Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast, the London edition., I took my book tour to London, sort of a dream come true that truly I manifested into reality. I arrived on a red-eye from JFK to Heathrow on a Thursday morning. With only one hour sleep, I rushed to NYU London to lead a Sondheim games workshop for students. After checking in at my hotel and finally catching a shower, I returned to NYU for an evening event, which was packed, presenting to NYU alums, but also the general public.

On Friday, I went to the National Theatre Bookshop, where I signed copies of my book, then took in the production of Into the Woods that only a few days earlier had won an Olivier. On Saturday, I met with members of a weekly puzzle-solving group at a pub that had been gathering for almost two decades, who simply enjoy the pleasure of social solving.

On Sunday, I went to Upstairs at the Gatehouse, a performance space where the Stephen Sondheim Society produced an evening with not just me, but performers who integrated Sondheim songs into my presentation. Throughout the week, I tried to bring something different to every audience and meet with as many different fans of my book as I could.

It was a true whirlwind, but I couldn't have asked for anything more. London was generous and welcoming, the food was great, the subways a delight, and I can't wait to return to the city in the future. So this episode will share excerpts from my two main presentations. They are significantly edited to remove redundancies, eliminate visual components, and to keep the murder game spoiler-free.

I want to thank the IT and AV folks, especially Ian Bowkett for the audio, Dennis Caouki for not only being willing to take on so brilliantly the editing challenges of this episode, but also coming to all of my talks and arranging a lovely lunch during my visit,

the performers who joined me, composer, lyricist, and musical director Colm Molloy, whom listeners to this podcast will know as the talent behind our theme song, and performers Oliver Sidney and Rhys Lambert. And finally, event coordinators Shoba Nahappan and Tina Foote lastly, I want to thank everyone who showed up for my talks and for me. It meant the world to me, truly. Okay, so let's get started. First, with my time at NYU London, and then with the

Stephen

Sondheim Society. And you know what?

Let's skip the regular theme song because, well, in a few minutes, you're going to hear it sung live for the first time. Enjoy.

Shoba Gayathri Nahappan: Good evening, everyone, and welcome. My name is Shoba Nahappan. I am a NYU alumni and member of the Steinhardt Dean's Alumni Advisory Board under Dean Jack Knott. It is a pleasure to welcome you all here tonight at our NYU London Academic Center for Barry Joseph's: The Puzzling Mind of Sondheim. Events like this highlight the strength of NYU's global community and illustrates our shared commitment to education. Barry Joseph is NYU's Steinhardt faculty and alumni with over twenty-five years of expertise in digital engagement and learning. He is also a New York-based author, his most recent book being Matching Minds with Sondheim. His book takes us on an immersive archival and deeply original exploration of how Stephen Sondheim used games, puzzles, and rule-based systems, not just as hobbies, but as a philosophy. A way of creating connection, of finding order in complexity. Of inviting us as audiences and as people into something that asks something of us. I first met Barry in New York last October at an NYU event where he brought his book tour. That evening stayed with me, and so here we are six months later with Barry in London for The Puzzling Mind of Stephen Sondheim. I'm genuinely thrilled that we made this happen, Barry. And to all of you for being here tonight, please join me in welcoming Barry Joseph.

Barry Joseph: Good evening, everyone. As you heard, I am Barry Joseph, and welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim. I have a question for you all. Is anybody else here feeling appropriately obsessive? All right, this jacket did its role in. I can take it off. That's a quote from The New Yorker review from last December.

And to answer a question some of you might have had coming in, yes, that Stephen Sondheim. Composer, lyricist, to some, one of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century. To others, just God. And game designer and puzzle constructor and jigsaw gifter and escape room enthusiast and so, so much more. The Sondheim most of us know and revere from his work in musical theater produced work I argue as equally compelling and beguiling in the space of puzzles and games over his entire life. But first, I have some thanks as well. I wanna thank Shoba for making this event happen. Please thank Shoba again with me again. Thank you. And so many people on the team, Joanna, Cillian, Maria, the tech crew, Jamil, who's in the back, thank you. All the folks out front with the food and the drinks and everyone here at NYU London. And as was mentioned, it is really special for me to do this presentation with all of you, in part because it's so exciting to be here in London for me. My first time leaving the US to take this book tour on the road and at the same time because of my deep roots with NYU. I teach at NYU, as she mentioned, and I graduated from NYU in the early nineties. And my dad graduated from NYU in the early fifties. And my grandfather graduated from NYU in the early twenties. So really special to be here. And yes, this is my sixth presentation at NYU in six months. And each one has been for a very different specific audience within NYU and a different presentation. So this afternoon I was meeting with NYU students, some who are doing degrees in musical business, others in electrical engineering. People are coming together from all corners to learn about Stephen Sondheim and his puzzles and games. I'm so touched that it's meant so much to so many different people. And last but not least, I'm so appreciative for all of you for taking your time to come be with us tonight, to be with me and be with each other.

Now we can get properly started. I wanna learn a bit about all of you. So put up your hands if one of the reasons why you're here tonight is because you're interested in puzzles. Hands up. So in other words, if you're sitting in the back, you're interested in puzzles. Oh, some in the front, too. Good, good. Hands down. Hands up if you're here in part because you're interested in games. Right, about half that number. And finally, hands up if you're interested in Stephen Sondheim. Almost everybody. All right. Very good.

All right, I think we're ready to jump in. And we're gonna start with board games. This game was called The Game of Stardom or Camp. It had two titles, and he created it in 1953, soon after he arrived in Los Angeles to write for the TV show Topper. The idea came about when Sondheim traveled to Los Angeles and stayed at his friend's house, the Hollerhans in Michigan. And so when he arrived in LA to thank them, he grabbed one of these types of maps, the kind that were the maps to the stars' homes. And in fact, this is that map. This is it. This was discovered after Stephen Sondheim passed away. Seventy years later.

His friend in nineteen fifty-three must have saved it, and it's now in the Library of Congress. And he not only sent him the map, he annotated it, and we're gonna zoom in on a few of the parts of it. So number one, he has an arrow going to Samuel Goldwyn, the studios, and it says, "Where we shoot our marvelous scripts and where I'd like to shoot Ann and Bob," who starred in the show Topper. He's playing with shoot there, right? Number two, "Darlings, when you come out, we'll start at one end of the red line and drive gawkingly for three days, not stopping until we reach the other end." And then in quotes it says, "To the end of the line," and there's a musical notation. Does anybody recognize what that, "to the end of the line" comes from?

It's from The Trolley Song. Yeah. From Meet Me in St. Louis. To the end of the line, right? ... He's talking about going down, right? And then we have number seven in the upper right. It says, "Famous nightclubs and cafes." He has selected all of them and wrote, "My homes away from home." and then the lower right-hand corner, nine is his home. He wrote a little star and it says, "Me." And up top he wrote, "Little, little old me." And this is the original board for Stardom, a near perfect match information-wise to the real map designed by none other than Foxy Sondheim, his mother.

Barry Joseph: So what was the object of the game? Well, as you can see here in the rules, as in the game of Life, to become a great star. "Thus, the game of Stardom is an imitation of life. A star is born, not made. But stardom can be accomplished by a little luck, a little talent, determination, and most importantly of all, the ability to camp. Time has showed us that the greatest stars are the greatest camps. Therefore, this game teaches us a moral at the same time it entertains us." It teaches us a moral? I think this must be kind of a tongue in cheek joke. The instructions say that the object of the game is, quote, "As in real life, to become a great star by getting the highest salary, the most contracts, the most divorces- and sleeping with the most stars." The game ends when the first player succeeds in sleeping with the fictional Norma Desmond. Well, this was only the first of Sondheim's fully developed board games. He would go on to design a game about producing Broadway shows for Hal Prince, and a trilogy of games called The Great Conductor Hunt for Leonard Bernstein. And both of these were birthday presents to be played with his dear friends. Moments of connection. Let's now move on to parlor games.

Tonight, we're gonna play something you can play again and again, and it's called Bartlett's. Is everyone here familiar with Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations? No. All right. If not, it is quotes, you know, like these. It's people you've heard about, like Shakespeare, and people you may have never heard about. Maybe they have one quote, maybe they have five, but they're all something interesting that someone said once. And you just flip through the book and you can see them all. All right? To learn more about Bartlett's, I need three volunteers. One, first, from the back. Who's in the last two rows who'd like to come up? I see your hand, come on down. Whoo. Someone in the middle. Yep, round of applause. In the middle, I see a hand. Great. And someone towards the front. Anyone? Have a seat. All right. Give him a round of applause.

So here's how this game works. Can you guys take a half sheet of paper on the table in front of you and grab a pen? If you need a table to write, you can. All right? Sondheim and his friend, Mary Ann Madden, were familiar with a game you might know called Dictionary. Has anyone here played Dictionary before? Yes. Right. In that game, players write fake definitions of a real word. Once mixed together, the fake definitions compete to be incorrectly selected as the true original. One day Mary Ann said to Stephen, "Why use a dictionary? Why don't we do it out of Bartlett's quotations?" So in their new game, someone picks an author from Bartlett's and then writes down a quote from that author. And tonight I'll be the one to do that. The other players, hearing only the name of the author, manufacture their own quotes trying to get everyone to guess that one. They'll be playing the game, but you'll get to play as well 'cause you'll get to guess which one you think is the real one. And so they're gonna try and fool you, not just each other. Okay? After they write down their quotes, and I'll give you specific details, I'm gonna read them all out loud, including the real one, all mixed together. When the true quote is revealed and all learn if it's guessed right or wrong, the player who managed to outwit their friends then does the next round.

So you have a pen. Mm-hmm. You've got paper. I need a piece. Can you pass me one, Brian? Please, there, there should be one extra piece there. Thank you. Okay. So I'm gonna share the name of the person who's in Bartlett's and the year they were born and died, and that's all the information we have to work with. Okay? You make up a quote that you think everyone can guess would be the real one. Each of you independently are doing it, yes. So you're competing with each other. Oh, yeah. And when you vote, and you get to vote, if you vote the real one, you get a point. And if anybody votes for yours, you get a point.

Barry Joseph: All right, so the person's name is John Bright. B-R-I G-H-T. He was born in 1811 and died in 1899. John Bright, 1811, 1889. What did John say that was so witty and so impactful that that one sentence got him into Bartlett's? You guys have about a minute. Now, I'm gonna write down the real one. And I'm gonna then fold it in half. And when you guys are done, you are also gonna fold yours in half, and then I'll randomly put numbers on the back. Sondheim loved to play and sometimes even design parlor games. He would hold game nights for friends and colleagues in his apartment in Manhattan and then when he had a place in Connecticut as well. Some people were dying to be invited, others were begging to escape.

If you're ready, fold it and pass me the folded over one. All right. One of the things he loved about this game is that, again, it's democratic. It's not based on your book knowledge. He would say he didn't have a lot of book knowledge. That's why he liked this game. It's based on reading the room. Being able to figure out what someone might write and kind of peg them, right? Or what might fool them. So now I'm mixing these up. I'm now writing a number on each one. One, two, three, four. And then quickly look at them, so if I have a problem, you don't know it's not mine. Okay. And what you're gonna do is notice the number. So if you think, oh, then that's the number you wanna vote for, then you're gonna think about that one and hold that one in your mind. And you guys get to pick one as well, okay? All right, so number one. Again, this is John Bright, born 1811, died 1899. "It is with great delight I write with charcoal of the night so long as you don't take flight." I'll repeat it. "It is with great delight I write with charcoal of the night so long as you don't take flight." number two, " Force is not remedy. Number three, " Never, never leave a fire unattended." "Never, never leave a fire unattended." Number three. And last but not least, number four, "To be what one wants, one must act the part. To be a chef, you must cook, dot, dot, dot." "To be what one wants, one must act the part. To be a chef, you must cook, dot, dot, dot." Now what you're each gonna do is either put up one, two, three, or four fingers guessing the one you think is correct, and you guys will be invited to do the same. All right? You guys ready? You have your numbers? Yeah. All right, on the count of three, put up your hands. One, two, three. Guessed one, guessed three, guessed three. I'm looking out at the room. I see three. I see twos, fives. Does anyone here see your number out there? If you do, you got a whole bunch of points. Thank you. You can put your hands down. And the real one was number two, "Force is not remedy." Oh. Did any of you pick two?

No. All right. And you both picked three? Three was, "Never, never leave a fire unattended," right? So you get two points. And, you picked number one. Is that right? Which was, "It is a great delight. I write with charcoal." You did that? Mm-hmm. Then you get a point. But you all got lots of points for everyone here too as well, right? All right, so with that, let's thank our volunteers. Thank you, guys.

Anybody with a passing familiarity with the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim knows he had a remarkable ability with words. But word puzzles showed a different side of Sondheim.

Stephen Sondheim: You just don't see words as collections of letters. I passed under this... When Cinerama first was invented, I passed under the sign that was being erected on Broadway. It said Cinerama, and I immediately thought America. Didn't have to think about it.

Interviewer: Wait a minute. Cinerama. And America..

Stephen Sondheim: Are anagrams of each other .

Barry Joseph: Ah. When I see a word, I see meaning. When Sondheim saw a word, he saw possibilities. By the time Sondheim became the founding puzzle editor of New York Magazine in nineteen sixty-eight, he had spent decades playing competitive and complex word games, such as cutthroat anagrams and the New York Times puns and anagrams.

So perhaps it's no surprise that his first role at the magazine was to popularize the, to many, impenetrable weekly cryptic crosswords that at the time could usually only be found in British papers. So we're gonna talk now about cryptic crosswords. So let me get a sense of the room. Who, before I said it, has even heard of cryptic crosswords? Almost everyone. Good. I was expecting that being in London. Who does cryptic crosswords? much less. Much less. About four or five. All right, so let's break down then, what is a cryptic? I'm gonna use some examples from Stephen Sondheim. In his first, puzzle in the first New York Magazine, he didn't just publish the puzzle. He published a multi-page essay explaining it, and that more than anything is what helped transfer cryptics from England to a version that could work in America. So I'll share some of that here. So this is what a typical cryptic clue would look like. It's again, it's a crossword. There's gonna be in this case, seven letters that'll go somewhere in the puzzle, maybe across, maybe down, maybe something more complex. But you start by recognizing the answer is seven letters. Okay. And what is our clue? It's not a typical, at the time American straightforward one, like the name of a nut from a certain country. Instead, there's something mysterious about it. It says, "Wed a silly admirer." Wed a silly admirer? What could that mean? Well, with a cryptic, the first thing you have to do, and those who know cryptics better than me, please correct me if I get something wrong, you have to put a line between two of the words. You now have two parts. One side is like the typical American side. It's a straightforward definition. The other side is more cryptic. It could be an anagram. It could be one of many other things. So in this case, wed a silly admirer, you put a line over here. And part of what Sondheim liked about these is that the answer on both sides are exactly the same. You get that absolute confirmation. You know you're right. If you come up with something on one side, and it's not the other side, you didn't get the answer yet. So okay, something that is wed... is also a silly admirer. You have to decide now which one is the straightforward definition and which one is the more puzzling one. Now, the word admirer I put italicized, 'cause if you did cryptics, you would know the word silly is a clue. It is telling you it's an anagram. It's telling you that the anagram of admirer is the same thing as someone that, who's wed, and the answer is then married. And as he wrote, when he used this as an example, simple, yes. Tricky, yes. Fair, yes, right? You guys went, "Aha." But was it different than the other aha? It was kinda like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, aha." all right. So let's take a look at the next one, I'm gonna ask you to see if we can solve it. American confused by widescreen movie. Eight letters. The first thing to do is decide where does the line go. Just shout out if you think you have a sense of where that line goes. American. American's a word, so between American and confused should be a line.

Anagram. He's guessing it's an anagram. It's actually "American confused by" line, and then "widescreen movie." So which side is, if it's an anagram, which side's the anagram? Cinerama, right. 'Cause I gave you a clue already, right? There it is. So Cinerama is also a widescreen movie. All right?

You're getting it. Okay. This one is the most famous of them all, and my absolute favorite. I love this one. And for the first time ever, I actually went to the original so you can see it. So I have it on the screen, but you can see it in the original number twenty-six, or the one called Choplogic. Broken harmonicas found floating in Manhattan. Ten letters. Broken harmonicas found floating in Manhattan. Where do we break it up? Anyone wanna guess? It's between harmonicas and found. So now you have to ask yourself, right, which one is the straightforward definition and which one is an anagram or something else? So what are you noticing about harmonicas? We know it's ten letters. Harmonica's ten letters. We're guessing it's an anagram. Broken is a clue to tell us the next word Is an anagram. So something that is an anagram of harmonicas is also something found floating in Manhattan. What is that? What is found floating in Manhattan? Who said that? A drink. Who said the drink? Who said cherry? What kind of cherry does one find in a drink that is called a Manhattan? Maraschino. Cherry. There you go. Ah. That's a nicer aha, right? So when you heard the phrase, found floating in Manhattan, what did you picture in your mind?

Audience: The city.

Barry Joseph: Right. So especially when I do this in New York, people picture the Hudson River, right? Found floating in Manhattan, they picture the river. But it doesn't say, found floating around Manhattan. It's in Manhattan. That's the misdirection. Broken harmonicas found floating, not around Manhattan, in Manhattan. It kind of makes sense, we kind of ignore the anomaly, but that anomaly is exactly the point, right? That is the point. And then you have to think laterally, right? You have to think outside the box and say, "Oh, not the obvious Manhattan," not the one that he got us to picture in our mind. He's intentionally misdirecting us." And people who often create cryptics are doing that, creating intentional misdirection in how to pronounce a word and what you're picturing in your mind when you have to step back and say, "Well, what, what is it really?" To be able to solve it like this one. Meg Wolitzer, who many of you might know, the novelist, she actually created a book of cryptic crosswords in the 1990s. And she said, " This one particular, it's witty, it's funny, it's beautiful. I think the thing that is in keeping with Sondheim as an artist is that it's elegant." Right? Sondheim created in total forty-two cryptic crossword puzzles for New York Magazine in less than a year and a half. When Sondheim stepped away from his post at New York Magazine to create a little show you might have heard of called Company. The impact of his work ever since has echoed over the decades, showering us with moments of clarity.

So we've just briefly explored Sondheim's relationship with parlor games, board games, treasure hunts, and word puzzles. Last but not least, let's take a short look at mechanical puzzles, of which there are three types I describe in the book. Tonight we're gonna look at puzzle boxes. Has anyone seen the movie on HBO, Six by Sondheim? Yes. This is a screenshot from it, and there is Sondheim at his piano, and what's on that box? What's on the piano? All of these puzzle boxes. A year before Sondheim passed away, he discussed his collection of boxes with Games Magazine with my now friend, Andrew Parr. Would you like to hear a minute from that? Mm-hmm. Andrew was generous enough to share the audio of that interview, so I can share it with you tonight.

Andrew Parr: Can we talk about your karakuri puzzle collection?

Stephen Sondheim: Well, yeah, sure. There's nothing to talk about. I sure envy your collection. None of mine are as elegantly fancy as yours.

Andrew Parr: Well, I disagree.

Stephen Sondheim: I'm happy enough with my collection. I'm no good at them, really. I've no three-dimensional imagination at all.

Andrew Parr: Have you solved any of them?

Stephen Sondheim: The puzzles that I'm good at are numbers and words. But no, I just love the object. And I love still fiddling with them. I almost never can open them without looking at the solution sheet, but I don't really care. I just love the way it looks, you know. The fun of it is the look of it and how it's gonna work. And there's no point in my even trying it because I'm just no good. The karakuri boxes I rarely can open by myself.

Andrew Parr: But that's the nice thing about those boxes is they do combine form and function. They look fantastic.

Stephen Sondheim: Yeah, they look great, and they're satisfying even if I have to be told how to do them.

Andrew Parr: I don't think there's anything wrong with that either because then you marvel at the fact that someone actually created this box.

Stephen Sondheim: That's the point.

Andrew Parr: Yeah.

Stephen Sondheim: It's the craftsman part of it that I love.

Barry Joseph: And finally, here's a few words from, David Staller, the founding artistic director of New York's Gingold Theatrical Group, who as part of his lifelong friendship with Sondheim, gifted him puzzle boxes. And here is David explaining why Sondheim, from his perspective, loved these boxes.

David Staller: Then I began finding these boxes. Puzzle boxes fascinated me, especially those made with inlaid wood from Japan. But every culture has had them. And discussing with Sondheim the reason for this, he quite rightly provided the insight that it's something finite, something solvable, as opposed to day-to-day existence, as opposed to our life. Take a box and figure it out. And then mission accomplished.

Barry Joseph: The moment a puzzle box is opened, a moment of clarity. As exchanged with gifts between friends, moments of connection. So we looked at how Sondheim used games and puzzles to create moments of clarity and moments of connection. But we didn't address why and what it might tell us about his personality. Puzzles pose a challenge. I dare you to solve my puzzles. Games can offer an invitation. Come play with me. We can combine them to get, I dare you to come play with me. I push you away and draw you close. Sondheim, I argue, used play To invite others to connect with him, but only after a challenge had been conquered and elaborate test evaluating who might be safe enough to gain entry into his world. He was his own gatekeeper, but the treasure at the end of his challenges were the greatest of all. Entrance into the mind and heart of Stephen Sondheim. . Thank you very much.

So let's take some questions, and then I have a few things to share with you before I pass it back over to Shoba. So I see a hand on the left.

Audience: Yeah, Mike. Was he as good at maths as he was with words?

Barry Joseph: So, yeah, Sondheim, when he was talking about puzzle boxes, he says, "What I'm good at is math puzzles and word puzzles," right? So math was important for him, and I... He's often said, "I wanna leave, um, making musicals to do games. I wanna make puzzles." He sometimes said, "To go into math." so something he enjoyed, right? On this side.

Audience: Hi. I'm Emily Rose. What are your favorite examples of what you've just explained in his work?

Barry Joseph: Pick a show. Pick any show.

Audience: Company.

Barry Joseph: Company. So, when they're talking about what it means in the first song, Here Comes Company, and they define what company is, one of them is "board games". It's about getting together with your friends. It's all about connection right there, and that show is so much about someone struggling with connection. I mentioned earlier that ending of the first act of Sunday in the Park with George, I almost can't say it without almost crying. Thinking about that moment when it all comes together, even though I know it's gonna happen every single time, it always gets me, you know? His last show, Here We Are, the first act is a board game. The second half is an escape room. I don't know if he did that intentionally or not, but it was originally called Square One. What square are we talking about? It's not a board game. It's about them repeating the game over and over and over. They can't get out of that scene, and they can't move forward in the second act until they solve the puzzle of why they're stuck there. Hi, what's your name?

Audience: Chris.

Barry Joseph: Hey, Chris.

Audience: I know that you had the quote from James Lapine about how he was thinking about being a game designer, but outside of his early job at New York Magazine, did he ever commercialize any of these things? 'Cause it's really striking that obviously after Merrily, he was thinking about rejecting Broadway because of the culture. But it's just really striking hearing all the stories of the many, many games and puzzles he created, that he was doing them for friends, they were gifts, they were for love rather than for business.

Barry Joseph: So there's a few ways I'll answer that, and I'll do it backwards. If you haven't seen yet, there's a new biography of Stephen Sondheim by Dan Okrent called Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy. I think it's hands down the best biography of Sondheim ever written. It's phenomenal. And there's a moment in it, and I'm acquaintances with Dan, and I was joking with him about it. Between two sentences from 1965 to 1970, he kinda jumps in his book, but a third of my book fit in that. That was the period which changed with Company, and it was in that period that he was the most productive with puzzles and games. There's usually a balance between the two, right? When he was a teenager, he sent a puzzle to The New York Times, which was rejected. It was a word puzzle. So he did try to put that out in the world, and he also designed a board game that he wanted to have commercialized, that he sent to a major manufacturer as well. Also rejected. So we see early efforts of teenage Sondheim putting work out professionally into the puzzles and game world and being rejected. He still enjoyed it. And in that first board game we looked at, Stardom, or Camp, when it was discovered, 'cause it was thought to be lost after he passed away, it came with multiple pages, not only with the instructions, but with a letter that he wrote with it describing his intentions to commercialize it. Not only to commercialize that, but the whole concept. He said it doesn't have to only be about Broadway, actresses. It could also be about books. It could be about Broadway shows. So he was thinking about that early in his career, didn't get the feedback he needed to do it professionally, and then we know the rest of what happened. And so I think he never fell out of love with what puzzles and games meant for him, but it became a place where he could explore that creative side of himself outside of the world of critics, outside the financial pressures, and just enjoy it.

Audience: I was surprised to learn that Sondheim was open to using rhyming dictionaries, and I guess 'cause it was a resource. Was there anything with board games and his process that you found surprising in setting the rules and the order, as you say?

Barry Joseph: I think what's interesting to me about how he drew from existing resources for board games is that he was very literate when it came to board game designs. If you're not a board game designer, the language would be the mechanics of a game. So you might think about Monopoly, and you might be thinking, okay, Monopoly is a game about getting a monopoly and trying to destroy the other players. But what it is as a mechanic is just a roll and move. You roll a die, and you move. That's a game with a certain name. It's called The Game of the Goose. He knew all these things. So he could look at the game and understand the parts and then how it was changed to work with the theme. And so when he was, a teenager, and very close and living often with the family of the Hammersteins. The boy who was in the family he was close with, he said they played a game every single day because he just wanted to understand the mechanics. He was a collector in many ways. He was collecting those informations, and he did the same thing with the cryptic crosswords. He wasn't only doing those cryptic crosswords from England that would come over once a week. He saved every single one of them. He then gifted them to Will Shortz, the puzzle editor of The New York Times, in the mid eighties. So Will Shortz has every single cryptic that Stephen Sondheim did in his own hand because he collected things. And then he would bring these things back. When he did the crosswords for New York Magazine, he would then say which cryptic constructor in England inspired that one. So he was constantly learning and taking and putting it back in.

And so he did that with games, he did that with puzzles as well. Yeah. Think we have time for one last question?

Audience: Yeah. I'm wondering if, you see a way in which Sondheim attempted to square his sexuality, his queerness with his penchant for puzzles, or how puzzles might have played out in his own sort of personal life.

Barry Joseph: So if you wanna look at how his sexuality was expressed in his games, the obvious example is a board game called Camp, which is all about the importance of camping. It's all about camp culture. Is anyone here listening to the new Sondheim podcast, Loving Sondheim? So this is, produced by Sondheim's first public boyfriend from the nineties,, Peter Jones, and Martin Mills, who I think maybe lives in London. Who was close friends with him. And Martin's connection with Sondheim was through his, deep obsession, with old Hollywood movies. And so you're seeing that come together in this one piece. It's a game, it's camp culture, and it's all about those people. And I didn't describe how you play that game. When you play that game, you move through the game, and it... Y-you gotta imagine it, right? Your character is a young starlet that is being played by most likely gay men, who, as they're playing the game, have to put on furs and stars on their faces and tiaras and jewels, so it's all really camping it up. You're embodying the camping culture in it, and so you're in a safe space with your friends in the early 1950s really embodying camp culture through the design of a board game. But it's rare. It's a rare example. . Let's now travel to Upstairs at the Gatehouse, an independent theater in London. The audience took their seats, the lights dimmed, And Tina Foote from the Stephen Sondheim Society took the stage. The Stephen Sondheim Society is a charitable trust that promotes the public knowledge and appreciation of the works of Stephen Sondheim.

They do this through master classes, cabarets, and producing special events like my own The jewel in their crown is the Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year Competition

Tina not only produced my event, coordinating with Upstairs at the Gatehouse, hiring a photographer and a videographer, and promoting it to the membership of the Stephen Sondheim Society, she also designed the evening with me, recruiting performers Oliver Sidney and Rhys Lambert, along with pianist and composer Colm Molloy.

Tina then introduced me, and I took the stage.

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim. First, I wanna thank a number of people, starting with Tina. We've been working for months to put tonight together. She has worked so hard. And along with Tina, of course, everyone involved with the Sondheim Society, and to Annlouise, and everyone here at upstairs at The Gatehouse, including the tech crew, please give her up for them, wouldn't be here without them. And you'll be seeing so many of the amazing performers will be joining me today. I try and do something different everywhere I go, but this is a whole other class of different. That's a thanks to Tina and everyone who will be up here today. This ends my week of being in London. It's been incredible to be here. I arrived at the middle of last week, and I've been doing all sorts of things, and the city and the people in it could not have been more generous, and inviting. But not all were prepared for me. I won't name the bookstore. I'll just say they start with an F and end with Oyles I stepped in to say, "Oh, do you have any copies of a book called Matching Minds with Sondheim?" Asking innocently. I would then reveal, I'm the author, I'd like to sign it. And they said, "No, we don't have any copies." And actually, there's not a copy in any of the stores in the entire city". And I said, "Oh, don't you think people might be interested in Stephen Sondheim?" And, the lovely person behind the desk said, "Well, it's not like he has anything in production right now in London." And I said, "Oh, didn't Into the Woods just receive an Olivier?" And she said, "That, that's not my area." Okay. So if you go into any bookstores, just do what I do. Just ask if they have the book. The more people who ask, the more they think, "Oh, maybe people are interested." More importantly, I'm delighted to be here with all of you. Thank you for coming out tonight. This is now normally when we listen to a few of those 100 people who spoke with me for the book, along with the original theme song to my podcast, sung by Ann Morrison, who many of us know from what? Mary. Mary, from Merrily we Roll Along but tonight I have something extra special for you and for me. The person who composed that song, Colm Molloy, is here tonight and will perform it live on piano as it is sung for the first time ever live by Oliver Sydney. Isn't that exciting? Yay. So with that, please keep applauding and welcome Colm and Oliver up to the stage.

Colm Malloy: Hello.

Oliver Sydney: Matching minds with Sondheim. Stream it in your ears. It's your new favorite podcast about the theater God casting off your fears from Parlour games to treasure hunts. You need and feel a dunce. Because Barry's here to hold your hand. Whether cryptic or esoteric, odd or even alphanomeric. He'll help you understand. Matching minds with Sondheim. Tell a friend or quiz him.

Test him with his anagram he's pure hedonism. His songs and his shows, Mary Flynn, Mama Rose. Everybody already knows, they're superbly designed, but where would we be? Without a puzzle to bring us glee, even someone in a tree would believe we need Steve and his mind.

Barry Joseph: I'll give that a standing ovation. That was marvelous. Thank you, fellas. Moments of clarity, moments of connection. That's why I love so much about the musical work of Stephen Sondheim. We have the end of the first act of Sunday in the Park with George, moment of clarity. We have Bobby at the end of company, finally figuring out what it means to be alive. Moments of connection. Moments of clarity and moments of connection are also the two themes I heard the most among sondheim's friends, his colleagues, loved ones, but in this case, I wasn't asking them about musical theater. I wasn't asking them about Stephen Sondheim at work. I was asking them about Stephen Sondheim at play with puzzles and games. So, what did Sondheim do with puzzles and games? Let's listen to what he had to say in this interview from 1995.

Interviewer: In a sense, your fascination with puzzles, you can't help but wonder about whether that's in any way analogous to putting together a show.

Stephen Sondheim: Oh, it is very much. Sure. Well, I think that's what art is anyway. A puzzle, like art is making order out of chaos. You know, take a jigsaw puzzle, right? It's chaos, put together its picture. And I think art is the same way on a slightly higher level.

Barry Joseph: Order out of chaos. This is a phrase Sondheim would repeat over the years. This, that wasn't the first time he said it, and it certainly wasn't the last. Puzzles were a way for Sondheim to spin chaos into order. When he designed puzzles, he was creating experiences for others to have that aha moment when confusion melts into clarity. Take a moment. Think about a puzzle you might have done today, this week, this month, and think about that aha moment. Put up your hand if you're willing to share it. What's your name, sir?

Audience: My name's Ken, and the puzzle I was doing this morning while watching some TV is a flat puzzle of eight squares, which are connected by wires, and you can rearrange them. There's a picture on one side.

Barry Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Audience: But the other side is all chaotic. And if you rearrange it, you go from order to chaos. .

Barry Joseph: And how did that feel when you solved it?

Audience: Good.

Barry Joseph: Felt good.

Audience: It also helps manipulate the hands to avoid any sort of arthritis.

Barry Joseph: Excellent. Thank you. There are many health giving properties, physical and mental with puzzles. But tonight, thank you. We're gonna focusing on that piece around clarity. That moment, that aha moment, that's a precious moment to experience, and it's a gift to get to design those moments for other people. Games, however, are different. They're less about moments of clarity. They're more about moments of connection. When you design a game, you're creating opportunities for players to connect with one another and also with you as the designer. So, same question I just asked, but now about games. Think about a game you played today, this weekend, this week, and think about who you played it with. Do I have another volunteer? Who played a game in the last month? In the back, you always see hands in the back. If you can help me, can you come down? What is your name?

Kay: My name is Kay.

Barry Joseph: Hi, Kay.

Kay: I was playing the new New York Times game Crossways, which is basically just Scrabble.

Barry Joseph: Yes.

Kay: Rebranded. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Rebranded.

Kay: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: So, were you playing it with anybody?

Kay: I was. I was playing it with a friend of mine who's in New York.

Barry Joseph: Ah. So, how much of that playing with your friend was about because you wanted to play that game and how much to connect with your friend?

Kay: 100% connect with my friend because I don't like Scrabble, actually.

Barry Joseph: Okay, thank you very much. Games, creating moments of connection. So, , in summary, Sondheim used puzzles to create moments of clarity and games to create moments of connection. Your job now for the rest of the evening is to look for examples of that through all of the work that I'm gonna be sharing with you. You up for that? Yeah. Yeah. Are you up for that? Yeah. There we go. We're now gonna review the five main areas of Sondheim's ludelogical or playful interests.

Should we try one of Sonhem's puzzles before we jump in? Yeah. All right. I ... So, this is the warmup we're gonna do. This is a creation from a 2009 treasure hunt designed for a group of friends for games night. It was held in the apartment of a friend in the Dakota, which is a famous building on Central Park West. And these clues were designed to be solved through observing objects that were in the space. So, in your mind, you have to think about the answer being something you might see in someone's New York City apartment, okay? These are three of the many questions that are there. So, the first one is a painter who's a Gentile. Question. Just the reverse. The second one is, this could be so New York. Shortly. And the third one is, can banjo eyes hold his liquor? Without McMahon, he can. So, I'm gonna wait a moment and give you some times to look at it, and then I'm gonna go one at a time and see if anyone thinks they have a solution.

We'll start with the first. A painter who's a Gentile, just the reverse. You think of an answer?

Audience: It's a horrible answer. I'm gonna say Goya.

Barry Joseph: Goya. That is correct. Because a Gentile is called a goy, thank you.

Audience: I'm not sure it says just the reverse.

Barry Joseph: Well, it's "a goy"- Goya. Now, you can complain to Sondheim if you want, but he's not here at the moment, sorry. All right. So that's the first one. Well done. And for that, you get a prize. We said there'd be prizes tonight. Puzzle is donated by the Sondheim Society. Does anyone have a guess for this could be So New York, shortly. Oh, we have a hand in the back. And if you're able to come down, if you can't, I'll come up to you. What? Sure. What's your name?

John: I'm John.

Barry Joseph: John. This could be so New York shortly. What do you think you're looking for in the apartment?

John: Is it a Sony?

Barry Joseph: Sony, let's find out. Yes, in fact, it is. Can you tell us ... Yeah, give him a round of applause. That was excellent. So John, explain to us how does that become Sony?

John: Well, New York shortly is NY and so is so, so it's so NY Sony.

Barry Joseph: Excellent. Give another round of applause. Thank you, John. Congratulations. All right. The last one and the hardest of all, can banjo eyes hold his liquor without McMahon he can. No one yet? All right. It, I will now reveal it. And the person who shared all this with me is, playwright Jonathan Mark Sherman, who was friends with Stephen Sondheim and loved playing games with him. And he explained it to me this way. Without McMahon refers to Ed McMahon. Banjo eyes was Eddie Cantor. So if you take Ed out of Eddie Cantor, you're left with- Decantor. Decantor. So that was a Decantor in the bar holding liquor, he said. So I'll give Sherman a puzzle when I get back to New York. All right. I think we are ready or as ready as we're gonna be. Now, it was widely known that Stephen Sondheim collected antique boards from board games as wall decorations. What has been less known was his efforts designing board games. And tonight, we'll just take a look at just one. Or should I say a series of games? The great conductor hunt from 1968, a 50th birthday present for Sondheim's close friend and collaborator, Leonard Bernstein.

As far as I know, all that really still exists of these three board games is an acetate, an album that can be heard in Washington DC at the Library of Congress. And the best person to explain it, luckily, is this designer from an unused interview from PBS that was filmed in 1998.

Stephen Sondheim: He was going to leave the filler money, and it was, there was much speculation as to who was going to replace it. For Lenny's 50th birthday, I invented a great conductor hunt. And the first part was a game in which it's actually quite a good game. It involves letters and moves and making words out of the letters by moving pieces. The point was, you graduate from music school. In the first game, there were chance cards that would happen every now and then by the throw of the dice. I thought instead of printing them out, you know, like you do in Monopoly, I would have Helen Coates read them. And so I got Helen Coates to read in her dry school teacher voice, all these things. I put it on a, on an acetate. Uh, uh, and so every time , the dye would require a card to be turned up, you'd just put it onto the next groove and find out what, whether you got a letter or lost a letter. You know, I would rather invent games and invent crossword puzzles and write any songs I can tell you.

Barry Joseph: So Stephen Sondheim referenced Helen Coates. I'm just curious, who here knows who Helen Coates is? Getting a sense of awareness. One person's head is really high. Thank you. So Helen Coates was Leonard Bernstein's childhood piano teacher, who then became his personal secretary. So if you wanted to get to Lenny, you had to first get through Helen in real life and now through Sondheim also in the board game. Sondheim's brief, witty jibes at his friend are hilarious. And if you go to the Library of Congress, you can listen to those recordings of Helen reading them. Again, as he said, you'd get to a point in the game, you might lose something or gain something, but you put the needle on the record and you would hear what Helen had to tell you. Has anyone done that, gone to Library of Congress to listen to them? Crickets, okay. Well, in that case, would you like to hear some now? Yeah. All right. So I sat down with Mark Eden Horowitz. I say I sat down. I'm on Zoom. I Zoomed with Mark Eden Horowitz, who is the Library of Congress's curator, responsible for both Leonard Bernstein's collection, and now as of last summer, Sondheim's.To listen to them together and then hear his response, and we'll just listen to two, both what Helen said, and then us talking about it.

Let's listen to 23.

Helen: Lenny feels it's a serious defect that you can't do the puzzles in the nation. Zubin made it can, but of course he can do anything. Lenny insists upon another letter giving this one.

Barry Joseph: I think those puzzles in the nation were cryptic crosswords at the time, which Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim loved to do. So he's again, bringing into the game this biographical aspect of their relationship together and commemorating it.

Mark Eden Horowitz: And tweaking Lenny at the same time.

Barry Joseph: So it speaks a lot to the way they battled with each other.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I can just picture Lenny, the first time he played this just bursting out laughing when he got to some of these clues or some of these recordings from Helen, he must have just busted a gut.

Speaker 4: And lastly, let's listen to number 27.

Helen: Lenny was fascinated to hear that your hobbies included chiropractic, and belly dancing. But he'd like to find out whether you can practice them simultaneously. To elucidate, send him a letter.

Mark Eden Horowitz: He cracks yourself up there.

Barry Joseph: Yeah. A biography in the form of a board game series designed for a friend. Moments of connection. Let's move on to treasure hunts. Sondheim loved designing treasure hunts, which he enjoyed as a child growing up next to Central Park where he would look for clues. His most famous one, the one talked about the most, was a Halloween treasure hunt in 1968, designed with Anthony Perkins. He would make these elaborate hunts around the cities, around theaters for friends and fundraisers, and often just for fun. I was able to document seven, and I know there were many more than seven for my book, because people were able to tell me about what it was like to be there, share photos with me like this one, at the Shewbert Theater for the cast of Little Night Music in 1973. And share with me the clues themselves, which is rather remarkable because some of these are decades and decades old.

Would you like to try another puzzle? All right, let's do it. All right, so get out your pen and paper or just in your head or your phone, whatever you like. Now, this is back in 2011. Does anyone here know this theater in New York City? Do you recognize it by looking at this Neil Morris building? East of Broadway?

This is a New York City Center, okay? So imagine now you're not going to a show, but you're going to a birthday party. They have rented the entire place. The party is all of the floors. The dinner's going to be on the stage, but the cocktail party is behind the area where we can see. And you're at the cocktail party and it just started and suddenly, unexpectedly, Stephen Sondheim takes the mic and says, "Guess what? We're playing a treasure hunt for the next hour that I designed just for our party guests." Sit at a table and there's going to be 12 sheets of paper. Each one is going to lead you to a different location in the theater. At that location, there's going to be an envelope, and in that envelope is going to be a city center ticket for a seat. Go to that seat. There's going to be a letter when you collect all the letters, put them together, and you'll find out where the treasure is. For us now, we're just going to look at one of those 12 sheets. Keep in mind, you're looking for a location in the theater, but it could be any theater. All right? And the way it works is, the sheet said, "Arrange these shows, these six shows in chronological order, then read all of either the first letters or the last letters, either up or down to find this puzzle's location."

Does anyone think they have it? Oh, I see hands on the left.

Hi , what's your name?

Owen: Owen.

Barry Joseph: So Owen, tell us what do you think the answer is? Where would one go to solve this puzzle?

Owen: To the sconce?

Barry Joseph: Let's take a look. These are the shows in chronological order. We're gonna reverse that order just to make it a little bit easier. And then look at the last letters down. S, C, O, N, C, E, and in sconce, it's behind the lights. Congratulations, Owen. How did that feel when you figured that out? When you're like, "Oh, it's Sconce. I think I might have it. "

Owen: Yeah, it was good. I was kinda going through the first letters, so could I get a word out of them? Couldn't get a word.

Barry Joseph: I asked you the feeling. It felt good?

Owen: Feeling was great. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: So that feeling that you had was designed for you by Stephen Sondheim. Moments of clarity and moments of connection. We're now gonna move on to word puzzles. So when Sondheim constructed these 42 cryptics for New York Magazine in 1968, in 1969, they would forever change the nature of puzzles in America. I often say that had Sondheim not written a single show for the stage, he still would've got an obituary in the New York Times because of this impact alone. I'm not being facetious. And tonight, being in London, what I wanna talk about is how he got there. Not that impact, because it came from London. In 1995 for that PBS documentary on Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim spoke about their friendship and how they were connected through puzzles.

Stephen Sondheim: Actually, one of the things we did was, he was an anagram player and I was an anagram player. And, I had never played Cutthroat Anagrams, which is a very aggressive form of the game and a much, much better one than the polite version. And I got into playing anagrams with him, and it helped relieve any tensions that would come in the collaboration. Also, I introduced him to the Crossroad Puzzle and the Listener, which is a BBC, was a BBC publication. And, they're very tricky British puzzles. And so that would usually arrive on Thursday. So we would meet on Thursday and spend the first couple of hours doing the puzzle together, and then we would get to work. If he'd had his way, we would've always worked in the room together. And if I had my way, we'd always work separately.

Barry Joseph: If he'd had his way, we would've worked together. If we'd had my ways, we'd work apart. Solvent cryptics together, moments of connection. By the time Sondheim began constructing his own cryptics, he already had both a deep knowledge of British cross crosswords and an extensive collection. Because he kept every single one that he did.

Here, we can see he not only kept one, this is one from 1968, that whenever he created his own, he referenced who it came from. So here, for example, his crossword 1,943 called Diametric Code five by Babs. And then the one he did in the New Yorker was just called Diametric Code parentheses with acknowledgement to Babs of the Listener. He was always thanking each one of them for what they did because the metapuzzle would inspire him. He made it completely original cryptic, but he would often be inspired by that metapusle and he thanked them. And then one day in the spring of 1968, Sondheim came to London to meet them in person. And one of those people that he met was named Eric Chalkley now, if I say the name Eric Chalkley to an audience in New York, they have no idea who I'm talking about. Does anyone here in this audience know the name Eric Chalkley? One. Okay. This is Eric Chalkley. Does anyone know his pen name? His pen name was Apex. Why was it Apex? 'Cause he learned from and was inspired by Ximenes whose name starts with an X. So he was aping X. When I started my book, what happens whenever you start a book about a knowledge that just gets passed around, but no one knows where it came from, the things that people pass around the most and get off a little bit, that's always the most interesting for me. And the thing I heard the most was Sondheim was involved in some secret British crossword society, some crossword club, something like that, and I had to learn more about it. And so I learned about it, but it wasn't exactly what I was told. Apex, a carpenter by trade, after that dinner, had an idea, and what it grew into was ... Does anyone know what it grew into? Grew into Apex, which looks exactly the same, and yet, if not, Apex, of course, a puzzle every Christmas. Chalkley invited people to his mailing list. Remember, this is decades before email in the internet, and each Christmas, he would send them a new cryptic. One clue, however, would be straightforward. I think you guys call it here concise? And those like Sondheim were challenged to come up with a cryptic clue for it, which Chalkley would share and they'd all judge them, right? Apex also really enjoyed illustrations. So he would ask member Derek Harrison to both create private ones for Sondheim. And here's one including a crossword cryptic that Apex made for Sondheim about Sweeney Todd, and then he put it into, you can see a picture of a Sweeney Todd, right? And also ones to be included in each year's mailing. So this, for example, is one from, I think, the late '90s. Stephen Sondheim's all the way on the right behind the piano. And next to him is Leonard Bernstein who says, "Let's jazz it up and give him a ball." And, a member of that community, maybe somebody might know him, says, "Tonight, tonight, won't just be any night." obviously referring to West Side Story and then the one that followed the year after. I don't know why. Sondheim is again on the right, but now he's playing an accordion. Chalkley would eventually visit Sondheim in his home in New York City and continually send Sondheim personal custom cryptics about his shows. Many of which actually are in my book. But in one case, one of these letters wasn't for Sondheim, but for Bernstein. Sondheim was just the messenger. And I'll read you what it says. November 2nd, 1988, Dear Lenny, the enclosed was sent to you care of the Barbican. So obviously he must have been here in London for something, but the author feared, which was Apex, it didn't reach you in time. So here's a copy. You won't even have to sit on the John for this one. Love Steve, because that's where Sondheim often did his cryptics. And then on the right is that puzzle, which says, "Spot the song, singer, place, composer, and lyricist." It's all about Leonard Bernstein, and that's Leonard Bernstein's handwriting, having completed it. Whether it was honor, not on the John, we don't know. Before alkleyte passed away, his friends worked to get him in order of the British Empire honor. That required some letters of support, three at the time, and Stephen Sondheim was asked and wrote one of them. And I think it was December 30th, 2002. What do you know? There was Eric Chalkley in the paper for having received it. Eric Chalkley, crossword setter for services to the newspaper industry. And a month later, here'salkleyte, receiving his honor personally from Prince Charles, Justin Carpenter who constructed crossword puzzles, which happened in no small part due to Stephen Sondheim, who clearly appreciated all Apex did for him and for Crosswords in general. Moments of connection. Now, we're gonna look at the jigsaw puzzles. The Sondheim revue that many of you I'm sure know, putting it together when it arrived from London to America from the landed on off Broadway, in 1993, it used a jigsaw puzzle design in its poster. I don't know if Sondheim was involved with it or not, but it clearly inspired him because for many years he'd been giving different types of presents for opening night gifts, one for Into the Woods, you can see on the back of my shirt were the beans, which had a special encoded message for each person. But this year he did something different. He made, as his opening night gift, for all the members he gave it to, a bespoke, customized, personalized jigsaw puzzle. Each person who received it got a small green box with thick wooden pieces with no picture on the outside, so they didn't know what it was gonna be. As they put it together, they soon discovered it was a version of the poster from their - production, but a bigger surprise awaited. These puzzles were deviously designed. Sometimes, for example, pieces didn't connect or straight edges faced inside, that allowed over time for shapes to form, cut out in the initials of the person who received them. That moment when they saw their initials, moments of clarity. From Putting It Together in 1993 to the Broadway gender bending revival of Company, nearly 30 years later, Sondheim commissioned thousands of these jigsaws, each unique for each show, each unique for the recipient from the same Vermont-based puzzle company called Stave. I'm gonna show you here me putting one together. This is sped up from 45 minutes, took a while. And while I share you some of my favorites, if you figure out which one this is, just shout it out. Whoever shouts it out first, whatever I'm doing, you'll get a prize. Meanwhile, on the right, I'm gonna highlight some of the ones that I've learned along the way. So here's one for, Sondheim on Sondheim, and we wanna guess who the VW was, who was in that production. Vanessa Williams. Vanessa Will-. Oh, you gotta link. You got it. That's right. Vanessa Williams. And you can see, look at the shapes. It just goes all over the place. And then we have Pacific Overtures. And I like this one. So if you look at the two ships that are the eyes and the lips, they're almost each their own separate piece. There's only one little part that connects it to everything else. If it was on its own, , it has its own word. Into the Woods, if you can see Red's Cape, which in the posters right against the book or the tree, there's almost no connection between them. So if you're looking at a red cape piece, you wouldn't see some of the black or brown tree and vice versa. That's part of the way they make it really hard to figure out. And in this one of Gypsy, note how on the lower left, there are notes cut out as pieces in a little box. This one for Frogs, I love because you can see how they made little windows to put in the initials. And, this one's one of my favorite from Sunday in the Park with George. I'm not too partial to this poster for it, but inside, I don't know if you can see it. There's a little George. There's little George painting has his own little piece. A silhouette. They call it a silhouette. The last one that was given in 2021 to the cast of Company was given out only a few weeks after Sondheim passed away. He was alive when it went into previews, but passed away once it opened. And Etai Benson, who I interviewed for my book, shared this with me that. That's the EB, Etai Benson, that when he saw it, when he came home that night from the first production and he had all the gifts that everyone gave him and him and his wife were opening them up and.. There's a box that says from Stephen Sondheim. It said it gave him a shiver down his spine. He said it almost felt like a gift from beyond the grave. Now this is the one that you saw me building, the Little Night Music one. Note that the stars in the sky are cutouts, right? And the proud owner here, Susan Joliz, is a harpist who's in a number of the shows, including this one. All right, you wanna see just one more? This one is from Passion, which I'm sure you all know starred Marin Maisie as Clara. And this is hers. And I love this one more than all the others simply because it shows the entire show. On the right, we have Fosca in that cutout. On the left, we have Georgio. And if you look carefully, you can find Clara. She's holding the heart between the two S's.

That's what she looks like. So her lower part has the H, E and the N, so if you can look for that there. So the whole plot of the show is right there in the puzzle. And with that, I think we can transition to some songs. Starting with one from Passion. So please welcome our performance again back to the stage.

Oliver Sydney: No one has ever loved me as deeply as you.

No one has ever loved me as you have, Fosca. Love within reason, love without mercy, love without pride or shame. Love unconcerned with being returned. No wisdom, no judgment, no caution, no blame. No one has ever known me as clearly as you. No one has ever shown me what love could be like until now. Not pretty. You're safe or easy, but more than I ever knew. Love. Within reason, that isn't love. And I've learned that from you.

Barry Joseph: And of course, that was, "No one Has Ever Loved Me" from Passion. Thank you, Colm and Oliver, but don't go far. I'm gonna bring you back up here very shortly. . So far tonight, we've been talking about the puzzles and games produced by Sondheim. But of course, puzzles and games appear throughout Sondheim's musical work, both as subjects and in the designs of the shows themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, what is the end of the first act of Sunday, if not a jigsaw puzzle? Another example is in Road Show. In a song literally entitled The Game. Two brothers, Addison and Wilson, are working a gold claim up in the Klondyke. When, to his brother's horror, Wilson decides to gamble the claim in a round of poker. The only thing that matters is the game, Wilson argues. It was about more than just winning the money. It was about putting all you have into the pot. Sondheim and his collaborator, John Weidman, used poker as a metaphor for how to live life always on the edge. In the long term, gambling did not pay off for the brothers, nor did their next game nor the one after that.

In the song Get Out / Go, Wilson tells his brother, after their latest calamity, that it was always bound to fall apart, that "whatever the game, this was always our road". Games in the context of the show are about how to approach life, about taking the big risks, even if they come at the cost of others, and riding them as far as one can, and then when they eventually crash, picking yourself back up and looking for the next game to play.

Let's welcome back our performers to the stage to hear a song from Roadshow, "The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened" from Roadshow with both Colm Malloy, Oliver Sidney, and now joining us, Rhys Lambert. .

Reese Lambert: First, there's cocktails at the costumes.

Oliver Sydney: Oh, Jesus.

Reese Lambert: Hun, you've got fish to fry.

Oliver Sydney: Why don't you do this one without me?

Reese Lambert: Then there's dinner at the Dodges, the reception at the Roosevelt.

Oliver Sydney: I think I'm gonna die.

Reese Lambert: And every party filled with millionaires who want to build the biggest villa since the days ancient wrong. So what do you say we just stay home?

Oliver Sydney: You are the best thing that ever has happened to me. You are. Okay then. One of the best things that's happened to me, you are. They say we all find love. I never bought it. I never thought it would happen to me. Who could foresee? You are the God damnedest thing that has happened to me ever. When did I have this much happiness happen to me?

Never. I can't believe my luck. But all I can do is be the best thing that's happened to you.

Reese Lambert: So what do you say we just stay home? What do you say we just go out on the boat and get smashed and make love on the beach and stare up at the moon?

Oliver Sydney: Adi.

Reese Lambert: You might just be the best thing that has happened to me so far. Of course, not much ever really has happened to me so far. I didn't much like love. I always fought it. I never thought it could happen like this.

Oliver Sydney: Give us a kiss. We may just be the best thing that has happened. To us, kiddo. Partner. Another moment like this may not happen to us. When all is said and done, I have to agree. You are the best thing that's happening toWho knew? Who dreamed? Beats me

Barry Joseph: I almost forgot to get back up. I didn't want it to end. It was beautiful. So for our final stop on our tour of the map of the territory, the territory, again, being the puzzling and playful interests of Stephen Sondheim, we land on parlor games. I think we're ready now for a deep dive, deeper than the other four, to see what we can unearth about the mind of Stephen Sondheim. To do that, we start with a song from Sunday in the park with George. Please welcome to the stage for the last time, Colm Malloy and Oliver Sydney for Finishing the Hat.

Oliver Sydney: Yes, she looks for me. Good. Let her look for me to tell me why she left me, as I always knew she was. I had thought she understood. They have never understood and no reason that they should. But, if anybody could ... Finishing the hat. How you have to finish the hat. How you watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hat..Mapping out a sky. What you feel like planning a sky. What you feel like voices who come through the window. Go. Until they distance and die, until there's nothing but sky and how you're always turning back too late for the grass or the stick or the dog or the light. How the kind of woman willing to wait's not the kind that you want to find waiting to return you to the night. Dizzy from the height. Coming from the hat. Studying the hat. Entering the world of the hat. Reaching through the world of a hat like a window. Back to this one from that. Studying the face. Stepping back to look at her face leaves a little space in the way like a window. But to see is the only way to see. And when the woman that you wanted goes, you can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give, but the woman who won't wait for you knows that however you live, there's a part of you always Standing by mapping out a sky. Finishing a hat. Starting on a hat. Finishing a hat. Look, I made a hat. Where there never was a hat.

Barry Joseph: Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you both. So, what do most audience think that song is about? What's that song about?

Audience: Difficulty of arts.

Barry Joseph: Difficulty of arts. Thank you.

Audience: Attention to detail.

Barry Joseph: Here's what Sondheim had to say it was about.

Terry Gross: This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The song "Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George is one of the songs that's performed. And about that song, you say that it's about what it's like to come out of the process of making art, to be done with something and then reenter the world.

Stephen Sondheim: That song came out of an incident in my life where I sat down to invent a game for a friend. And I started inventing it eight o'clock in the evening and I looked up from my pad because the sun was coming up. And I'd been concentrating for eight hours and I know obviously I must have gotten up to get something to drink or to go to the bathroom or something, but I have no memory of anything except that. And it's transing out.

Barry Joseph: Surprising, no? Finishing the Hat, one of his most famous and, I would say, autobiographical songs is less about painting or about making art. He says it's about trancing out once designing a game.

So, what was the game? That was the game of murder. The game of murder comes from, I think, England as a parlor game where a group of people get together and someone somehow is designated the secret murderer. Maybe there's pieces of paper and they have an X. Maybe to kill someone they have to wink or shake their hand or pat them on the back or something.

And then a bunch of people fall down dead. Maybe the lights were out. The lights come back on. And everyone has to figure out who the murderer was. And this is a game that intrigued Sondheim. I think he liked the theatricalities of it. He liked the kind of bumping around in the dark part. But then the part where people who were dead couldn't do anything, and then people were trying to figure out who it was, and he didn't think that was very interesting.

So he spent a lot of time trying to fix in his mind the design problems in that game, in the 1950s and the 1960s. And he wasn't happy with any of his solutions until finally in 1965, he had a friend, Phyllis Newman, who had a show that opened and quickly closed out of town, and he met her backstage and said, "Don't be depressed.

What can I do for you? " And she said, "When I come back to New York, throw a games night for me and design me a new game. Invent a game." And that's where the game came from when he talked about, in that storytelling, eight hours, sometimes it's 11, sometimes 12 hours, making that game.

So the next time you watch Sunday in the Park with George, and you see the character of a painter being lost in the act of creation, keep in mind its inspiration was a night Sondheim spent thinking about his friends and how he could use a game to create moments of clarity and connection. Two things I hope I was able to impart to all of you, at least a little bit tonight. Thank you so much.

So if you have a question, please come up to the microphone. If it's hard for you to move, let, just put up your hand and I'll bring a microphone to you. Okay?

Audience: Okay. So Barry, how many Listener crosswords have you ever solved?

Barry Joseph: How many what crosswords?

Audience: Listener.

Barry Joseph: Listener crosswords. Oh, that's an easy one. How many listener crosswords have I solved? Zero. I am not a crossword person.

I don't come to this from a word puzzle side, which for me, talking about cryptic is one of the hardest things for me because getting my head around it was really hard. So it was one of the last podcasts that I did because I was kind of always pushing it to the side before I can get together some incredible people to talk with me about them. Yeah. But I love that lateral thinking and the thinking outside the box that you can do with puzzles where it brings out the best of you. When I do a workshop, which I did with NYU students this week, NYU London, we talk about Stephen Sondheim's game design and puzzle design values. You know, I'm sure many of us here have the collection of Sondheim's lyrics, which he opens by saying, "Here's his, you know, three rules plus one for writing lyrics." and he did not do that for games and puzzles, but he lent us enough in his instructions for how to do his treasure hunts and his warnings and his teachings of people like Richard Maltby about how to do, design, crypto crosswords that I could call up from my perspective what I think those values were. And those values are generosity, making people feel good about themselves when they solve your puzzles, not make them think that you're so smart. Along with generosity is playfulness, is making it as fun as possible. Do you guys have fun tonight? Was it playful? Yep, that was, that's my goal. And then mentorship, which is building into the design of the experience, the absent designer, giving people the steps that they need to succeed and move forward through the process.

Other questions? John, hit me with a good question.

John: I love the way that you characterize games as being a tool for connection. And it occurs to me that there's something about them that's playful but constrained play because it, there, there's a set of rules. And then that got me thinking about, in theater terms, in improv, you help improvisers by giving them more constraints. And the more constraints you pile on an improviser, the easier it is for them to come up with something creative. And I wonder if you could talk a bit to that if you can about the creative process of applying rules.

Barry Joseph: I knew I could rely on you. Great question. Thank you, John. So, if you're not a game designer, you might not know that one of the main tools that a game designer uses is constraints. Pick up this ball and put it in a hole. Super boring. That hole is now really far away and you have to hit it with a stick and we're gonna count how many swings and I have golf. And having this kind of arbitrary goal with challenges is what makes it interesting, right? When Meryl Seacrest interviewed Stephen Sondheim for 30 plus hours in the mid 1990s, she chose, as one should, what she was gonna include or not include in her book. And one of the incredible delights for me was going to look at the original note she took from those interviews that are at Yale and listen to all of the interviews. And so I could see in the book what she was interested in, which was asking Sondheim in general, "What kind of games do you like? " And he says, "I don't like games where the rules are loose. I like ones that are kind of exact like chess." But I could go back to the original and see his example was, "I don't like games like Dungeons and Dragons because the rules are looser. I want them to be more exact." And that kind of order and structure is what he tended to look for in his games, whether he was playing them or designing them. And one might hypothesize, it was because it gave order and structure to how he was connecting with people and how he was letting them into his life, but that's a theme we often see, throughout his puzzles and game designs. One last question. Yes, over here. Hi, what's your name, sir?

Audience: My name's Ali. I've played games with Barry back in New York.

Barry Joseph: And I followed him all the way here.

Audience: As someone who's doubled in game design and failed many times. A lot of pain right now goes into game testing. Did Stephen Sondheim do game testing or?

Barry Joseph: Thank you. Real game designer question. So did Stephen Sondheim play test his games? You don't make a game and it's done. In any more way that you write a song for a show when it's done, right? You know, from show production that it has to be tried out of town and you're trying it with different voices and maybe you've shifted from one character to another and the audience doesn't like it, blah, blah. Same thing with games. And so, we know that from the people who worked with him later in his life, that when he did like treasure hunts at American Museum of Natural History, when he did them at City Center, he playtested. And the people who didn't design the game with him, but they were the ones managing the space and printing the stuff out and bringing the play testers together and calling up their friends saying, "Hi, can you come this Sunday to City Center? I have a new treasure hunt that Stephen Sondheim designed and we need to test it. " And they would be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be there. Tell me the time." And then as they were playing it, somehow would be watching and he would say... "Think out loud, tell me when it's difficult." And he would in real time with them understand how they were experiencing it and that gap between what he hoped for in his mind and what other people were experiencing to continually keep iterating to close that gap. And they talked about again and again, how he used those techniques. And it was exciting for me as a game designer to see that Sondheim, whether he was doing this in his mind intentionally as a game designer would or it just made perfect sense to him, was using those techniques because at the end of the day, what is that all about? It's about recognizing that I do not know everything. I have my blind spots and if I'm building something, it's not for me, it's for my audience, it's for my game players, it's for my puzzle designers. And to understand them, I have to spend time with them. I have to hear how they experience something and then keep modifying it for, to work with them. In theater, you hear how an audience responds, but with a puzzle like a treasure hunt, you got one shot. These are one time events. So being able to meet with people and see what works and doesn't work allowed him to figure out how to close that gap and figure out how he can match people's minds, but do it in a way that can elevate the other people at the same time. Thank you so much.