, he does play along, and he gets wrapped up in the same competition, but this time, it becomes a real duet.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And Barry, you know, there's a question that I think is really fun is to- do Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett know that they're rhyming? Do they know they're playing a game? Is this Sondheim rhyming? Or is this Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney rhyming? And how we know that they know they're rhyming is because she trips him up and asks him to come up spontaneously with a rhyme for "locksmith". And therefore she wins. And that's how we know all along they've been playing a game.

Barry Joseph: And at that moment, every time I've seen it, the audience laughs. And that laughter is us connecting directly with Sondheim, laughing at what's going on and recognizing that we have been invited to participate in it. By our listening, that's making what we're seeing happen, happen.

Gail Leondar-Wright: That's great.

Mark Halpin: In the score. There's another example of a musical formulation that I'm thinking of the "Bells" song that the Beadle sings where- so you have this other example of a formulaic ritualistic sort of, song that's not a- sort of a parlor game kind of song, just the repetitive verse and so on and so forth. So it seems like that vocabulary of songs that serve as games or playful tunes feels like it does set up a world where that, where "Priest" as a little bit of a competitive song makes sense.

Eric Henwood-Greer: And you mean because the parlor songs are diegetic songs that are supposed to be actual Victorian songs from the time, and their formula is very much in the same way that the duet of "A Little Priest" works?

Mark Halpin: Yes.

Natalie Gerber: In "A Little Priest", they're rhyming off each other, they're consciously playing, and it's still- Sondheim talked about the difference between humor coming from character versus cleverness, and this is a song that is so brilliantly clever, and yet the comedy, is coming from the characters and how they are catching each other's drift and such, rather than just, what he called in another song, "a portrait of the lyricist on display" or cleverness for its own sake. So, it's really a marriage that we don't get in the show itself.

Eric Henwood-Greer: And Mrs. Lovett is using the game and the song to calm Sweeney down, because remember, it comes right after the "Epiphany" where he is so outta control and so mad, and she brings him down with the game and with the song.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And incidentally leaves the audience able to go to intermission not having that mass murder image in their brains. It's a way to get us to come back.

Mark Halpin: such a great point because we enjoy that song simultaneously on two really distinct levels because at the- on one level we are marveling at Sondheim's cleverness as they sing that song, but at the same time, we're enjoying the sort of artificial cleverness of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett, right? We're enjoying Sondheim's cleverness, but also we're enjoying these clever characters. And, when she comes out with "locksmith", it's funny because it's clever writing, but it's also funny because she's scoring a point on Sweeney. And we love it for that reason as well. And he kind of grunts at acknowledgement of that, you know, and that's very satisfying. So it's both a character thing and a lyricist thing.

And it's kind of amazing that we enjoy those simultaneously.

Barry Joseph: And is it fair that I call the hidden identity of the Beggar Woman to be discovered a "puzzle", or am I stretching things?

Gail Leondar-Wright: Absolutely.

Mark Halpin: How is that foreshadowed? I'm trying to think of the specific motif that does that.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Sure. The main way is that she sings to Anthony this over sexualized, "How'd you like a little muff, dear? A little jig jig", right? And when Mrs. Lovett is talking to Sweeney about what had happened to Lucy. And that she was, she was raped by the judge.

The music is a minuet version that goes, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. da. It's brilliant.

Mark Halpin: times and never noticed that until you just pointed it out. Of course

Gail Leondar-Wright: brilliant. So, the other part of The Beggar Woman's theme, when she's singing, "Alms, alms for a pitiful woman", Sweetie takes it up later, "And my Lucy lies in ashes". And it makes us wonder if Sweeney doesn't somewhere in the back of his head know that his Lucy who lies in ashes is the Beggar Woman. If it's somewhere subliminal in his brain and he doesn't want to admit it, because that would mean admitting that his wife lives among them and she's deranged and he's now responsible for her. I don't think Sweeney consciously knows that, but he sings her theme in Epiphany. Isn't that cool?

Mark Halpin: That's so cool.

Gail Leondar-Wright: All right. We've got, two shows left to discuss. Barry, would you take us back to the Spin-O-Matic? I'm seeing Sunday in the Park with George and The Fabulous Fifties.

Barry Joseph: Here we go.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Yay.

Barry Joseph: I am amazed that we're, we have not talked about The Fabulous Fifties because people listening won't know that it has almost been the one almost every single time. And it's the first one chronologically-

Mark Halpin: thrilled that it's-

Barry Joseph: -will now be

Mark Halpin: that that's

-the last one to come up, because that's going to be the finale, because I've never heard of this.

Barry Joseph: Great. But before we get to it, we have Sunday in the Park with George. I'm so excited we get to talk about this at the end of the podcast. I could have written the entire book on just the thing I'm about to share. The song, "Finishing the Hat", in Sunday in the Park with George, appears to the audience to be about the act of painting. It is also about the intense concentration that goes into the act of painting. of artistic creation, directly inspired by an experience he had in 1965, "trancing out", as he called it, over the course of a long night creating "The Murder Game", a parlor game for his friend, Phyllis Newman. Sondheim described the experience of designing the game as, quote, "a treasured feeling". But nonetheless, that game design was just a distraction, quote, "inventing games being something I did to avoid working while still maintaining the feeling I was exercising my brain", end quote.

Every time Sunday's George Seurat is singing on stage about painting a hat into existence, one might imagine Sondheim fondly recalling a time he designed a parlor game for a friend. Whether one is painting a portrait, designing, a game or writing a letter. The act of creating is not just for the gifted or the elite. Sondheim once described George's state in the song as analogous to a child coming home from kindergarten with a piece of art in their hand.

Quote, "Look at the face of the kids as they draw", he said, "you'll see that complete concentration and complete unawareness of anything going on around them, except what they're doing". So, for the game lovers, I would recommend taking from this that Sondheim viewed the process of designing games and puzzles just as seriously as he did creating work for the stage and that all of his creations, whether lyrics or game rules, were birthed within the same state of trance, all children of the same powerful muse. And now, commenting on the jigsaw structure at the end of the first act. All this needs, yes, is two sentences. Sunday in the Park with George is theater as jigsaw puzzle. As the protagonist George Seurat spends his first act painting what will become "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", he is also maneuvering set, props, and performers.

Until, in the first act's final moments, the pieces all fit perfectly into place, revealing the final painting.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well Barry, I have a question for you then. Do you think there's any jigsaw puzzle element to Act 2, or do you just see it for the first act?

Barry Joseph: Can you describe how the second act ends and how the characters on the stage who are playing the figures within the painting are displayed so we can contrast the two?

Eric Henwood-Greer: The end of Act 2 has modern day George returning to the island of Grand Jatte, and he's disappointed because it's not recognizable from the painting. But the spirit of Dot comes to him from the past, and suddenly the place transforms back to the original end set of Act 1, and all the characters from it come back and bow to George, if I remember correctly.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And we have a rare reprise of "Sunday".

Barry Joseph: And so your question is, is that also a jigsaw puzzle in its construction? There There is something about the fact that we know this painting exists in the first act and we- the first act is about its creation, that we are expecting it to come together. If the first act didn't end with us seeing it, we would then have expected it in the second act.

Like it's like that Chekhov's Gun. We're waiting for this thing to appear. We no longer expect it. No one does a jigsaw puzzle twice. Maybe they do. I don't know why they do. I never do them twice. Once it's done, it's solved. Like, I don't need to do it again. So when the pieces are reconfigured in the second act, it's now something else, perhaps a call-back. I'm now revisiting something I've seen before. I now have nostalgia for it. I'm remembering and feeling the feelings I had remembering how devastated and floored I was the first time at the end of the first act that I saw it, which is what now, like an hour ago? So Sondheim is doing something different when it's recreated that is something very theatrical, and I still think very powerful and explains why many of us are in tears at that moment and having a hard time explaining why. Maybe that's part of it, that he's returning us back to that earlier moment of creation that we are not expecting to revisit.

Eric Henwood-Greer: I think that's a really good point, because if we didn't return to the Act 1 finale, in some form, at the end of Act 2, I think we'd be very unsatisfied.

Gail Leondar-Wright: And in fact, 2 is filled with musical motifs that we heard first in Act 1. Dorian Bandy says that Act 2 seems to be listening to Act 1. So that every single piece of musical material that we hear in Act 1 shows up in Act Two, and it's sometimes disguised and it's sometimes not very well disguised, but there are musical connections between the two. Um, Sondheim tells a story, I don't remember if it's in Finishing the Hat or elsewhere, but he was at a party with Mandy Patinkin about a year after the show had opened. So Mandy Patinkin's been playing George both Act One and Act 2 for a year or more, and Patankin mentioned to Sondheim that he had a really hard time learning the melody to the song "Putting It Together", which happens in the beginning of Act 2. And Sondheim says, what are you talking about? You just sang it with "Finishing the Hat". So it's "finishing the hat", "putting it together".

They're basically the same tune with that little extra something something that makes it a new tune in Act 2. And there's musical connections like this all the way through. You can chart it, how the Act 1 song is repurposed into Act 2. It's just a puzzle, I think.

Mark Halpin: It's interesting how the lyric, "bit by bit putting it together", certainly sounds like a jigsaw puzzle. It's almost, he's doing it in Act 1 and then commenting on it in Act 2.

Gail Leondar-Wright: That's beautiful.

Barry Joseph: I'm curious, any thoughts on hearing or having us discuss this song, many- their favorite song of all of Sondheim's, "Finishing the Hat", which appears to be in the specific about painting and in general about creativity, was also in the specific about designing a game specifically for a friend of his?

Mark Halpin: I, for what it's worth, personally, I have these two things, I do set design and puzzle creation. And And, it occurred to me at some point how absolutely identical those processes are and how even the goals are the same. You are designing to an effect and then you're constructing the artificial thing that gets you there and then you're disguising it somehow, so it feels graceful and inevitable. And that's the same, whether it's a song or whether it's a puzzle or whether it's set design or whether it's I can only imagine almost any other sort of artistic, uh, creation

Barry Joseph: I don't think we need the Sondheim-O-Matic anymore, because there's only one thing left on it, The Fabulous Fifties.

The earliest example chronologically, which is going back to 1960s. Again, it's a TV show, and we're now going to be talking about playground games. In 1960, Sondheim wrote a song for a television special called The Fabulous Fifties. "Ten Years Old" a whimsical and inventive retrospective of the past decade, sung by children playing on a playground. They sing songs with lyrics and music that reflect the games they are playing. This unproduced number is full of parodies, its own form of musical game. Turn a known song or nursery rhyme into another and seek humor and meaning in the contrast. For example, "with a knick knack paddywhack, who can go to bed when the future lies ahead?" Some of the songs are themselves game songs, like count-outs, "A! Angry Young Men! B! Bridgette Bardot!". Another, is in the form of name, spouse, location, object. "K, my name is Kukla. My husband's name is Kefavar. We come from Korea and we use kredit kards". Note to the listener, the credit cards are spelled with Ks instead of Cs.

Children's singers are playing in a playground while commenting on the world by singing parodies of children's game songs. It was pretty complex material for a time before viewers had the option to pause or rewind a television show. Songs that review historical periods are often list songs, like Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" and R. E. M. 's "It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine". However, "Ten Years Old" is notably not a list song. Why not? Because listing the decade's hits and turning them into interesting lyrics was not hard enough. Instead of a list song, Sondheim challenged himself by adding the additional complexity of referencing the historical events within parodies of children's play songs. He must surely have delighted in including his own take on a playground insult-your-mom verbal battle. "Ah, your mother cheats at Scrabble". Well, I'll tell you my favorite part of the song, which is, it's a parody of "London Bridge is Falling Down". And it goes like this. " Who had heard of Salk Vaccine, Dexedrine, Mr. Clean? Who had heard of Fulton Sheen, or My Fair Lady?"

Gail Leondar-Wright: All these wonderful references from the 50s and then repurposing the name of the musical. Just, that slays me.

Natalie Gerber: And every- as you're saying, Gail, every decision he makes is so exactly right. So when he talks about Elvis, he sets it to the tune of Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, something, something made the girls cry. And it's Elvis pelvis wiggled, you know, and made them cry. Each one is exactly- like, he just nails it and has so much fun. He's so interested in language. And I think he must know, that, these nursery rhymes, often have, associations with- like not only the counting songs, But nursery rhymes often get picked up by crime novelists. They have a lot of violence and, issues in them, some of which come up in the song. Like, "knick knack paddywhack" isn't necessarily a good thing.

And Jane Klain shared a great example of Sondheim writing for Topper and writing a jingle that was intentionally wrong. She didn't know who wrote it, but it ended with an extra word. It's something like, " this is the winner of the oats, vote for it sight unseen. Everyone loves Individual Oats. It's the cereal everyone votes- for." And, because the ghosts burn up all of the other contestants' better jingles, this is the jingle that wins. And Jane Klain was like, that had to be Sondheim who wrote that because only he would intentionally introduce a mistake. So, everything is so deliberate.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Well, has there ever been any discussion about how this song anticipates the much more serious "I'm Still Here" from Follies, in terms of using all the historical references? You'll notice in the book, Finishing the Hat, those are the only two songs that he felt he had to have a separate explanation of all the references in.

Natalie Gerber: I haven't seen one, but you know, they also anticipate the transitions that get cut in, Merrily. There are a lot of references- I think the second transition or third transition, which refer to like hot tub sex clubs is the example that comes to mind

Eric Henwood-Greer: And those transitions were originally called "Bump".

Natalie Gerber: Yes. And then the bumps also turned dark where I think he's having fun. "Bump Chappaquiddick, bump thud, another one", where he's talking about bodies laying- landing, and he's- he must know the tradition in the nursery rhymes where- because he uses these onomatopoeia words throughout his career and take such delight in just turning it from a, you know, bump on the road, into a bump of a body coming out of a car.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: We just finished exploring all of the items on this episode's Sondheim-O-Matic. On the second part of this series, we'll be looking at four other shows: Into the Woods, Putting It Together, Road Show, and Here We Are.

Before we go, I'd love to see if any of our guests have any final words, and of course, if there's anything you want to share with us about how we can learn more about your work.

Eric Henwood-Greer: Thanks, Barry.

I had never really thought about how the two different worlds of Sondheim, at least in my mind they'd always been two different worlds, his game playing and creation, and his musical and theatre writing, actually share so much in common.

And I think examining them together just makes me appreciate both aspects all the more. So, thank you very much.

Natalie Gerber: And let me echo those things, Barry. It was such a joy to read your book. It taught me so much because Sondheim talks about lyric writing as the same as doing puzzles. He doesn't love writing lyrics as much as he loved writing music. calls the first a craft, the second, music, an art, and compares lyric writing to producing pewter ashtrays at one point, knocking them out. But we get that elevated sense from looking at the puzzles and examining the layers of puzzles within the lyrics and understanding from the puzzles and games he created just how much he loves language and how much it comes down to wordplay. So, I'm new to Sondheim studies, but I'm looking forward to, writing on the Sondheim Hub and a couple of other places about his language play and verbal dexterity.

Mark Halpin: I just wanted to say thank you for having me. It's a rare opportunity to get the chance to talk about this kind of thing.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Barry, thank you so much for bringing us all together. I had the best time. And I want to thank our guests, Eric Henwood- Greer, Mark Halpin, Natalie Gerber. I'm Gail Leondar-Wright. And if you want to connect with me- because I'm constantly doing things in the Sondheim sphere, I teach classes and do other stuff- you can reach me at talking Sondheim at gmail. com. And just thank you, Barry. This was really, really delightful.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Gail. Thank all of you. I also would like to thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, specifically transcription and text editing by Jenny Westfall, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy, and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along.

And thank you listeners for joining Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. I hope you'll return for the second half. And if you don't want to wait, please pick up a copy of my book, us up on the socials, Facebook and Instagram at Matching Minds with Sondheim, and please comment and like the podcast on whatever platform you use. It helps us out immensely. Gail. I look forward to seeing you here next time.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Can't wait, Barry.

Woosh.

Gail Leondar-Wright: Who had heard of Salk Vaccine, Dexedrine, Mr. Clean? Who had heard of Fulton Sheen, or My Fair Lady?