Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. You might have noticed we're slowing production down around here just a little bit, but we are far from finished. In the coming weeks and months, listen for my London recap, an episode on board games, an exploration of how Matching Minds is being used in universities, special guests, and more.

Before I introduce this episode, I want to catch you up on the latest on the book. The biggest news is that I went into the studios last week for my first two of four days recording the narration for the audiobook edition coming out this July, but available now for pre-sale. It was a blast. Working with my sound engineer, Ethan, I felt well-supported in my tiny sound booth, water by my side, as I read the script version of my book.

Whenever I got stuck on a word, such as an unusual surname or something in French, Ethan was there to do a quick web search and guide me along. I had so much fun coming up with different voices for the real people I interviewed, something I didn't know if I could actually pull off. And I came to appreciate a lot about tea, hot tea, and how much after five hours of nonstop reading out loud what a lifesaver it could be.

Wanna know what surprised me the most? After the first day, my arms were so exhausted. I tend to gesticulate a lot. In fact, that was part of how I figured out how to do different voices, curling my hands in different ways to emphasize their vocal personality. But when I lower my hands and put them on the pants, that rubbing sound would be caught by the mic. Ethan kept letting me know whenever I was doing that.

So I ended up just keeping my hands in the air for hours at a time, pushing through the pain like some crazy workout. But boy, at the end of the day, did I feel it. The second day, I figured out how to rest my elbows on the arms of my chair. That made a big difference. In June, I'll go back to finish recording the second half of the book, and I can't wait.

For now, here's a clip from how I open the book. And here's a clip from my reading the book Okay, let's turn now to today's episode, which is unlike any I've done before. At this point, I don't wanna just repost my interviews from other podcasts because you deserve something new every episode. But in two recent interviews, my guides took me to new places.

My challenge to our line producer, Dennis Caouki, was to combine them both into one, as if they had interviewed me at the same time, and oh, what a brilliant job he did. The first set of audio is from my time with Art Benjamin, Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. For the recent academic year, he was the visiting professor for public outreach at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City.

If you haven't been before, it's such a special place. I couldn't recommend it enough. As part of his Starring Math webinar series, he invited me to talk about my book, and no surprise here, math. And please check out Art's new off-Broadway show this summer at thatmathshow.com. The second set of audio is from the podcast series Scene to Song.

Hosted by writer Shoshana Greenberg, Scene to Song brings on a guest each episode to talk about a musical, musical theater writer, or topic or trend in musical theater, and Shoshana just wanted to dive into my book. Let's see what you think about how Dennis did weaving these two threads together into one audio adventure.

We talk about Into The Woods, the second season of the TV show Schmigadoon!, math and Sondheim, and more. Finally, before we jump in, I wanna thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, yes, the amazing audio edit by our line producer Dennis Caouki, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: It's my pleasure to introduce Barry Joseph.

Shoshana Greenberg: Hey, Barry. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Barry Joseph: It's such a delight to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. And all of you who came today to be part of that audience.

Shoshana Greenberg: I came to you and the book through your podcast. I found that first and then I went to one of your events which was-

Barry Joseph: At CCNY in February ...

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah. Yeah, which was such a great event 'cause it wasn't theater people in the audience mostly, it, which was a lot of fun.

Barry Joseph: It was game design students. It was a combination of game design students and local adults who are into immersive theater, which two very different groups. And it was wonderful to see how well they mixed together.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah. It was so great, and I just remember being in the line for you to sign my book and some, student next to me was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna check out this Sondheim guy."

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: you know, this is a special program for me today because I've been a lifelong theater lover. And I'm normally out in California, so I don't get a chance to experience New York like I've had the opportunity this year. I've seen probably 20 Broadway and Off Broadway shows since I've been here. And even though it's incredibly cumbersome to take books back home with me, I just can't help myself. But I couldn't help myself. I bought a book on the Periodic Table of Broadway Musicals. I still haven't had time to go through it, but my gosh, it looks like fun. And, so I just have to have it, you know? And you could claim that this is math or science-y for sure, but it's not. It's just fun. And then my favorite book, I mean, the birthday present to die for was Matching Minds with Sondheim.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, I'm so excited to talk about your book and everything you've researched and written about.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: You can tell by the Matching Minds bookmark, I am halfway through the book, halfway through-

Barry Joseph: Which chapter are you in?

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: This is where we're meeting Sid Saxon, who is a game designer. And, Stephen Sondheim, as, our author well knows, had contemplated other careers, 'cause who can expect to become a success on Broadway, right? So what are your backup plans? And I'd heard him say once in an interview that when he entered college, he thought about becoming a mathematician. He thought working on problems like Fermat's Last Theorem would be a really cool thing. And, later in life, even as he was achieving success as a writer of great hits, like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Gypsy, and the lyrics to West Side Story, you know, he still wasn't sure he wanted to make that his life. He thought about becoming a game and puzzle designer, you know? And, and that story never got fleshed out Until this book. I'm just so grateful that someone wrote a book on that. As a kid, my, my father was into community theater. And so I'm raised on songs like Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I was spoiled for life because I had such high standards. Things had to rhyme. Not just rhyme, rhyme cleverly, you know, in interesting ways. Anyway. Barry, I'm just so excited to have you here.

Shoshana Greenberg: First we'll get started with our get to know our guest questions. What is the last great musical you saw?

Barry Joseph: I think the last great musical I saw must be Hadestown, and I'm referring... You said last, that means it's the third time I saw it. My family loves that show. We go back to see it every year. Each time I see it, it's richer and deeper. And actually, the last time we saw it was our favorite of all. I don't know if you're someone who gets to see productions of shows a second time. I feel lucky to even see them the first time. But usually, you know, you're always trying to capture that thing you got the first time. And it's never the same. But with Hadestown, it just gets better and better. And the different interpretations from the different casts are really flavored so differently. Sometimes we think something is more comedic, or sometimes it's more dramatic, and sometimes they're really pulling on the ritual aspect of the show, and other times it's the leaning in the music. And so it's really fun to notice the differences and notice the parts that we like the most. But it is theater as ritual, which for me, at the end of the day is what I'm looking for when I go into that space.

Shoshana Greenberg: Totally agree. I've only seen the off-Broadway version of the show. So I keep saying that I have to go back and see the-

Barry Joseph: You gotta go.

Shoshana Greenberg: The latest Broadway version because, yeah, I know it's changed. But yeah, as you said, sometimes it's so hard to see shows multiple times, so it's like if I've seen it once, it's like, "Oh, well, there's other things that I need to prioritize". But yeah, I feel like that one I do need to get back to.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Now I see another comment in the chat from Megan who said, "I studied math at Williams College undergrad, and we talked very regularly about how Sondheim took math classes at Williams. If I'm correct, we even temporarily used his own dorm as the math building. Did you encounter anything in the archives, or in your oral history research about his experience or work in the Williams math department?" As I recall, he was a music major at Williams. He did ultimately choose music as his major, though going into college, that was not a foregone conclusion, even though he'd worked under the tutelage of Oscar Hammerstein.

Barry Joseph: Well, just what Megan's saying. He did do math, and he did like it, but he dropped out of it, and that's not the path he ended up taking. But when asked what he might do if he wasn't in musical theater, as I've said, his most common refrain was puzzles or games. His other most common mention was math. Now, what he thought he might do in math, I don't know, but he did love math, and he got to experience math properties, as you talked about, Art, by bringing it into his lyrics in his shows, and he did also get to explore it through his puzzles and games.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: There's something very, precise, astonishing about, everything he did. And if you displace a note. And he was hard on actors. If they sang, either the note wrong or the lyric wrong or, said booby instead of boobie, you know, he's like, "No, no, no, no. You gotta say it this way." Yeah, I mean- Yeah,

Barry Joseph: You're referencing what, if you haven't seen it, you should see the documentary about making the album of Company, right?

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: That's exactly where that came from. So I thought it would be fun to talk to somebody about where has math appeared in musical theater? I think the first show where I saw this happening. Where it was - obvious to me was in a show called A Little Night Music. And I remember it was in that musical, there was a series of rhymes that really just hit me in the face that said, "Oh my God, this guy's a genius." Frederick is describing to his former mistress, a former girlfriend of his, about his young wife, and she doesn't wanna hear about this. And he says, you know, he said, "Oh, she's just so great," you know. "She loves my voice, my walk, my mustache, the cigar, in fact, that I'm smoking. She'll watch me puff until it's just ash. Then she'll save the cigar butt." And she says, "Bizarre, but you're joking." And oh my God, that just hit me in the face. It was hilarious. It was brilliant. And it just captured everything so efficiently. Barry, you wanna say... You look like you were gonna jump in on that too.

Barry Joseph: No, I just loved your rendition. That was great.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Oh my gosh. Well, so I wanna play a song... in the very beginning of the show, you set the stage where Frederick is trying to seduce his wife, but she still isn't ready. She's still pretty young and he's thinking out loud how can he manage the seduction? And he goes through what I would describe as a mathematical argument, a proof, you know, as to whether he should do so, in a song called Now.

Frederick: Now, as the sweet imbecilities tumbles so lavishly onto her lap.

Now, there are two possibilities. A, I could ravish or B, I could nap.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: What I like about this song is that first of all you get this fun little logical argument of, "Well, if I do this, then this'll happen, and if I do that, then that'll happen. If I do this... I'm just gonna nap in the end." it's followed by Henrik's song, where he's singing about Later frederick was singing about now, and what he wants now. And Henrik is bemoaning the fact that everybody tells him later, you know?" You're too serious. You're a real buzz kill". And at the same time here, he's preparing for the priesthood, and , will he ever know a woman. Will that later ever emerge. And so he's bemoaning that. And then that's followed by a song sung by Anne, who's singing while Frederick is napping, she's singing Soon. Soon. Just have patience with me and I'll be the wife you want to be. You wouldn't want me to be perfect anyway. How boring would that be? Et cetera. And then they do a trio. Where all three are singing together. And what makes this mathematical is... it's analogous to the entire show, which is you've got these couples that are originally together that really don't belong together, and through this romantic farce, in the end everything's brought to where it should be. And that happens in this original song too. So they start with now, soon and later, which is sort of their normal, organic state of affairs. And then as they're singing, Frederick through his nap. They switch over to the other parts.. Everything was just so precise. ... And, , one of my regrets is I'm not musically sophisticated enough to appreciate.. I hear people who are as in awe of his music as I am with his lyrics, who say, "Oh my gosh," you know. Marvin Hamlisch came out of a production of Into The Woods saying, " I'd give my right hand for those five notes," of the beans or something, you know.

Barry Joseph: Well, I just was lucky enough last week when I was in London on my book tour to see the current production of Into the Woods. Which, won an Olivier just a few days earlier. And of all of Sondheim's shows, it's probably the one I've seen the most. This was a very grim production. Pun intended. You still had all that humor in the first act, but you also had a lot of blood. In this production, Little Red sings her song completely drenched as if she's coming out of the movie Carrie in the blood of the wolf.

Shoshana Greenberg: Oh my gosh.

Barry Joseph: But normally that first act is about, you know, people having wishes and the wishes being fulfilled along the traditional lines of fairytales. And part of what's so fun of it is you kind of know where it's going and they get there, and then you're like, "Wait, what's gonna happen next?" And then the second act deconstructs the whole thing, and that act of deconstruction is intellectually for me so fascinating, but it hits that emotional point when it isn't just about the idea of deconstructing the things we ignore in fairytales, which in this show it's about looking at the consequences of what they did to fulfill those wishes, which are largely ignored in the first act and come back with a vengeance in the second. But it's about what fairytales are about. About, as the show frames it, ways for us to prepare ourselves to deal with the challenges of our life, to have an order and a structure to guide us in the stories that the adults around us tell us, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, and what does it mean when you no longer rely on those, when you are actually gonna grow up, when you leave those behind? And when the narrator the mysterious man is killed, when he's given to the giantess in the second act, he says , "But who's gonna tell the story?" And that's the point where you realize, yeah, this whole thing has been structured around them being in stories, and they've been relying on that, and now they have to grow up. They have to live not knowing what's gonna happen next. They have to create each moment, one after the other. And to feel what that's like for the characters to finally be forced to deal with that pain of growing up, that separation, the responsibility of whatever happens, it's on them, and they can build on the resilience they've had from whatever the past stories that they've gone through. But now everything is different, and the show's able to do that first I think in an intellectual way, and then emotionally it just pounds me and I'm like, "Wow." And there's... I talked about theater as ritual. There's this moment where the ritual allows us then as an audience, I think, to say, "What are we holding onto? What is holding us back? Where are we afraid to build from our own times in our lives where we've been to the proverbial woods, and now leave behind the constraints that we held onto of fairytales and ready to really take something on and take full responsibility for it in our lives?" And every time I see it, it always hits me in a different place, but it's always hitting me in the same... The process is always the same of how it gets me there. And I think that's absolutely remarkable. And of course it's not just Stephen Sondheim. It's James Lapine who together created that ritualized experience to bring an audience to that point.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: And that musical itself, Into the Woods, was an example of what Sondheim called a quest musical, a puzzle hunt. The witch puts a curse on the couple, says, "Unless you, if you wanna ever have a child again, you're gonna have to get for me these four objects: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, a slipper as pure as gold, a hair as yellow as corn." and to do so, they interact with all of these famous characters, mostly Grimm's Fairy Tale characters.

Barry Joseph: And that story arc that you're describing, James Lapine said it was inspired in part because of the kind of puzzle point-and-click games that Sondheim liked to play on his Macintosh in the late '80s. So if you played any games at the time where, you had puzzles you had to solve but that moved the narrative forward, it had that tone to it. Not the kind of adventure games like Zork that were more popular, but the more esoteric games that had some narrative- but it was really about you advanced through solving puzzles, and that informed a lot of how apparently he was thinking about Into the Woods.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, it's so interesting, cause I played a lot of 1980s computer games too, and when you think about Sondheim actually playing those types of games and how that kind of maps onto Into the Woods and then Here we Are and stuff. If you think about like, you know, her getting like the shoe and all of a sudden, you hear a sound of like 30 points or- whatever coming up.

Barry Joseph: And then in the early '90s, Stephen Sondheim spent some time, and we don't know exactly how much time, but he spent some time trying to adapt Into the Woods into an educational CD-ROM game to teach children about music. And he was taking the very quest that Art was just talking about and then building a game structure around it. And when asked if could ever do that around other shows. and I think it was a CompuServe, user forum that we still have the transcript from. He was like, "Yeah, you're not gonna do that around Carousel," but Into the Woods had that structure to it inherently and was easily adaptable. And he actually did record in the studio a number of quite famous singers singing some of the outtakes from the show. It got stopped in part because the original movie production of Into the Woods, not the one that we all saw, but the one that was being developed in part with Jim Henson Production in the '90s, owned the rights to the songs in a way that he couldn't use it in his game. So he says that's what stopped it. And so he worked with the outtakes. The people who were in the studio were told they were recording it for a CD-ROM, and so it was that into the Woods game that was never finalized that he played with for a while. That would've been his only video game he ever designed.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Do you know if any of those lyrics made their way into any of his collections, like Look, I Made a Hat or something?

Barry Joseph: Well, this is the remarkable thing. Sondheim has had a number of albums come out that had, like, extra stuff on them. All of those songs that were recorded, people like John Bowerman sang some of them. Those songs were included, but there was zero context put around them. It was only years after they came out that people started learning that there was this thing, this Into the Woods game, this CD-ROM. And when these people were asked what they were singing, they said, "I don't know. Sondheim just said it was for this game'. And then we put all the pieces together and realized all these songs had been released for decades. We just didn't know it.

Shoshana Greenberg: No, it's so fascinating, like just to think we could have had that game which we all would've loved to play. It's so great because I've been a huge Sondheim fan since I was in my teens in the '90. I mean, Into The Woods was my first favorite show by Sondheim when I was in elementary school in the '90s, so I've been with Sondheim a long time, and I guess I knew he was into games and puzzles, but mostly because I knew of the movie The Last of Sheila, and like, I'm-.

Barry Joseph: How did you come across The Last of Sheila at that age?

Shoshana Greenberg: My parents said, "Oh, , you're into Sondheim" they knew about it and they said, "If you're into Sondheim, you should watch this movie". So they showed it to me, or they gave it to me to watch or whatever. But somehow I knew that he at least had this background, and that the only way you could really get a sense of that background in him is through The Last of Sheila. Like, that was this window into his love of puzzles and games. So I love that your book really brings this aspect of him into the fore. And you really can see him now as like a whole person. I think that's such a gift because so many of things about anybody is you're only seeing like one piece of them until you really look at the whole. So I feel like we're finally, through your book and your work, seeing this whole person, this whole artist. Yeah, like games and puzzles are kind of throughout all his musicals in a way, even though he was also, as you say, trying to separate the two a lot of the time. He was always saying "Oh, games and puzzles are over here," when talking about his musicals and stuff like that. But yeah, I feel like today he wouldn't have, probably wouldn't have to do that as much because nowadays I think not only are puzzles and games so much more a part of our everyday lives, and, I think it's more acceptable to do a lot of different things also.

Barry Joseph: Absolutely. And honestly, if he started today, he might have been focused on puzzles and games, just written musicals on the side. We don't know. During most of his life, except for a few things like crosswords, most of the things in the puzzling and gaming world were looked down upon. Not that musicals were always given the same respect they deserved either. But nonetheless- with his training, kind of being mentored by Oscar Hammerstein, and where he was being rewarded, where he was successful in musical theater versus the puzzles and games he did as a teenager, not getting him very far. He wasn't able to pursue it as a career, but he always maintained his connection with it, whether it was, you know, writing The Last of Sheila based on at least three of his puzzles and games, whether it was making a puzzle for Games Magazine in the 1980s. And most importantly, just making puzzles and games for his friends who he loved. It was a passion he had, an interest he had that he always made sure that he was able to put attention on.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah. And I guess for me personally as someone, I'm not a big puzzler and gamer but I dabble, I do some. And so it's interesting to me, which puzzles and games that Sondheim preferred over others can give us like even more of a window into how he thought about these games and puzzles. And it seems like he won word games obviously, but games that didn't rely on luck as much.

Barry Joseph: I think his designs were often very based on the idea of always being engaged, so you weren't sitting and waiting for someone else to have a turn. Everyone was always involved. And it wasn't about luck or often prior knowledge that would give someone else a leg up, that it was very democratic. Everyone had equal access. It wasn't based on your life experience or how well-read you were.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: I see in the chat, David says, "A lot of Sondheim's puzzles were word and logic focused. In the City Center treasure hunt, there was a math puzzle," and are there other favorite examples of math-based puzzles?

Barry Joseph: That's a great question, and I'm trying to remember where I saw this quote recently. Somebody was asking, Stephen Sondheim about his love for puzzle boxes, which he loved collecting. Puzzle boxes are, they're boxes, and you open them, except there's no obvious way for how to open them. And they're beautifully constructed, both as objects to look at and as to play with, to actually figure out what you do to open them. And he was never good at opening them. He just loved the idea of them. And he was telling that person what he loved to do was not solving physical puzzles, but word puzzles and math puzzles. And if anyone knows that collection that we, that was sold after he passed away at the Doyle Auctions. There were many, many books in his collections that were just simply collections of math puzzles. So he enjoyed them a lot. And yes, he did design them as well. . One of the collections I document in the book to some extent was a treasure hunt that he did in 1995. And all of the answers were numbers. So every single puzzle had some type of mathematical thing that you were doing to come up with those numbers. It wasn't necessarily a math one, but they were always answers in the form of numbers. And I'll tell you one right now. The image was of an old-fashioned telephone, the kind where it might be like "Hi, I'm calling Pennsylvania 6-5000." You'd stick the thing to your ear, and you talk into the object. And it simply said, next to that image, it said, "What is the number when you dial it on the phone?" If you think you have an answer, go ahead and type it into the chat. I'll give you a hint. You guys want a hint? I say in the book that you can find the answer on page 48.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: So you say Pennsylvania 65-

Barry Joseph: Hey, David got it. It's 48. David, you wanna un-mic yourself and explain it?

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yeah, please do.

David: Like, on the phone, the number 4 is I, the number 8 is T. That's right. How you dial it on the phone.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, David. David got it. So he wanted you to use the knowledge you already had coming into the event. No special expertise knowledge was required. It's 1995. Everybody knew the dial pads on the phones. But is that the kind of phone I described that he showed on the sheet? No, he showed a phone that was before a dial pad. His puzzles always had misdirection. Right. But it also had a misdirection so that when you found the answer, you'd say, "Oh, I get it now," and it's something you could have done, as David just did. And so he used the visual and he used the words to misdirect, and that's what I love about his puzzles. Whether I can solve them or not- .. I can always appreciate how he used misdirection. And a lot of his designs have that at its fore. And when people talk about Sondheim musicals being inaccessible somehow, I find that surprising, 'cause I find both in his musical work and with his games and puzzles that while they can be challenging 'cause they expect a lot from you, everyone's welcome to come in and everyone's invited.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah. It reminds me of, 'cause I also to relate this randomly to poetry, but like, when I took poetry classes and, you know, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were contemporaries around the same time, and we would study both poetry together, and it was always like Emily Dickinson poetry... it seemed like it was harder to access, harder to get at than Whitman's, who was, like, for everybody. But part of what we were saying was that with Emily Dickinson's poetry it was like anybody who wants to do the work can come in. You know? And that's kind of how I think about Sondheim. It's okay if you don't wanna come in. It's not for everybody, but it's for anybody.

Barry Joseph: If you're willing to do the work. I like that phrase. You have to contribute to the process. But if you're willing to do that, the rewards are amazing.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: The good news is every puzzle creator wants their puzzle to be solved.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: There's no challenge in creating a puzzle that nobody can solve. That's boring in puzzle communities, right?

Barry Joseph: Can I challenge you and get you there? And I talk in the book about his design values for making puzzles, and one of them is mentorship. He designs in his games multiple entry points, and his job is not to crush you, but to make you feel good about yourself, not to notice how smart he is, and to help you get there. And I call the book Matching Minds with Sondheim 'cause when you're trying to solve a puzzle, you have to say, "What would this person do? I'm trying to figure out what the right answer is here. Where do I go? What might the word be?" And so I'm thinking about, "How does their mind work, and how might they think about me?" And so even though he's no longer with us, yes, we can enjoy connecting with Sondheim through his musical work. But my argument through my book is you can also do that by solving his puzzles. And in fact-

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yeah ...

Barry Joseph: When you're solving one of Sondheim's cryptics, it's just you and him. You're right in his mind. That's right. There's no one else mediating that experience, and so you get this direct connection with him through his puzzles and his games, which is, I think, rather remarkable.

Shoshana Greenberg: I thought it was really interesting in your book how you were talking about how he was really into the aesthetics of games, like what they looked like, and how he would decorate his apartment with them. So that was really interesting to me because it's not just the intellectual with games, it's the emotional. It's like what you feel when you stand in front of a game board, and what it looks like to you, and what that makes you feel in a way. Or else why would you hang it on your wall, you know? And also, there was something you posted on your Instagram that I thought was really fascinating, because I think when I went to your talk, I was wondering this question of which games did he prefer over others, and I've been wondering about cryptograms, because that's a puzzle that has always been like my puzzle, you know? I always would love to solve those, and never met one I couldn't solve kind of thing. And then you posted on your Instagram account a exchange with him and Leonard Bernstein where I think Leonard Bernstein sent him a cryptogram, and Steve Sondheim responded with anagrams that said something about like cryptograms. I forget what it came out to.

Barry Joseph: Yeah, it was a birthday missive from Bernstein to Sondheim. And he wrote in code some of his message, and then Sondheim wrote back in code criticizing him for not doing it as perfectly as he might. But that was part of the nature of their friendship. They really went back and forth with each other.

Shoshana Greenberg: It's fascinating to me, 'cause I looked through and it didn't seem like there were any errors in the cryptogram that Bernstein had sent, so I was like, "Why is Sondheim responding in this way?" And then I was like, "Maybe he just like thinks cryptograms are inferior to anagrams," or I don't know. But anyway, it was so fascinating, and I keep thinking about that exchange.

Barry Joseph: Well, that relationship between the two of them is fascinating, and was often framed through games, through a board game Stephen Sondheim would design for him, or Leonard Bernstein would make a birthday message for Sondheim, it would be an acrostic based on his name. And they were constantly just connecting with each other through their love and interest of puzzles, but also competing with each other through that as well.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, no, it's so fascinating. It was like this whole relationship that was based a lot on games and puzzles. Another level of their lives.

Barry Joseph: And like you said, once you know it's there... you can never not see it. You can't see a Sondheim show without seeing how puzzles and games were both content of the productions and part of how the shows are structured. When you look at his relationships with people like Leonard Bernstein, again, you can't not see how puzzles and games were intimately involved in everything they did with each other.

Shoshana Greenberg: And I also think just when you think about just Sondheim's lyric writing itself, and you kind of put this layer over it of oh , he had that puzzle mind, and he was thinking in that way. When you look at like certain lyrics and you see oh, this is constructed like a game, or this is constructed like a puzzle. But even lyric writing itself is kind of puzzle-like in that you kind of... People do it, you know, I'm sure all different ways, but set up a rhyme scheme, you set up the rules. And then all of a sudden, like from those rules, then you have to repeat that throughout the different sections that are similar. So it is kind of like a puzzle and a game.

Barry Joseph: Yeah. Lyric writing is creating a puzzle that you have to solve yourself.

Shoshana Greenberg: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: And so you can see time and again when Sondheim could have chosen a simpler approach, but he made a much more challenging one for himself, 'cause he wanted to challenge himself and give him something that was really gonna work that muscle. There's a song he wrote for a 1950s kind of decade in review that was on TV in the 1960s. And it could've just been a list song that listed a whole bunch of things from the 1950s, and there is some list elements to it, but he also decided that it was gonna be children in a playground, and so it was gonna be parodies of children's songs. So now he has to do parodies of children's songs and list everything from the '50s and, you know, on and on and on. And that's part of the fun of Sondheim, just seeing that no one asked him to do these things. He was doing them himself. That's what he wanted to do, and that was where he excelled.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, and as like a lyricist myself, I'm sometimes I'm writing something and I'm like, "Ugh, why did I pick this rhyme scheme? This is horrible." But he was also the composer of almost all of his songs, after, West Side Story and Gypsy. So he was also in total control of both things, but he also didn't have anyone to get him out of whatever puzzle he had set up for himself because sometimes I'll write a lyric and then it'll have a rhyme scheme and scansion and all that, and I'm trying to fit everything into, and then my composer will just be like, "Actually, I have this melody for it," and then that's that. So I feel like as both lyricist and composer, he could write himself into a puzzle. Whatever puzzle he wanted to write himself into. Another thing about lyrics that kind of something relates to games and puzzles too in a way is that, I think he said this, the rhymes should be both surprising and feel inevitable, which I feel like is something that a game solution or a puzzle solution should also feel like. And you can imagine him like thinking of rhymes in the same way he would think of puzzle solutions.

Barry Joseph: That's part of the beauty of the aha moment. When you go, "Aha," you're not only getting the answer to something, it's the one where you say, "Oh yeah, that's fair. I didn't get it, but I could have gotten it."

Shoshana Greenberg: you don't want it to be something that someone could guess like halfway through the line. ? That's why you never use June Moon, right? Do you ever, did you ever see the June Moon video? Oh my gosh. This is his like foray into acting. He's in a filmed production of a play, June Moon. And you can watch it. I forget where it is, but I think I have the DVD somewhere. But anyway, I think it was just like a funny thing that he was in this 'cause it was about songwriting. But anyway, point is that, you don't want something like June Moon because someone's gonna guess the rhyme before it happens.

Barry Joseph: And the guessing of the rhyme and sending people to a different place than is expected, that's a kind of a game. And that's a game a lyricist can play with his audience, and Sondheim knew how to play that game, and it was so much fun to play it with him. And the first time you're hearing it you have that experience, but on all repeat listenings you can be like, "Oh, okay. I think I know what's gonna happen," and you get to watch how he did it and watch how you react to it and watch how other people react to it, that laughter, that unexpected shock sometimes. And that's such a beautiful thing, and that's, again, another way to understand that it's not just beautiful, remarkable, challenging, interesting songs that he's writing, but that he's building a relationship with us. And that way of playing with rhymes the way you're talking about is a type of game, but a game that's designed to build a connection between him and us as the audience. And that's one of the things I talk about in the book- Is the role that games played in his life. It's about building connections. And so when he's playing a game with us from the stage, he's building a connection with us. And so many people who love Sondheim they'll say, " he hears me. He understands me. His work makes me feel seen." And it's those kind of games that I think help the audience to connect with him, not just the work itself, and trust him, and then trust whatever he's gonna give us next is something that's a journey we feel safe traveling on.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: When I start, when I started college, my freshman year, I was at Carnegie Mellon University, and I saw in the bookstore, and it's back in my office in California so I didn't bring it with me, but a spirally bound book that was called Stephen Sondheim's Crossword Puzzles, and it was cryptic crossword puzzles, so these are just ordinary puzzles. These are your uber nerdy cryptic puzzles where every clue is given twice, once in a normal form and once using some kind of wordplay. And these weren't just normal cryptic puzzles. These were created, these were masterpieces. I mean, these could be folded into dodecahedrons or some of the clues were written in code and you had to solve the puzzle to figure out the code, to figure out more of the clues. ,

Barry Joseph: If you don't know how cryptics work, each of the clues rather than being straightforward is a string of words that are designed to misdirect and confuse, and within it is the answer, maybe, you know, eight letters across or seven letters down. But it actually is split into two, and one of them is a straightforward definition, and one is a more cryptical one, like an anagram let's say or a word inside something. But the fact that it's split into two and both sides have to come up with the same word that means that you get that inevitability where it could only be that. You didn't just hope it was correct like in a typical American style crossword. You see that it absolutely could only be that because it's those two. . And that kind of. assurance, that kind of order I think is part of what attracted him a lot.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yeah. And thinking again mathematically,, I remember one of the first puzzles in Stephen Sondheim's Crossword Puzzle Collection, which I regret having done about a third of them in ink on this. It would've been much more valuable if I had kept it pristine, but I wanted to solve these, and I was an ink solver. One of them was flat out on the page, but letters would match if they were adjacent when those things were folded into a dodecahedron. . Each clue in itself is very satisfying. You know? They're not like your traditional crossword clues. They have anagrams. They have puns in them. They have rebuses in them.

Barry Joseph: Is this the one you're talking about?

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yes. . Look at that. Madden with wild anger to a point. The cryptic solver in me says when I see w- I think the definition is madden, and if I take anger and make it wild, if I anagram anger followed by one of the compass points, N, E, S, and W, then I think we're gonna get something that means madden. Enrage. So if you anagram anger, E-N R-A-G, followed by the compass point E, you get enrage.

Barry Joseph: And it feels so good.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: I know. And once you have it, it's like, "Great".

Barry Joseph: And in fact-

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yeah ...

Barry Joseph: When you see what Art just showed, you're hearing a director directing musicians. You're hearing the interpretation of the actors, the person doing the lighting and the costume. It's at a giant collaboration all creating one thing.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, just, uh, how, how anyone could even possibly create these constructions themselves, like, that came out of these puzzles.

Barry Joseph: Once a week.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: What?

Barry Joseph: He was designing them for New York Magazine once a week.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Every single week for a year. This was a genius of the highest order of magnitude.

Shoshana Greenberg: You have such a great delineation in your book. Clarity versus connection with puzzles and games. It's like what we've been talking about with just making something intellectual also emotional, and I feel like he was so good at that. He somehow figures out a way to connect you to it in a way that you're like, "Oh, my gosh," like "how am I so emotionally involved in a treaty being signed in Pacific Overtures or, you know? My favorite example that you talk about is, of course, the competition songs, like A Little Priest and Poems, and 'cause I just love that. I think most people do love that about A Little Priest, and how they're going back and forth with the trying to one-up each other, in the lyrics.

Barry Joseph: That to me is so amazing because it's so obvious that even though we're watching two characters competing in this witty rhyming game, who's gonna win, can they fool the other? It's obviously one person writing them all, Stephen Sondheim. And yet, we're just experiencing it in the moment as an audience, and it gets to a certain point where, you know, like, you're clapping when they achieve it that you realize, oh, actually it is not two characters on the stage with each other. It's Stephen Sondheim with us. Can you guess where the rhyme's gonna go? Can you guess what the rhyme with this role or with that role, and how funny it is where it lands. And then we're just engaged in it, and then we clap at the end of the song because we've had this experience with Stephen Sondheim that was, brought to reality through the two performers. But at the end, it was them just being a conduit for Stephen Sondheim to play a game with us.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah. No, it's so true. But also because I feel like Sondheim would always say he's writing character, he's writing character. He always finds a way for him to show off or play with words but make it always through character. She wants him to notice her. She wants to be on his level. She's trying to get, him to be impressed by her. You know? And so it works on this character level, too, which I think is so great.

Barry Joseph: Absolutely. And that's what I talk about, is what Stephen Sondheim was often doing with the puzzles and games in his life. He was challenging people who were willing to take that challenge, and what they were being rewarded with was an enter into his heart and his mind. So David's asking, And this might be a good place to kind of start ending our time together, is are there other puzzles or games in Sondheim's music? And I would say There isn't a Sondheim show that doesn't have puzzles and games in it. And what I'm referring to is a number of things. First, you should watch for actual literal puzzles and games, characters playing bridge, playing parlor games, playing charades. They constantly appear in his shows. So that's the obvious one, games and puzzles as subject matter. But more interesting, I think, is thinking about them in the structure, and that's part of what Art was referring to when we started wanting to look at Now, Soon, Later. Like, how are they in the format of it? Or like Someone in a Tree from Pacific Overtures, a song built around partial perspectives, or in the same show, A Bowler Hat, which is about a Japanese character's Westernization reflected through a sequence of accumulating substitutions, kind of a gradual transformation machine around his clothing, his posture, his values, his identity. You have songs with numbers, like Another Hundred People in Company, and it goes on and on. Yeah. And so I just say look for any of his shows and just have fun looking at it from the lens of someone who was so passionate about games, so passionate about puzzles, and see how that passion was communicated through how the characters are interacting with each other, playing games with each other, sometimes word games, like again in Pacific Overtures or in Sweeney Todd, or the actual substances of the shows themselves and the way that they were combined.

Shoshana Greenberg: And I love, something you say in the book all of his shows or almost all of his shows have parties in them.

Barry Joseph: And sometimes the whole, the entire show is at a party.

Shoshana Greenberg: Right.

Barry Joseph: Sometimes the party, like in Into the Woods isn't on stage. That's Cinderella's Ball, for example. But they're always there. And they're not always about sitting around playing games, as happens in Merrily We Roll Along. Sometimes it's the dance scene, you know, in West Side Story, where our, our two romantic leads meet. But parties are so central to him in his life for where he entertained people. It's where he got to feel safe. ... I'm not talking about a party that someone invited him to. I mean the ones where he was the host, and he chose who was there, and he planned the activities, and he can relax and be himself and impress his friends and elevate his friends through the challenges he would throw them. And this concept of a party being central to your social life and how you connect with people and manage those relationships, you see those parties appearing time and again throughout his shows.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, definitely. I think you talk about in your book too, just, like, how the influence of, Sondheim's puzzles and games has trickled down to today. My favorite example is the Knives Out movies, which are just like a love letter to Sondheim as a puzzler and gamer, and he even appears in Glass Onion. I heard on a podcast with Rian Johnson that Glass Onion was inspired by Merrily We Roll Along, the plot of it, which I find really fascinating. Someone will have to write .. an essay on that or something. But yeah-

Barry Joseph: I'm still seeing The Last of Sheila. It's almost as if they operated in the same universe, and this is the sequel to The Last of Sheila. They reference that this wasn't the first trip they went on in the second , Knives Out movie, and that the previous one was a boat on an island, which is what they do in The Last of Sheila. And of course, it's structured just like The Last of Sheila. There's some shots that are the same. The photograph of them standing in front of Sheila is set up exactly the same way as the same group of friends standing in front of a bar in which the photo plays a key role in the movie. There's so many connections between the two that weren't accidental. It's not a coincidence that movie opens up with a giant puzzle box that everyone has to open to get their invitation. It's a wonderful film on its own, and it's a wonderful homage to Sondheim, not just the musical composer and lyricist, but also the puzzle constructor.

Shoshana Greenberg: I'm curious now to pull more of the threads of how it's more like Merrily. Maybe it was something with friends fighting or something. I don't know, but...

Barry Joseph: Yeah, people who were close falling apart.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, yeah.

Barry Joseph: 'Cause I think in the movie they were close once, and then as they became famous they fell apart.

Shoshana Greenberg: But yeah, so it's all those movies, and even the most recent one. I love also how he switched to Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it was like, "What does that mean? What, what does that mean?" It was like a Clue. And But yeah, let's move on to our next section, which is the why is this so good? And we're gonna talk about, Good Enough to Eat from Schmigadoon! And why did you pick-

Barry Joseph: Season two.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yes. Why did you pick this song for why is this so good?

Barry Joseph: So you asked me to come up with something connected to musical theater that would be fun to talk about, and I had so much fun thinking about my favorite songs from musicals written for television. I looked at Schmigadoon!. But I also looked at Central Park, the animated series. Schmigadoon!, the second season, I just adored, in part because, yes, there was more Stephen Sondheim, but also 'cause almost everything was a mashup. The first season were kinda straight-up homages, even if they're homages to a number of different things at once. The second season was like playing a game with us. What are the two shows or even specifically The two songs that are combining into one? And so there's a lot of Sweeney Todd in this, second season of Schmigadoon!, and Kristen Chenoweth introduces the Worst Brats in Town which is her combination of her role being Ms. Hannigan from Annie. She's got all these orphans, and at the same time, someone who maybe is gonna make some money out of them. So of course we have in Sweeney Todd the Worse Pies in London, and she's singing the Worst Brats in Town which tells us what's gonna happen to these kids. . And then that's followed up with her and Alan Cumming singing Good Enough to Eat. Which tells us what's gonna happen to those kids. And is obviously a straight up, during the first half of the song, homage to A Little Priest. But instead of saying the names of the food with the names of the jobs they had, like you know, vicar. Instead it's the names of the kids. And so it's just so funny. You know, "Have you any mutton?" "Oh, that would be Sutton." "Perhaps some foie gras?" "Voila, c'est Francois." It's absolutely hilarious. And then when you get to the end, it's, "But you have mincemeat?" "Since meat is sparse, we've got Vince Meat instead, sliced right off his..." "Ah!" And then interrupting, "Miss Codwell, please, there are children present," they sing. "Not for long." Now they're gonna tell us right out. "No, because we're gonna kill him and sell him as meat," is sung. Just putting it right out there.

Performer: Mr. Blythe, Mr. Blythe. You are in for such a treat. I have got some little doves, darling sprouts, hereabouts, that I'd love for you to meet. Step right up, sir. Welcome to Blythe's Butcher Shop. What can we get for you today? Have you any ham? Oh! C- as you Sam. How about veal? Yes, thanks to Camille. Kidney? Sydney. Belly? Kelly. Lamb? That's Pam with some jam on her jelly. I'd love some ground beef. Why then sir, you're in luck. Which do you prefer? We've got Patty or Chuck. Have you any mutton? That would be Sutton. Perhaps some foie gras. Voila, c'est Francois. Bologna. Tony. Salami. Tommy. And we've also got Reuben if you like pastrami. But do you have mincemeat? Well, since meat is sparse, we've got Vince Meat instead, sliced right off of his... Ah. Miss Codwell, please, there are children present. Not for long. No, because we're gonna kill them and sell them as meat.

Barry Joseph: So funny. And so I loved all the mashing up. I love the, like, can we play that game also? And they do it so well. both the characters and of course, the creators of the show. And that, being willing to go back into those constraints that are unique to that song, A Little Priest- And then saying, you know, "We're not trying to top him. We just wanna reference it and see if we could have fun playing in that space too, with ourselves, with the audience". And I feel like they did that to quite success. And of course, when you do a mashup, if you do it well, you not only have something that's as awesome as each of the two things separate, you've a whole new thing when they're combined together, like combining the Annie with the Sweeney Todd in one package.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, yeah. It was so funny. What I love about it too is if you were watching it instead of just listening to it, you can see the kids, instead of being scared, they're just smiling and like- Like, they're they don't even care that they might be eaten. They're just happy to be there.

Barry Joseph: It's a hard-knock life.

Shoshana Greenberg: Exactly. There's like this layer of artifice to it in that way, which makes it even funnier.

Barry Joseph: It's kind of like the irony Sondheim's work often works at, where the words are saying one thing but the scene is the opposite. You have that there as well. It's this paying attention to the fact that often people shouldn't be smiling during their songs, and then having with that, because the situation that the children enter is absolutely horrific before even Kristin Chenoweth's character comes in. And now with Alan Cumming they can take it to a new level. But you can't get these kids down. They're still smiling and dancing.

Shoshana Greenberg: Right. Yeah. I, my only wish is that they had also done, like in A Little Priest, some moment where they said a name, and it was like, how are we gonna rhyme this? Yeah. I don't know. Which is what I love in A Little Priest. With the locksmith.

Barry Joseph: And I'm glad they didn't, 'cause that was Sondheim's end. They had to find their own way. Which of course they didn't end it.

Shoshana Greenberg: That's true.

Barry Joseph: The second half just moves into a different song, and they leave the Sondheim aside for a bit.

Shoshana Greenberg: That's true.

Barry Joseph: But speaking of Sondheim and Schmigadoon, what I'm looking forward to next in the musical theater scene, now that Schmigadoon is not just on TV, but it's also on Broadway, Season One. If it does well, does that mean we'll get to see Season Two, Schmicago? And if Schmicago does well, does that mean we'll get to see Into the Schmuds, the completely written but never produced Season Three?

Shoshana Greenberg: Oh my gosh.

Barry Joseph: That's what I wanna see.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yes. Well, yes. I have heard really good things about, Schmigadoon on Broadway.

Barry Joseph: Super fun.

Shoshana Greenberg: So hopefully that will lead to it doing well, as you said.

Barry Joseph: Into The Schmuds. Into the Schmuds. Into the Schmuds

Shoshana Greenberg: Exactly. Yeah, so I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing that. This has been so great. Thank you so much, Barry, for coming on.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin: Thank you, Barry, for being such a fun guest. What a fun topic. Today. .

Barry Joseph: Real pleasure. So nice to be with you today. Thank you so much for having me on. So I encourage your listeners to go to matchingmindswithsondheim.com to see about upcoming events and learn more about the book. You can also see the online version of the pop-up exhibit there, which it featured many of the gaming and puzzle archives that were sent my way, in the production of the book. And you can also go to the same thing on Instagram, Matching Minds With Sondheim, to see... The research never ends. People send me stuff all the time, and you can go there and see the latest stuff that, that I'm finding at this point a year and a half after I finished working on the book.

Shoshana Greenberg: Yeah, it's so great, and I love you're still putting out podcast episodes that I can listen to, and I love your Instagram.

Barry Joseph: It's a pleasure and a blessing for me to be part of this incredible world of Sondheim and bring something into it.