Richard Schoch: One of the most poignant and precious comments I've had from quite a number of readers is the times that they've had to put the book down because they've started to weep.

And I thought, well, a reader who is bringing that much emotion and vulnerability to the book, what a wonderful gift for an author.

Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. I am your host, Barry Joseph. Today's episode is the first in a series I call Writing Sondheim. These are episodes where I get to have a discussion with other authors who have written books about Stephen Sondheim. My goal is to get beyond the content of the books- you can find those in reviews and hear those interviews elsewhere- and instead dive into the weeds on the writing process. And what it means when that process includes, as a subject, the Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim.

For this episode, I am thrilled to invite to join me Richard Schoch, author of How Sondheim Can Change Your Life. Richard is professor of drama at Queen's University Belfast. Before launching his academic career, Schoch directed plays in New York City and worked for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Richard, welcome.

Richard Schoch: Barry, thank you. It's great to be with you and your listeners.

Right now I'm in London, England.

Barry Joseph: And I'm in New York City. So, this is how this is going to work. Richard, I'm going to be asking you questions, questions you asked me not to share with you in advance, and I'll also be answering those questions. And of course, I'll be talking about my own book. I'm hoping we can all learn something from the approach I first encountered in my 10th grade English class, the compare and contrast assignment. Listeners should know I also invited Richard to ask me questions as well if he liked, and we'll see. Richard, are you ready to jump in and see what happens?

Richard Schoch: Let's do it. I'm ready to take the plunge.

Barry Joseph: Alrighty.

So why don't we start by providing brief overviews of our books. Title, the lens we each took, and the scope of what we covered.

Richard Schoch: Sure. So, you very kindly said my book is called, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life. Though that was not the first title. The first title, the title that I, the author came up with, was Being Alive. Two words that all Sondheim fans will know Bobby's famous song from Company, "Being Alive" and the subtitle was What Stephen Sondheim Can Teach You About Life. And the book was contracted under that title. Now, of course, it's very very common for titles to change and- at least my experience- authors often do not have the right to insist upon a title in terms of the contract.

But I have a very good agent and there was a clause that said if the title is going to change, the author needs to agree. So I was protected. Early-ish in a publication process, the book is presented as a concept and as a design to sales reps, the people who will be convincing bookstores across the country to stock it.

And the word came back from the sales reps who are very knowledgeable about the book industry. And they said, "we love the approach. We love the concept. We love the cover. What we don't love is the title because it's too long. And the word Sondheim needs to come much earlier, needs to be at the start of the title".

So the folks at Atria kind of traded some titles back and forth, and they came up with How Sondheim Can Change Your Life. They ran it by me. I said, I love it. I think that is a much better title than the one I had. So that has been the title ever since. And think it does two things -- It says, this is not a book that is primarily about Sondheim. It's not a biography. It's not a deep musicological study of the works. It's not a collection of interviews like D.T. Max's Finale. It's not a gorgeous book of anecdotes and photographs. It's not a coffee table book, and it's not so much about Sondheim-

As what we can learn from Sondheim. So the true subject or to use a dramatic word- the true protagonist of the book- is not Sondheim, it's the reader or the spectator, which is why the book is called How Sondheim Can Change Your Life with that kind of playful nod to self-help. I hope it's not as cheesy as some self-help books are, but the approach is really to focus on the reader or the audience member. So I look at 12, 13 of Sondheim's works and how they move us, how they provoke us, what they stir up in us, how they make us feel. And to use Sondheim's own lyric from Dot in Sunday in the Park with George, how they "give us more to see".

So that's the sort of trajectory of the book: from Sondheim to his works, to us.

Barry Joseph: That's lovely. Thank you, Richard. And I'm so glad you started by talking about the alternative titles. My book Matching Minds with Sondheim, The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend. had Earlier titles like "an invitation" in it. The Puzzles and Games of the Master Lyricist, An Invitation. I like the idea of- as you describe- this is about you, the reader. I want to invite you to come in. He has these gaming parties. He's throwing treasure hunts. You're now going to be invited for the first time. That tone pervades the book, but it didn't last in the title itself. I also played with a time for calling it, as the subtitle, A Ludological Biography. Ludology is the study of play. So a ludological biography means looking at someone's life from the lens of play, which is what my book is all about.

That's my lens. Sondheim as game player. Sondheim as puzzle solver. Sondheim as game designer. Sondheim as puzzle constructor. I wanted to focus on the things he produced, the games and the puzzles. And I do, but as a result, I started seeing that we were learning about who the person was and how he changed over time as the games change.

And that brought biographical element, which meant I start talking about Sondheim when he's a teenager-

Richard Schoch: Mmhmm.

Barry Joseph: -when he's designing his first, board game, when he's constructing his first word puzzles. Up until his last few years, when he was still playing these games and creating them. So a "ludological biography" made sense, but it left the cover because no one else knows what ludology is.

Richard Schoch: That's right.

Barry Joseph: So that became a section title instead. The other one I liked was Solving Sondheim. That feels good on my tongue. But of course, this book doesn't solve Sondheim. It's asking questions about Sondheim.

Richard Schoch: Right.

Barry Joseph: So-

Richard Schoch: I imagine you'd get readers who would say, Sondheim is perfect. There is nothing to solve in Sondheim.

Barry Joseph: -that's right. At the end, "matching minds" was really the image I'm looking for. it's about how you, the reader, can find a different way to connect with Sondheim, his mind, his brilliance, through his works. But in this case, the works are puzzles and games, not the music.

Richard Schoch: I love it. I love the main title, "Matching Minds". It's alliterative. It's lively. It's the invitation, as you said. And it sort of puts the reader and Sondheim, at least in terms of this conversation, on the same level. I think it's a really dynamic title.

Barry Joseph: Thank you. And I love how both of our titles situate the reader. You name them by saying "you". I imply them by saying "matching minds". At the center of what our texts are about and what the experience is about we're finding new ways to help people connect with Stephen Sondheim and at the end- through themselves.

Your book explicitly says how Sondheim can change your life. I try and put out a challenge by saying, if you play these games, if you tackle these puzzles, you'll also learn something about yourself as well.

Richard Schoch: Yeah, and I love that it keeps Sondheim, as it were, alive, as a partner in this conversation. Because in the theatrical moment, the works are alive, Sondheim is alive, and it's important not to treat him as a statue, as something in a museum. But as a cultural resource, a wisdom resource, a playful resource, a ludological resource- to coin a phrase- who is always available to us, because when we're sitting in the theater, that's our experience of Sondheim.

He's still here.

Barry Joseph: I want to move from title to the cover.

But before we do, I want to follow up with something you just brought up, which is that you and I both wrote books about Stephen Sondheim after he passed away. You're talking about how our books are about keeping him alive. A way to help readers past his passing, to find ways to keep connecting with his materials, and keep what he's done in our lives in a way that can impact us.

Can you say a few words about what it was like for you to take on a subject like this still in a period of mourning?

Richard Schoch: I actually start the book with an anecdote of when- you know- when and where I was when I got the news that Sondheim was dead. I was watching, Tick, Tick, Boom, which is Lin Manuel Miranda's film about Jonathan Larson.

And there's that famous scene where Sondheim, just as he did in real life, leaves a message on Larson's answering machine. This is after a difficult workshop of his musical, Superbia, and Sondheim says, "it's first rate work, and it has a future, and so do you". Very encouraging, heartening words. For Jonathan Larson, who is not in a great place at that time.

And of course, as most of your listeners will know, Sondheim wrote those words for the screenplay and he recorded them for the film. That was his last sort of contribution to a film. And it was a very powerful scene, just on its own terms, to actually hear Sondheim's voice, leaving that message. And at that moment, my cell phone went off and it was a text message with his New York Times obituary, Sondheim is dead.

And I just, it was, wow, I mean, the timing was uncanny, and I thought he's not dead. He's- I can hear him on the telephone. So you know, I felt like the universe was sending me a message. Saying two things: that Sondheim is speaking to us individually, like the voice on the answering machine, and he's not going anywhere.

He's dead, but he's not dead because he lives on. I always think of Dot's song, "Children and Art", those two legacies. So Sondheim lives on through his art. And, you know, I never met him. I never wrote to him. And ironically, I'm glad that I never knew him, because I could then write the book in the frame of mind I wanted to write it in, which is "what did these works mean to me?" Rather than saying, "Oh, I know Sondheim I've met him. So now I have to sort of honor Sondheim in the way that I'm approaching the work". So I'm kind of kicking myself for never having written him a letter because he was famous for always writing back, but I'm glad that I had that little bit of distance so that I could write what I needed to write.

So, the book was prompted by the sadness of his death. But then writing the book was extremely- at times very harrowing because the issues that come up are intense, but also a very joyful experience because I thought, you know, the abundance of Sondheim is not going anywhere. Yes, Here We Are is the last music we will ever hear, the last new music by Stephen Sondheim, but there are infinite riches in the works that he has written and composed, and they will stand the test of time.

Barry Joseph: I love that you used the phrase "joyful". Our books are very different in one particular sense where your main resource had to come from yourself. You're looking into your own experience, your own psyche, your own background, and comparing how your relationship with Sondheim's work can teach you something that can also teach all of us. I had the opposite.

I had nothing inside me to reflect on because I'm talking about the experience of Sondheim's games and puzzles, which I had zero access to.

Richard Schoch: So what did you do?

Barry Joseph: What I had to do was reach out to people who did have those experiences, people who had played Sondheim's games, people who had solved Sondheim's puzzles.

And who were they? They were his colleagues. Those were his friends. Those were his loved ones. So I had to reach out to people and say, "would you be willing to share your experience with me?" But what I significantly underestimated was this was five months after he passed away.

That's when I began my project. I dove deep into three different books about Stephen Sondheim. That was my way of mourning his passing and learning more about who he was. And that's when I discovered that he loved games and puzzles, which I also love as well. And that became for me a way to learn more about him and connect with him, just to learn these things. But it meant I was contacting people who were still in mourning and saying, "Would you be willing to share your stories with me?" And some people said "no." and very rarely, but occasionally, it brought a tear to someone's eye. But mostly, the tone of those conversations was joyful. People didn't want to end these conversations which were summoning forth memories of what it was like to connect with their friend, to play with him, to be challenged by him, to build stuff with him. and how much fun he was. And that was such a privilege for me to get to be in those spaces with them and then to figure out how do I bring people during their period of mourning into the book, but in this frame of mind where they're bringing forth their positive memories and wanting to share them with others.

Richard Schoch: That's wonderful. As you say, our experiences in one way are parallel in another way are completely opposite. Kind of internal and external. So do you sort of transcribe interviews or how do you represent your conversations in the book?

Barry Joseph: So I communicated with over 100- 110 for the book. Of those 60 of them were interviews, and I would interview people over Zoom. I would ask their permission to record it. Meryl Seacrest, who wrote Stephen Sondheim's biography in the nineties taught me a very key lesson.

She had always wrote things down on a pad of paper. But she said in her follow-up book where she writes a book about writing the book about Stephen Sondheim, that she knew if she got one word wrong, he would remember and she would need to have proof. So she recorded all of them. All of those recordings were donated and sold in some combination a few years ago to Yale. And they're all available for any researcher to go listen to. there are dozens of hours of interviews that she did with Stephen Sondheim. And I think over a hundred more with friends and colleagues, and that taught me if, I'm going to be interviewing people and I'm going to get it right, I need to record it. So once I recorded on Zoom, I use Otter AI, which is an online tool that automatically transcribed it for me. I could go back and look at the text of it. And the text is linked to the audio, so I can make sure it's correct. And then in the book what I'm trying to do is tell stories and bring the reader into a moment. So, for example, one of the people I had the privilege of interviewing was playwright and playmate Jonathan Marc Sherman. And so I want to bring the reader into a moment when Sherm, as he goes by, is having a conversation with Sondheim. And you in the book are reading dialogue from the two of them, but the dialogue is coming from what Sherm recalls. And I'm bringing you into that moment. So I try to do that throughout. Other times, I'm using the interviews to highlight points. So I might say, "Sondheim, when he was designing puzzles, had certain values", let's say, "and one of them was about the value of always being fair. For example, his friend and colleague Richard Maltby Jr."-

Barry Joseph (2): said, and then I'll use the quote there, right? So sometimes I'm bringing the reader into a moment, a story, and other times I use the quotes to flesh things out. So these interviews were the only way this project could have happened.

Barry Joseph: There's a lot of research in libraries. Yale, which I mentioned, New York Public Library Performing Arts.

The Library of Congress, and Others around the country, not just on the East Coast. But all of that would have been flat without the experience of talking to the people who were there.

Richard Schoch: Right. And the games themselves, of course- you know, I guess it's, they're kind of- some are on paper, sort of, some are gadgets, some are sort of a kind of action game. They're in all sort of dimensions. Just in a material sense, did you collect games?

Barry Joseph: I never expected to ever see anything. I knew that he had designed, for two years over 40 crossword puzzles for New York Magazine when it first launched. So I knew those would be available. But I didn't know how much was out there, and I didn't know if anyone had anything. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised. There is so much material out there and people held on to it. So, for example, in 1973, the cast of A Little Night Music experienced a treasure hunt that used every floor of the Schubert theater, and it required deep, deep knowledge of the lyrics in the songs to be able to decode it. And one of the performers who was in the show held onto their sheet from their team, who won in a drawer of a desk for 50 years.

Richard Schoch: Until you came along and shone a light on it.

Barry Joseph: "Please let me take a photo". And, across his life, people had things and in 2024 in June at the Doyle auction- where many of the items from his house in New York City and his house in Connecticut were sold- originally when they were posted online, it was discovered that board games that were thought to have been thrown away were there in full.

Richard Schoch: Wow.

Barry Joseph: And so for the first time people could finally see these board games, one of which his mom had designed graphically, the design of the board itself. You could see the cards, like Monopoly chance- style cards with the text on it, and all sorts of stuff. So it turns out there is all this ephemera that's out there connected to the games and puzzles and people have held onto it.

So, that's not to answer your question. That's the context. The answer is I have a drawer with a whole bunch of stuff and I can't believe it's even in my house. And someday I hope it can go somewhere where the public can see it.

Richard Schoch: that's fantastic. I mean, there's no way you can write the kind of book that you want to write without having access to the games themselves in whatever formats. Now, I need to ask the inevitable question is, have you played any of these games?

Barry Joseph: So there's games and there's puzzles, Right. The game are board games. I've not been able to play them. I have been able to read their rules. I've been able to see the boards, but I haven't played them. The puzzles are something else. Luckily for us, the majority of his treasure hunts were designed for spaces but didn't require prior knowledge and often didn't even require the space themselves. Which means I could show you the clues right now and we could solve them and have fun. He did his first well known treasure hunt, perhaps his first, for Halloween 1968 designed with Anthony Perkins and he designed his last one in 2013 for a friend's private birthday party at City Center. And in between, he did a lot of treasure hunts. However, even though I have the full clue sets for many of them, he never seemed to have written down the answers. Because he knew them!

Richard Schoch: He knew, why would he write them down?

Barry Joseph: So you ask me, have I played any of them? To get the answers to the treasure hunt questions, which was required if I was going to analyze his design, I had to solve them. I am not that level of solver. So I would bring people together in Zoom calls who both knew Stephen Sondheim, when he was alive, and are puzzle people. And together I would simulate, we're now at City Center. Or, you know, we're now at the American Museum of Natural History, and here's what you see in front of you. And then they would solve them for me, with me, and I would see what it was like for them to "match minds with Sondheim" through the puzzles he'd left behind.

Richard Schoch: It's like a theatrical revival. You brought it back. You re-staged the treasure hunts, the scavenger hunts.

Barry Joseph: I call them revivals sometimes. Sometimes reenactments, sometimes revivals. Yeah, indeed,

All right, so let's get to the cover of your book. Can you describe for someone who hasn't seen it before, what is on the cover?

Richard Schoch: Sondheim is on the cover. About 10 years ago, Ken Mallon made a wonderful drawing of Sondheim at the keyboard. It looks a little bit like a Hirschfeld drawing, but it's not. I think it's gorgeous. And Sondheim's arms are, although he's at the keyboard, the arms are sort of open and curved, almost as if he's embracing you and embracing the music.

There's the trademark Sondheim grin. If you had to place it, you'd probably say it's somewhere around Sweeney Todd chronologically, but that really doesn't matter. But Sondheim is wry and smart and funny and musical, but also very warm, which I think is in keeping with the tone of the book. So the cover is white.

The lettering is gold, the title's at the top, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life and then below is in black and white, the drawing, and then my name in smaller type size at the bottom of the cover. But it's clean, it's elegant, it's lively, and, I think it's, inviting to the reader. I believe it's a kind of book that you would come across in a bookstore and you just want to pick it up. It's so beautiful. which is the purpose of the cover, to get you to pick the book up- and then you can find out what's inside it.

We knew from the start that we did not want a photograph of Sondheim because that would suggest biography. But a drawing of Sondheim, suggests something else- that Sondheim is the subject, but the book is also doing something other than telling the story of his life.

Barry Joseph: That's so interesting. You're helping me understand the design of the cover in a whole new way. I love the cover. It's very clean and I love that it is centered. Like if this was a movie with an old transition and it zoomed into a circle in the middle before going to the next scene, what would you see?

Richard Schoch: You would see Sondheim's face

Barry Joseph: Looking right at you.

And it's such a thoughtful gaze. He's inviting you to come into his world and it just makes me want to jump in.

You mentioned earlier that the title somewhat suggests a self-help book, and when I first heard it that's what I thought. "Oh no, did someone write self-help book about Sondheim?"

Richard Schoch: Sort of!

Barry Joseph: And it moves beyond that genre, but also draws from it in such an effective way that is meaningful and is so very true to Sondheim's work and the impact it has in our lives.

And so this cover very much is bringing me into that world that you want us to have. It sets that first expectation so nicely.

Richard Schoch: I appreciate that. I'll pass those comments on to the people who are responsible

Barry Joseph: Now, you of course haven't seen my cover. So, to be fair, let me bring it up and I'll share it on the screen so as I talk about it, you know what I'm-

Richard Schoch: Barry, I saw the cover of your book on Instagram and I think it's fantastic.

Barry Joseph: Thank you. So, mine is similar to yours in some ways and also very different. I like that you called yours clean. I would not call mine clean. Mine's very busy. And my challenge was, I was thinking with my editor, Chris Chappell, at Applause Books about how can it be something that really speaks to the richness of the content that's really being introduced to the reader.

They don't know what's going to be inside, but at the same time couldn't be overwhelming. And I know I was not going to decide what was on the cover, but that didn't stop me from putting together 20, 30 page deck, suggesting, these are the design values. These are some concepts I came up with, just to get ideas about how does one communicate this? And I couldn't be more thrilled with what we have: We have not one but two Sondheim photos. We have what we call young Sondheim and older Sondheim, and they're both playfully looking at the content around them, which is dice, jigsaw puzzles, board game elements, a pencil, and those are all representing the different types of games and puzzles you're going to learn about in the book.

It's really dynamic, it's colorful. The photo of Sondheim, that's the older Sondheim, is this one with his finger on his lips where he's like considering something. He's being jokey in the picture, which is just the right kind of, "I'm being serious, but I'm also joking at the same time". And I just couldn't be happier with it.

I want people to see this in the store and say, "the Sondheim pops". It's this red curvy Sondheim and like, "okay, I know Sondheim, but what does "matching minds" mean? And why is it all about dice and jigsaw puzzles?" And then you maybe take a look and you read the subtitle, The puzzles and games of the Broadway legend. "I don't know anything about this". And now that question is asked and you want to answer it. That's what I'm hoping the cover will do.

Richard Schoch: I think it will.

And if my memory is correct, you had a series of possible covers that you put on Instagram and invited your followers to weigh in on.

Barry Joseph: With all respect to my publishers, who I love, they would often say, "don't, don't show stuff. It's too early" or "don't ask people yet". But I always went the opposite And so when it came to the cover, I was like, "I have my community on Instagram. I'm going to ask, "What do you think?" I know what I like. I want to know what they like and why." And so then they gave me remarkable feedback that are specific design elements that they thought would work and not work. I was able to take their feedback, send it back to my editors. They did another pass. We shared that again. And each time I saw the people loved it more and more. So I knew we were moving in the right direction, because if they're not going to buy the book, no one's going to buy the book.

Richard Schoch: Yeah, and I love that you shared those iterations of the covers with your followers on Instagram. Who are of course your target readers. And nobody writes a book, not me, not you, nobody writes a book so that it will not be read. We write a book so that it will be read. And that means we have to know who our readers are, who the audience is, what attracts them, what repels them, what they want to know more about. That is all valuable, valuable information. I have found one of the hardest things in trade publishing is to define, with maximum clarity, who your reader is.

Who exactly are you writing this book for? Where do they hang out? What do they do? What other kinds of books do they read? And how do we find them? How can authors find them? Whether it's on social media, or off social media. So knowing the community and knowing how to engage with them and find them is an important role for authors and their publishers to undertake.

And it sounds like you're way ahead of the game on that.

Barry Joseph: This is my fourth book and my books are often based on knowledge and expertise that other people have. So I need to find those people.

Richard Schoch: Right.

Barry Joseph: So by building communities online, they find me. It's like I'm hanging up a lantern and they come to me. So by having a space for people who are in that intersection between Stephen Sondheim and games and puzzles. Someone says, "Hey, did you see there's a thing on eBay you might want?" "Hey, did you know someone posted this on Facebook from 50 years ago?" "Hey, did you make sure to interview this person around this topic?" Without that community, my book would not exist. I spoke about interviewing and communicating with over 110 people. Many of those people came through for the first time through my Instagram feed.

Richard Schoch: It's wonderful that you have been developing this project with your readers, with your target audience. Both the games community and the Sondheim community, and all of the people who are eventually going to read this book have been following it with growing interest as you've been sharing, talking about it, asking for feedback and advice.

And, I think, you know, the stars are aligning.

Barry Joseph: And you know, as a writer, we write alone. And so to have a space, a community where I can get some energy back that says, "we care, we're excited, we want to see it keep going", is the most invaluable thing for a writer to have.

Richard Schoch: it is. For sure. Writing is, you know, think of George in Sunday in the Park with George, you know, the painter has to be in the studio alone. "Red, red, red, red, red, red, orange". And the writer has to be in front of either- writing a long hand or in front of a laptop, whatever it is. And I find writing is a very solitary task.

I cannot do it in cafes or Starbucks. I tend to write at home at a desk. I don't even want a view.I look into a wall because I don't want any distractions when I'm writing. And my experience is a bit different from yours because I wrote the book, and then after the first draft was done, I shared it with probably half a dozen trusted friends, ideal readers, Sondheim fans, authors, asking them for feedback and got wonderful, wonderful feedback on the first draft.

And then I started my outreach, engagement, contact with Sondheim groups, Broadway groups on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, other channels. So it was very solitary writing the book, and it wasn't until I was in the refining phase during the second draft that I started to announce it, make contact, share things with the community of readers, but that has been an extremely rewarding experience for me.

I was not a heavy social media user before I started doing this Sondheim book, but now hundreds and thousands of people I'm connecting with, who love Sondheim, who love musical theater, and who take the time to send me messages and tell me what they think of the book. I'm very pleased that most of them say nice things, but I'm also pleased when people say, you know, "I didn't agree with your chapter on the Baker's Wife in Into the Woods". And I reply honestly, this is not just kind of- I don't know- a fake pose for an author. I reply honestly, which is, "I'm so glad that you've told me that you did not agree with something that I wrote because the purpose of the book is not to compel your agreement. It's not an argument. I'm trying to win. It's a conversation, an invitation, an overture, to use a theatrical phrase.

And if the book can spark a conversation, a virtual conversation, between you, the reader, and me, the author, Then the book is doing its work. So agree, disagree. But if you've taken my writing seriously, I'm a very happy author." and

Barry Joseph: I'm curious, before your book came out, was there an impact that being connected to this community had on your understanding of the material or the execution of it within the book itself?

Richard Schoch: timing was such that feedback from the Sondheim musical theater community didn't really align with the intensive writing. But they did give me ideas about how to talk about Sondheim and things to say and ways to describe the book that would be both accurate, but meaningful for the community.

My experience also is that everybody's going to give you a different response to the work. So when you're in the very, very intensive writing mode, I wanted to sort of limit the number of people who read it. And I thought half a dozen plus my editor, that's reasonable. If I'm getting two dozen generous souls who are taking the time to write to me, it's going to be contradictory and confusing. And I'm going to please somebody and displease somebody else. The risk is high that the revision will not actually be very good.

But with a smaller number of people who are responding to the first draft, it was going to be pretty clear, and it was you know, what fine tuning the manuscript needed. So I went from a few readers to a significantly larger number as the book came to its end.

Barry Joseph: We've been speaking about where our books came from, where the titles came from, how the covers were designed. I think it's finally time now for us to open that cover and go inside the books.

Richard Schoch: Yes, we haven't, yes, we haven't even talked about what's in the book.

Barry Joseph: Can I invite you to read the first sentence of your introduction and then explain why that was how you wanted to introduce the reader to your entire book? And then I'll do the same for mine.

Richard Schoch: Okay.

"Grateful, no doubt, for having Oscar Hammerstein as his mentor, Sondheim always called teaching a sacred profession."

I'm a teacher myself, so these words were personally very meaningful and powerful to me. But, beyond that, I think they capture the gist of the book. Which is that, you know, just as Oscar Hammerstein taught Stevie Sondheim, Stephen Sondheim teaches us, and he teaches us through his works. And he teaches us about life in all its confusion, in all its disarray, all its joys and jubilations, all its fears, all its longings. And I was really interested in this idea of what Sondheim can teach us about life, which as you'll remember, was the part of the original title. So it was important to have this image of Sondheim really committed to the teaching process as the way to start the book.

Barry Joseph: Nice. I always appreciate when authors not only have a strong introduction to bring you into the book, but that that first sentence captures what that book is about. And so I'm always reaching towards that for my own. So I'm going to read you mine. I don't know if I hit it or not, we'll see. So my book opens with, "I searched the FedEx package for the tear tab, ripped it open, then poured the contents out onto my dining room table, but slowly and with great care, like a curator receiving a precious piece of art."

Richard Schoch: I love it because it makes the reader want to know more. It's vivid, it's dynamic, it grabs you, it's a bit of a mystery- or if you will- it's a puzzle. So it's very much in the spirit of your book, very meta sentence to have. I think it works really well.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Richard.

Richard Schoch: I had not heard it until this moment.

So that's my honest reaction.

Barry Joseph: Finding the voice for the book was one of my biggest challenges. But whenever I write a book or a piece about something I don't know anything about, that's always the end goal. Like, how does one tell this story? And once I figured out this kind of writing, I was like, "oh, okay". You're in the moment. You're there with me. I am framing what he has produced that I'm looking at as art, even though you and I hearing it for the first time don't know it's going to be a puzzle or a game. We don't even know it's Sondheim yet, but there is an excitement that I have receiving this, and I want you to be excited with me. To see what it's going to be and why it's there, and why am I calling it a piece of art.

Richard Schoch: Right.

Barry Joseph: And that's what the entire book is about. I think what Sondheim did with puzzles and games is art. You don't have to agree with me, but I'm going to come at it with that lens, with that level of appreciation, and I'm going to make that case throughout the book and see if you'll be as excited about it as I am.

Richard Schoch: Right. I think this is all that any author can do. And by saying that, I don't mean to underplay that because what authors do is often very, very intensive and very laborious. By that, I mean, all an author can do is invite the reader into a world. And then the reader will find that world exciting, or not, but that is the author's task.

And it sounds like you are creating that world from your first sentence and in a very vivid and enticing way.

Barry Joseph: Let's segue from that to the topic of how we both write ourselves into our books. I get very excited about the things that I'm interested in. And part of how I'm able to be effective in many of the things I do, whether it's writing or building a museum or something else, is sharing that excitement with others. I was encouraged to remove myself from my first book, and so the reader had to experience the content directly. But with this book, I really wanted to be there with them so they could see how I was modeling how one could love this material.

Richard Schoch: Right.

Barry Joseph: The book is not about me, in my relationship with the puzzles and games, in the way that your book is about your relationship with Sondheim's musicals. But I still needed to bring myself in there to, I think, model that excitement of what it meant to discover that these things even existed in the world. And what it meant to go through the research process of getting to access them, or be in conversations with people to give them those moments to reveal what they did. Can you talk more about what it was like for you to, yes- you have "Your" in the title of your book, but the main "You" is you.

Richard Schoch: That's right. Most of the books I've written, because I'm a professor, have been for academic presses, university presses. And that's a very different kind of book in which the persona of the author is someone who is very learned, very expert and authority in their topic. Theater history is my topic. And they stand to the side of the material and then interpret the hell out of it for the reader. But there isn't much of the pronoun "I" in such books, in the books I've written for Cambridge University Press. But the Sondheim book is very different. It's not an academic book. It's a popular book. It's for Sondheim fans, musical theater fans. So the tone, not just the language, but the tone and the approach are very different.

But I knew that this book could not just be a series of beautiful, elegant, curated essays on Sondheim's musicals. Not just, you know, lovely, exquisite thought pieces. They might have something to say, but I think their impact would fade fairly quickly. I thought if this book is going to find its way into the world, it has to move readers. It has to incite a response from them. And you use the word "modeling" when you were talking about you were modeling a certain kind of enthusiasm that you wanted the reader to share. And Barry, I had that exact same word in mind.

I wanted to model for the reader, in a gentle way in the book, a way to give yourself permission to feel all the things that Sondheim's works can make you feel. So that meant that I had to write autobiographically or memoirish to coin it. That's- some reviewer used that word, memoirish.

So I had to use the first person, the pronoun "I" to talk about my own experiences in life. My own experiences of watching Sondheim and how the issues that come up in those works, how those same issues came up in my own life. And again, how Sondheim's works were a message to me and about me.

And I found this a very difficult thing to do.

Readers will tell me whether I succeeded or not, but I found it very hard. Not just because, as a professor, I had been trained to write in a different way, although that was part of it. The hardest part was the emotional intensity. I mean, the way it was like being in therapy every day for nine months to write this book. I wrote it out of order, but each chapter is about a different show, Gypsy, Follies, Sweeney, Merrily, and it took about three weeks to get the first draft of any particular chapter done. So say, A Little Night Music. Well, for the next three weeks, I, Richard, am going to think all about regret. What are all the regrets I have in my life and how have I dealt with them?

And then when it came to Sweeney Todd, I was going to think about all the times in my life that I wanted vengeance and I wanted revenge on someone. Or in Follies, it was three weeks of, "Richard, what about all the ways that you really screwed up your past and all these roads you didn't take and all the lies you're telling yourself about how things were?"

So it was an uncomfortable- a personally, emotionally, psychologically- uncomfortable experience because I had to be brutally honest with myself and with the material, and then carry that honesty onto the page. Otherwise, there was no reason for the reader to read the book. I had to have credibility with the reader.

And the only way to do that was to be unsparing and honest about myself on the page. Not because the reader cares about my life. They don't. They care about their life. That's the life they should care about. But because I tried to be honest and unsparing in the way that I grappled with Sondheim's works. I hope that modeled for the reader a response they could have and that the book could give to them.

Barry Joseph: And what a gift you gave us as a result.

Richard Schoch: I appreciate that. Seriously, I do.

Barry Joseph: The easier work would have been just to interview people for each of those shows and heard from them how it impacted their lives. Then this book might have just been a crass self-help book. But instead you are showing us, through your experience, how you are asking us to be honest with ourselves and interrogate our relationships with each of the shows. You're not telling us that this is the lesson we need to take from but you're saying that we need to find our own. And by us watching you go through it, and being empathic with you through the process, you're modeling for us what we can be doing.

Richard Schoch: I'm so glad to hear you say that, Barry, because that is what I hoped the book would do. So it's very gratifying for me to hear those words from you. And this is why I don't mind when readers say, "I don't agree with you" on Sweeney Todd or Into the Woods or whatever it might be. And my answer is, "Great. How did you react? What are your thoughts?" Because as you've said, I'm not offering definitive readings of Sondheim. That would be ridiculous. I'm saying, "Hey, this is what Sondheim made me think about. These are the crazy emotions that Sondheim's works have stirred up in me. Do you feel the same way? Do you feel differently?"

And this is why I love hearing from readers. One of the most poignant and precious comments I've had from quite a number of readers is the times that they've had to put the book down because they've started to weep.

Not because of me, but because of their relationship with Sondheim's works, that something very moving and profound is happening within them as they remember a song or remember a character.

And they think of how that resonates or, if you will, rhymes with their own life. And I thought, well, a reader who is bringing that much emotion and vulnerability to the book, what a wonderful gift for an author. So I feel so grateful to have readers of that level of sensitivity.

Barry Joseph: For me, when I'm writing a book like this, I know it's working because it makes me cry. And I don't just mean the writing of it, but when I have to go back and read it again, revise it, and each time I tear up or I choke up. Not to say this whole book should make you cry all the time, but those are some of the notes I want to hit. And when I see that I'm able to bring those emotions out for myself, I'm hoping I'm going to be able to be successful bringing them out for others. So when I first write that piece that makes me tear up, I think, "Oh, I'm onto something". And whatever that is, I want to keep following that lead and keep developing that.

Richard Schoch: That's right. I had the same experience and it's all about trusting your instincts emotionally. Because we are like our readers. We are Sondheim mega fans. So what interests us, what moves us, what touches us, is also likely to interest, move, and touch our readers. Although I wrote the book, not out of order, not chronologically, Gypsy was actually the first chapter that I wrote. And it ends with this idea of everything can come up roses, but not in a cliched way, in a profound way, if we can free ourselves from trapped, abusive relationships, which is what Louise Gypsy does by the end of Gypsy. And I started to tear up when I was writing the last few paragraphs of that chapter. And like you, I thought this is not a sign of, "Oh, Richard, what a wonderful writer you are", not at all. It was a sign of, "Okay, something important is happening in Sondheim's material in the show Gypsy." And I'm just the finger that points to this material, but the gold is all Sondheim's gold. But I share your reaction that if the author is moved and is touched by the material, then that's a very good sign that something important is happening and that the reader will feel the same way.

Barry Joseph: And for me, the part that I think I'll have the hardest time if I'm asked to read it in person is, interestingly enough, about his relationship with escape rooms.

Richard Schoch: Right. Why do you think that is?

Barry Joseph: Escape rooms, I imagine, in so many ways, were his dreams come true. He made treasure hunts, he made puzzles, he made parties with games, and they were all about him putting a lot of effort in to get people together. To have an experience with them, to, as I write in the book, create moments of clarity, moments of connection. With escape rooms, you didn't have to do all that effort. You could just go to them. Just book a ticket, right? And now you could be having these moments of clarity, connection with your friends for the next hour, right? One of the escape rooms that he was in was also a piece of immersive theater. So it had a director who was taking notes throughout. And we have the notes that the director took for those performers for the time that Stephen Sondheim went through it.

Richard Schoch: Wow. Fantastic.

Barry Joseph: And. At the moment when it ended, and they're told the final line, "Your escape test has completed, but your journey toward liberation has just begun.", which is part of the narrative of that room. Stephen Sondheim said, I'm already choking up, "but I want to stay". He didn't want that moment to end.

Richard Schoch: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: It wasn't about, "hooray, we solved it". It was he wanted to keep being in that moment where he could be connected with his friends, having his mind engaged with theirs, their minds together, engage with the designers of that space, and having that thrill of what it meant to move through these solutions. And I also use that towards the end of the book because this subject of escape rooms is the last series of types of games I look at.

So we're also narratively at the end of his life. So it's also him saying he wants to stay with us.

And he has.

Richard Schoch: I love that story of the escape room and Sondheim not wanting it to end because it's such a wonderful rejoinder to the very lazy criticism that Sondheim is cold and unfeeling and just cerebral and antiseptic. And that's not true. Yes, he's very clever. And yes, he likes puzzles and games and wordplay.

And he's very dexterous in the way he uses languages, but he has a heart. He has a big heart. And the word "connect", you know, George in Sunday in the Park with George and even the Assassins, this is the ironic word, even the assassins sing "connect". You know, "only connect" from Passage to India. But this is, you know, Sondheim's leitmotif in search of connection. Not in search of being alone, but in search of being together. In search of connecting, in search of, if you will, "company".

Barry Joseph: And you write about that so beautifully in your book with a lens about how Sondheim can change our lives. And I write about that in a book about games and puzzles. And we each have two different approaches, and we end up in the same place. Sondheim is who he is, and we're able to understand this aspect of the messages he's left behind for us through both his musicals and his games and puzzles.

Richard Schoch: I love that. There's a beautiful harmony between our books.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Richard.

This has been such a pleasure and a gift. Thank you so much for joining me today in conversation.

Richard Schoch: Barry, thank you. And I've had a wonderful time.

And thank you dear listeners for joining us today for Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. If you can't wait for the next episode to drop, then well please pick up a copy of my book, hit us up on the socials, Facebook and Instagram, and please comment and like the podcast on whatever platform you use.

It helps us out immensely. 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. Until next time, remember, someone is on your side, especially when matching minds with Sondheim.

Richard Schoch: Yes, he likes puzzles and games and wordplay.

And he's very dexterous in the way he uses languages, but he has a heart. He has a big heart.