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[0:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show!

[0:20] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And today we are talking about Every Day A Little Death, a collection of crime fiction inspired by Sondheim.

[0:31] David Rigano: Yes.

[0:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The largest panel we have ever had.

[0:35] David Rigano: Absolutely.

[0:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. It was edited by Josh Pachter.

[0:39] David Rigano: But he brought nine authors.

[0:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nine other authors.

[0:42] David Rigano: And he is one of the authors in the book as well.

[0:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: This is a collection of short crime fiction.

[0:49] David Rigano: So every story is written by a different author.

[0:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There are 20 stories, and the title of every story comes from the title of a song from a different Sondheim project.

[1:05] David Rigano: It's about the same show.

[1:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, but project.

[1:09] David Rigano: Also TV and film projects in there as well.

[1:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You gotta throw in Dick Tracy.

[1:13] David Rigano: You gotta throw in Dick Tracy, you gotta throw in Evening Primrose.

[1:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[1:16] David Rigano: And they even had... They didn't have the cut songs from The Birdcage, though.

[1:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No.

[1:23] David Rigano: Although I would love a story for "It Takes All Kinds."

[1:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, yes. That's the deepest of cuts, probably.

[1:30] David Rigano: I do love that some of the Sondheim songs that were used were cut songs from other Sondheim projects.

[1:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[1:38] David Rigano: So Nathan Lane does sing a little bit of "Can That Boy Foxtrot," which is cut from Follies, and in the scene in Christine Baranski's office, Christine Baranski and Robin Williams sing "Love is in the Air," which was the cut original opening number from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

[1:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Somewhere in my files, I have... I wish, and I believe it was "Rainbows."

[1:59] David Rigano: Oh yeah, I have the Into the Woods movie, the old intended 1990s Jim Henson movie.

[2:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We have that sheet music here too.

[2:07] David Rigano: We have it in a... There was a list of unknown Sondheim songs, not a list, a book that we have here.

[2:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I remember finding it going, "Whoa."

[2:14] David Rigano: Oh, don't think I don't own that book.

[2:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, no, just making sure. This is more for our listeners than you.

[2:19] David Rigano: We're like those kids in a class who know the answer, but they're doing it so everyone else listens.

[2:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[2:25] David Rigano: Oh, teacher, you know about those songs, right?

[2:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah, that's who we are right now. That's for you guys.

[2:29] David Rigano: And but they even had a story inspired by a song from Here We Are.

[2:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice, yeah.

[2:37] David Rigano: And there was no song list in the program for Here We Are, and the album hadn't come out yet.

[2:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So when the title of the story has to be the title of the song, but you have to guess the title of the song.

[2:51] David Rigano: So yeah, it was very thorough, and my copy is full of underlines and circles and notes in the margin.

[3:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Many references.

[3:04] David Rigano: Easter eggs are plentiful.

[3:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love it.

[3:07] David Rigano: And it's really fun to see how many Easter eggs there are from the specific show that they picked, and how many are just general Sondheimian Easter eggs.

[3:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: See, I was so excited for this one. One, because I love Sondheim, but two, because I'm writing a murder mystery.

[3:23] David Rigano: Yes.

[3:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it does a very similar thing, but with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

[3:28] David Rigano: And all of the chapters are songs, are parody titles, basically, but not parody funny, parody more like scary versions of titles of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.

[3:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Such as "A Grand Night for Screaming."

[3:41] David Rigano: Uh-huh.

[3:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There is "Idle Lies," which is "Idle Vice."

[3:44] David Rigano: Oh nice.

[3:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There is a "Cock-Eyed Opportunist," uh-huh, about someone about to have an affair.

[3:52] David Rigano: Oh, what a beautiful warning.

[3:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's all these nice, but it also... the chapters reference the theme of the song, which is why I tried to like really stick with it.

[4:02] David Rigano: There's a "Bloody Scary" where a character gets killed.

[4:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[4:05] David Rigano: And but it always falls... "Bloody Scary" is "The Girl I Love."

[4:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[4:08] David Rigano: There's even one, "How to Resolve the Problems of Maria," where one of the characters named Maria... there is a not necessarily Maria, but there is a death sequence in there, and the body is found in the theater in a bathroom near the lobby, and the light shining in because all the lights are turned off in the theater, they're blacked out.

[4:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It is... there is a moonbeam that shines from outside into her open dead hand, and it is "How You Catch a Hand," and it's the last line of the chapter.

[4:40] David Rigano: And there's a lot of that.

[4:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She loves me some murder mysteries.

[4:45] David Rigano: Yes, murder.

[4:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, I love murder mysteries, I love crime fiction. So this was right up my alley.

[4:50] David Rigano: Yeah.

[4:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And to the point where now back in the first season, uh-huh, when we had Melissa Errico come in, she called me on the phone the night before, and we were chatting about what the event would be.

[5:06] David Rigano: And one of the things she said to me was, "David, I need someone up there with me who's gonna be a real Sondheim nerd."

[5:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[5:12] David Rigano: And I was like, "Melissa, I got you."

[5:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: A hundred percent.

[5:15] David Rigano: Because that was her Sondheim in the City album, and so we just Sondheim nerded out.

[5:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it was wonderful.

[5:23] David Rigano: It was so much that we had to make a two-parter.

[5:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[5:25] David Rigano: And that was how I met Melissa Errico, and I wound up working with her this year.

[5:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We did a show together that I was script supervisor on called The Story of a Rose.

[5:36] David Rigano: And it was Melissa leading the show with Georgia Bood joining her to be the guy in songs where she needed a guy.

[5:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it was musical directed by and all of the arrangements and orchestrations written by Ted Firth.

[5:51] David Rigano: Nice, with some new music by Ted Firth.

[5:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so it was this amazing show that we did in DC.

[5:58] David Rigano: And this event, Every Day a Little Death, was the day after the performance.

[6:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You came running back.

[6:07] David Rigano: So I went down to DC to do this show.

[6:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then I got on a train the next late morning and took the four or five hours, whatever it was, into Penn Station, and then I came right here directly with my suit.

[6:26] David Rigano: With your luggage, yes, I came directly from the train.

[6:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I had been reading the book on the way down, and then on the way back, I made my way through the whole... and then obviously in the hotel and stuff like that.

[6:40] David Rigano: Yeah, I spent this whole trip going down to DC with Melissa Errico and crew reading a Sondheim book, which was the first connection between Melissa and I in preparation for doing this event literally the day after.

[6:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I had said to the producer, I have to be able to be out of here to do this.

[6:56] David Rigano: Be out of here.

[7:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was like, after the show's done, it's done, right? Is there anything that's like... no, there's nothing. The next one, I was like, good, I'm out.

[7:07] David Rigano: Because I need to do the show, and then I need to get right back to Drama Bookshop for my ten-person panel.

[7:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Also, just because math is fun, thinking of ten people on the panel, congratulations.

[7:18] David Rigano: Our last episode, not this, is the one after that. Our last episode was our 75th episode.

[7:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which is to do that.

[7:26] David Rigano: And that was Matching Minds with Sondheim.

[7:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Matching Minds at Sondheim was a 75th.

[7:29] David Rigano: Which is crazy to believe.

[7:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because yes, we're in season three.

[7:34] David Rigano: Yeah.

[7:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, actually, speaking of that, I was at his 75th birthday.

[7:40] David Rigano: Really?

[7:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was at Sondheim's 75th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl.

[7:45] David Rigano: Yeah, I don't know if I've ever talked about that.

[7:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was at Sondheim's 75th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl.

[7:53] David Rigano: And we... I've seen clips of that concert.

[7:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I was there.

[7:56] David Rigano: I was there for that.

[7:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we snuck into the after party.

[8:01] David Rigano: My friend who I was with was a student of Jason Alexander who was in the show.

[8:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we'd talked to him before because we went to the rehearsal before, and then we ended up staying and seeing the show.

[8:12] David Rigano: And we walked him to the after party, and as Jason Alexander walked in, my friend walked in with him, and I just immediately followed, as did my husband and another friend.

[8:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the security person was like, "Excuse me."

[8:25] David Rigano: And my friend goes, "Oh, we're with Jason."

[8:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Total lie.

[8:29] David Rigano: Yep. But suddenly, in jeans and a t-shirt, I am in this after party that everyone is all dressed up at and meeting Carol Burnett and just like going back to thinking of all of the YouTube videos I watched.

[8:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Josh Groban and obviously Jason Alexander.

[8:47] David Rigano: Jason Alexander.

[8:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I met John Van Druten.

[8:50] David Rigano: I met Elaine Stritch.

[8:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my goodness.

[8:52] David Rigano: And my friend was like, "Oh, we saw the video of Elaine Stritch at Liberty."

[8:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she goes, "Did you see the real thing?"

[8:59] David Rigano: And we're like, "No, we're here in California."

[9:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She goes, "It's not the same."

[9:07] David Rigano: So just like getting to meet all of these people, all these people that I'm huge fans of.

[9:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then Mark Cherry.

[9:15] David Rigano: Yeah.

[9:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: From Desperate Housewives.

[9:17] David Rigano: I was... I saw that happen.

[9:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was so cool.

[9:19] David Rigano: So he was there. I got to talk to him.

[9:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then finally.

[9:24] David Rigano: I have pictures with her.

[9:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And Audra and Bernadette.

[9:27] David Rigano: Um, I have these photos with all of them from that event.

[9:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then pause.

[9:35] David Rigano: And then the crowd parted.

[9:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[9:40] David Rigano: And there was Stephen Sondheim.

[9:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh.

[9:42] David Rigano: Standing there talking to someone, and it got silent.

[9:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The world slowed down.

[9:51] David Rigano: And he made his way toward you.

[9:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He caressed your face.

[9:55] David Rigano: No.

[9:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh.

[9:56] David Rigano: I walked over and I thought of all of the things I needed to say to him about how Into the Woods made me love musicals when I hated them, and about how his work has inspired me and how I write musical theater now and how he's always been an idol and been someone that matters so much, and that so many turning points in my life have been that.

[10:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I went to say those things and I said, "Huh."

[10:20] David Rigano: Excuse me.

[10:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then walked away and did a glass of champagne as a shot.

[10:27] David Rigano: Yeah.

[10:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And came back and said the things I needed to say.

[10:30] David Rigano: Yeah.

[10:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we're going to take a photo together.

[10:32] David Rigano: Oh, I'm sure he is too.

[10:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's one of the few times I've ever been completely starstruck.

[10:36] David Rigano: And that's the thing is I don't get starstruck over actors really, except for one.

[10:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because, yeah.

[10:42] David Rigano: But because it's usually something about someone's brain.

[10:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And Sondheim's brain needs to be studied.

[10:50] David Rigano: Yes.

[10:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[10:51] David Rigano: Yeah. His mind needs to be matched.

[10:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So my two Sondheim stories are... my godfather used to be the chairman of the board of GMHC.

[11:00] David Rigano: Right.

[11:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So when I was in college, he would get me into these GMHC events.

[11:06] David Rigano: And one of them was for Sweeney Todd.

[11:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[11:08] David Rigano: This was the John Doyle revival of Sweeney Todd, starring Michael Service and Patti LuPone.

[11:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And there's the first time I saw Lauren Molina, who's become a friend, and I think she's insane talent.

[11:18] David Rigano: And so we sat like second row, and the show was amazing.

[11:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then we went to the after party at Sardi's, because I'm with the chairman of the board.

[11:31] David Rigano: And so of course he had all of these things that he had to like responsibilities that he had to like take pictures with people and shake hands and all whatnot.

[11:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so he was like, "Hey, can you run over to the bar and get me a Diet Coke?"

[11:42] David Rigano: And I'm 19.

[11:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so I run over to the bar and I get him a Diet Coke and me a ginger ale or something like that.

[11:47] David Rigano: And I'm standing there with both of them in my hands, and I turn my head, and there's Stephen Sondheim.

[11:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Ah, just standing at the bar.

[11:55] David Rigano: Circle of maybe five people around him, just talking about the show that night, about stuff.

[12:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I just stand there and start to soak it in.

[12:05] David Rigano: And I'm gone a few minutes, and my godfather eventually comes up and finds me.

[12:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He's like, "Hey, what happened?"

[12:12] David Rigano: And I go, this was where I was just like, "Uh," and I turn my head and I'm holding his Coke in one hand, my ginger ale in the other hand, and I kind of point and he goes, "Okay."

[12:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he takes his glass from me, and then I just turn and become part of the circle.

[12:28] David Rigano: And I would have been fine not to say a word, just like you said, this man is so smart.

[12:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[12:34] David Rigano: And he's just talking, and it is so intelligent.

[12:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I would have been so happy to just soak it all in.

[12:43] David Rigano: And then at one point, I guess he realized that he knew who everyone in the circle was except for one person.

[12:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he put his hand out to me and said, "Hi, I'm Stephen."

[12:53] David Rigano: Oh God.

[12:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it took everything from me not to go, "No shit."

[12:59] David Rigano: Yeah.

[12:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was like, "David, it was so nice to meet you."

[13:01] David Rigano: And then we had a little chat.

[13:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He was like the easiest person to talk to.

[13:04] David Rigano: Of course, he knows a lot of words.

[13:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[13:06] David Rigano: Yeah.

[13:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: My second story is that when I went to see 13 the musical on Broadway, yeah.

[13:14] David Rigano: Starring my now buddy Allie Trim, who's in Wicked on Broadway right now.

[13:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I don't know if I've told her. So Allie, if you're listening, I was there the night that Stephen Sondheim went to see it.

[13:26] David Rigano: My friend Lauren and I are going to see it, and we're sitting there, and we are like watching the show and trying to watch Sondheim at the same time.

[13:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then we're like... and I was like, "I've met him before, and I had a nice little conversation. Like, I bet we could say hi."

[13:39] David Rigano: Not like he'd remember me, but I'll still... I bet like from having that interaction, I bet we could just say hi.

[13:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So let's try to see if we can find ourselves in the same aisle as him when we're leaving.

[13:52] David Rigano: And he was coming one way down the across the back aisle. We were coming up our aisle, and we got like... they intersected right at the same time.

[14:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So we're like, here he is, he's right there. My friend Lauren puts her hand out, touches his shoulder, and she says, "Stephen," and he turns his head and he says, "Yes."

[14:11] Josh Pachter: And she says, Sondheim. And I think that if you're Stephen Sondheim at that stage in your life, you know that, like, first name, that's one thing. That's that last name spoken in a theater is going to perk up some ears. And he's not going to be able to get away from it. So as soon as she said his last name, he said, Oh, it's so nice to meet you. Thank you very much. Have a good day. And buzz beelined out of there. Right. Which, again, completely understandable. In a theater, fall a Broadway musical theater. That's one of us saying, Oh, hey, Lynn, when he was a bigger one, exactly. Which obviously we same. We never do. And then we go outside and she calls her brother and she goes, I just met Stephen Sondheim.

And I told him what an inspiration he is. And I told him that he's my favorite writer. And all this musical is my and she's going like into all of this detail on the phone with her brother about everything that she told Stephen Sondheim. And I tap her on the shoulder and she turns her head, she goes, What? I go, You didn't say any of that. She goes, I didn't. But I think that the way she said his name, he felt like all of it. He understands musical theater, he understands tone. Yes, he was in the intonation. We've told some really cool Stephen Sondheim stories. Let's let some of these authors tell some really spooky crime fiction-y Stephen Sondheim stories.

[15:37] Josh Pachter: So this Every Day a Little Death is the eighth of these inspired by anthologies that I've edited. As David said, I've done about two dozen anthologies all together. Previous volumes in this series were inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, and also by the films of the Marx Brothers. So Stephen Sondheim was a little bit of a departure. I wanted to do a Broadway-based book, and it seemed logical to pick Stephen Sondheim, especially because I did, in fact, cast the tie-breaking vote that gave Sondheim and Anthony Perkins their Edgar Award for the script for The Last of Sheila. So I put together a collection of 20 authors, each of whom selected a song from one of Sondheim's 20 musicals.

That was 19 stage musicals, up to and including the final show, Here We Are, and one made for TV musical, Evening Primrose. And it's really a thrill for me to have been able to gather half of the 20 contributing authors together here today. It was not an easy thing to do, and I'm very grateful to the nine contributors who have joined me today, some from as far away as Ypsilanti, Michigan. Go Blue or whatever color Eastern Michigan happens to be. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to call on each of the ten of us, including myself, because I also have a story in the book. And that means in the order that the musicals which house the songs that inspired the stories were first produced on the stage or on the screen.

You have the book and you know how to read. So you don't need me to read those bios to you. You can look them up for yourselves. What I will do is I will name the show that the song comes from. I'll tell you the year that show debuted, and I'll name the author and then turn the mic over to the author. And each of us will take about two to three minutes to tell you a little bit about the story that you will eventually read and the connection of that story to the song. Several of the contributors actually have personal or had personal connections to Sondheim, and I'm hopeful that they'll be able to squeeze a little bit of that in as well. Hopefully you'll find that as interesting as I have. And then when we've all had a chance to tell you a little bit about our work, hopefully there'll be enough time left over to take a few questions from the audience.

When that has happened, we're all going to convene up at the front of the store and give those of you who would like us to the opportunity to get your books signed by each of the ten of us. And if you would like us to fake signatures of some of the ten authors who aren't here, I'm sure we'd be happy to do that as well. Or Sondheim's, yeah, why not? But as long as you spell it correctly. It's EI, not IE.

[18:42] Josh Pachter: Okay, so first of all, the first show that's represented by the authors who are here this evening is Saturday Night from 1955. And that was in fact Sondheim's first show. And the author who took that challenge on is sitting over here to my right, your left, and that's Michael Portantiere.

[19:07] Michael Portantiere: I thought we'd tried this out. Whatever happened with the second mic. Hello? Yeah, we're talking. Hello? Yep. There you go. I am not from Ypsilanti, Michigan. I'm from Hell's Kitchen. But I'm still happy to be here. And actually, my story, I think, is the only part exception to what Josh just said because as I'm sure many of Saturday Night was to have been Sondheim's first Broadway musical, but the producer died. So it was supposed to have been produced in 1955. We're recording, but it's ready to mind for it. Yeah, let's go. Testing? Testing. Please do not adjust your set. All right, here we go. Yeah, that's supposed to be all right. How are we doing? Okay. It was to have been produced in 1955, but the producer died, and it was not produced until the late 90s, first in London, and then in Chicago, and then finally off Broadway.

It has not yet been produced on Broadway. And when Josh came gave me the concept of the anthology, I thought it sounded great, but by the time he got to me, most of the the shows the stories had already been assigned. And I think there were only three left, three or four left that I could pick from. We were just told that the stories should be inspired by the titles, really, basically, and then we were free to do whatever we wanted. But in my case, I used some of the character names from Saturday Night, and also the time frame, which is the 1920s, and also the fact that the main character lives in Brooklyn. But other than that, I just made something up because there's no crime in Saturday Night, but there is in mine.

Yeah, I think it's fun just even to read the titles in the of the stories, how many of them you could see would sound like, oh, that can make a really good crime story. Everything from Everybody Ought to Have a Maid to the Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea, etc. So I think it's a really great idea to begin with, and bravo to Josh for that.

[21:43] Josh Pachter: Thank you, Michael. All right, next we're going to hear from one of the shows that that Michael just mentioned. We're going to hear from Marcia Talley, who used the 1962 show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as her inspiration. Take it away, Marcia.

[22:02] Marcia Talley: Thank you so much, Josh. I've been a Sondheim fangirl since as long as I can remember, certainly back as far as 1962 when the forum first came out. And I had wanted to volunteer for Sweeney Todd, because that's a fabulous one, too. But my second choice was Everybody Ought to Have a Maid from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And when thinking about writing a crime story based on that, I thought, where am I gonna set it? But where else? But in Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace, right? I just I thought I would let my character Jessie introduce herself here and give you a little taste of the story. 18 months ago, after Michael Crawford hired me to work for the private security firm out of LA, my mother thought I'd be learning how to drive fast and shoot straight, not traipsing about after a 21-year-old pop star as she checked out the forum shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

I spent 10 weeks on bivouac with a paramilitary group outside of Pensacola, Florida. But a lot of good that training did me on my current assignment. Abigail Owen or Abby O to the fans who had stuck with her via YouTube and TikTok during her two lengthy rehabs. Is she the one who shaved her head my mother wanted to know? No, I said, You're thinking of Brittany Spears. So she's the one who got caught trying to smuggle cannabis into Singapore. Wrong again, I said. No, Abby just quietly drank herself out of a promising career. She's clean and sober for over six months now. This is her big comeback. She's opening for Garth Brooks next week. Him I know, mother said. You babysitting this girl, Jessie?

And the conversation continues for a little while, and then finally, Jessie has to say, when she's in not in rehearsal, yeah. I make sure she eats properly and doesn't socialize with her old drinking buddies, and I walk her dog. Ha, mother snorted. You might as well be a maid. I am not a maid, I insisted, remembering the countless hours I'd spent in the Florida boondocks crawling through the heat and the ticks and the chiggers while carrying a full backpack. So that's how the story starts. And since it's a crime story, there has to be a crime. And this one involves a dog napping and a couple of very engaging drag queens that are named after characters in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And I hope you'll find a lot of the Easter eggs that I planted in this story for you for your enjoyment. Thank you.

[24:56] Josh Pachter: Thanks, Marcia. One of the things that's fun for me when I put these books together is on the one hand, working with writers who I've never had yet the opportunity to meet face to face, but on the other hand, working with people who I already do know face to face. And I don't think I've ever had an author contribute to any of my books who I've known longer than the person you're about to hear from next. And that's Jeffrey Sweet, who I've known for over 50 years. And Jeff used as his inspiration a song from Sondheim's television musical, Evening Primrose from 1966. Jeff?

[25:31] Jeffrey Sweet: Okay, so it's 1966. I'm 16 years old. I turn on the TV to see this episode of a show called ABC Stage 67. And it's a musical based on the John Collier story, Evening Primrose, with us and it it starts, and it starts with this poet played by Anthony Perkins, singing about how he's going to hide from the world inside a department store, and he starts singing this song, If You Can Find Me, I'm Here. And within eight bars, I'm going, What the hell is this? I've never heard anything like this before. This is brilliant. And I was the show I thought was extraordinary. It got terrible reviews and rotten ratings. And I so that's 1966. Six or seven years later, I've come to NYU, I've got a degree in film, I'm hanging out in theater circles, beginning to write plays, beginning to write about the theater, and I go to a session in the Sardes building of a bunch of Broadway songwriters, and one of the songwriters is Sondheim.

And I go up to him and I say, Whatever happened to Evening Primrose? And he looked at me and he says, You can't remember that. This is before any of the songs had been recorded. And in fact, I started to sing to him from memory from since 1966. I started to sing, Take me to the world with clouds, let me see the world, and his jaw dropped, and he said, Quick, what's your address? So I gave him my address, and a few days later, a copy of I'm forgetting the name of what they were called, they were bespoke recordings that you played on your phone. Huh? Acetate. And acetate from Sondheim came of the score. Now, around that time, I had written a little one-act musical called Wicked John the Devil, based on an American folk story, and it was at a place called the Cabicular that doesn't exist anymore.

Sitting down at the piano to play, and I look in the audience, and there is Sondheim opening his notebook. Thank you. Hello. And so I play, I play the show. It's on a bill with a few other things. After the show is over, he goes, suggests I come his way. We go to a place on Eighth Avenue, and he sits down and gives me notes on my half-hour show. And then he's just in the mood to talk. And we sat and talked, I think for something like two hours, telling me one fabulous story after another. And then after that, at the end of it, he said, I have to tell you something. He says, I've been getting a lot of crap from people who say that I'm too intellectual a writer and nobody can remember my tunes.

And the fact that you remembered a song of mine from six years ago was tremendously encouraging. And that was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until I think the last email we exchanged was three days before he died. Of just constant back and forth.

[28:17] Jeffrey Sweet: We occasionally ran into each other. He was president of the Dramatists Guild when I was on the Dramatic School Council. And I have a habit of showing up to meetings early, and he would sometimes be coming over filled with whatever energy he had from leaving his piano. And I remember seeing him come in early, and I'd come in early, and it had just been announced that he was going to do Merrily We Roll Along. And I said, Let me guess, because I knew the structure of the original play. You're gonna start off with like discordant chords and elements, and as you go forward, it's gonna get clearer, and the last number is going to be open chords. And he just looked at me and went, mm-hmm. So it was, I mean, I've got other stories, but there are other people on the panel, so I'm gonna shut up now. Thank you, Jeff.

[29:08] Michael Portantiere: And thank you, not just for shutting up, but for speaking up. Almost, but not quite as long as I've known Jeff. I've known our next speaker, Brian Cox, who I've known for about 40 years. And Brian took as his inspiration a song from the 1970 musical Company. Brian?

[29:27] Brian Cox: Yeah. It was Barbara Streisand that introduced me to Sondheim. I grew up, I knew three musicals that my mother watched: Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oklahoma. That was all I knew of musical theater. And I moved to New York when I was about 19, and I had a walkman, for anyone that remembers what those were. And I obtained Barbara Streisand's Broadway album. And I listened to that until it wore itself out. And there were two songs on that one in particular that were from Sondheim. And it was Being Alive and Ladies Who Launch. And they just blew me away. And so when Josh approached me about submitting a story for this anthology, I immediately went to Company. Even though I might say that it's not necessarily my favorite musical of his.

[31:30] Brian Cox: Winter, which are brutal. And yeah, it's cold and there's snow. And I went up there and it was just last year, and there was no snow. And they were all complaining that nobody was coming up to snowmobile. And I said, I guess this is what I've got to do now. I have to set it in D UP in winter where everyone is upset that there's no snow. It was a delight to write and to figure out how to put little cues in there about Company. And I just want to thank Josh for the opportunity. It was a total joy to write it.

[32:05] Josh Pachter: Thank you, Brian. And I actually just want to interject really quickly because when I was reading the book, and in your introduction, you said that you encouraged the authors to put Easter eggs in. And I was on a train down to DC, and I reached into my bag and pulled out my pencil immediately and started taking notes and underlining things in the margins. And I think that you're all going to want to do just that because there are hundreds, hundreds of Easter eggs that are so much fun to follow in this book. And I'll turn it back over to Josh.

[32:41] Josh Pachter: That's one of the things I always like to do with these books is encourage the authors to Easter egg themselves into a stupor because it means that not only are the books fun for mystery fans, but they're also fun for fans of the composer of the music, but they're also fun for treasure hunters. So I'm going to proud Papa for just a minute here before I introduce our next speaker and point out that Christopher Zagorski and his writing occasional writing partner, Drew Ann Love, who's sitting in the second row here. Sometimes I invite people who have contributed to anthologies of mine before to contribute again, and Chris and Drew Ann did a story together for my Beatles book, which last year won not one, not two, but three different awards for the best short crime story of the year.

They won the Agatha Award, the Anthony Award, and the Macavity Award, all three of them. That's in my experience unique for any story to win all three of those, and to make it even sweeter, it was for both of them the first short crime story they had ever written. So quite an accomplishment. Drew is resting on her laurels, but Christopher, a big Sondheim fan, has contributed a book to this anthology, and it comes from a song that appears in the show Follies from 1971. And Chris, I'm gonna swing this mic. Oh, you've got one. Great. Okay. So Chris.

[34:02] Christopher Zagorski: So I was joined this collection pretty early in, so I grabbed Follies as soon as I heard about it. And I knew it would be Losing My Mind. It screams as a crime story title to begin with. And my actual first, you saw Barbara Streisand, my first hearing of Losing My Mind was Liza Minnelli's techno version with the Pet Shop Boys. And it made me seek out the musical and find out more. So when I looked at Follies, I wanted to see what was different about it from other Sondheim works, and of course it's one that has some supernatural elements. Those ghosts of those showgirls are wandering the stage the whole show. So I said, Let me do something supernatural. It's not my inclination, but I was like, let me go ahead and do that.

So I came up with the concept of in order for the government to help curb the unemployment rate, they've decided to allow living beings to travel down to hell to work in the shops that exist down in hell. So my main character is a barista. He's a young barista who works at Infernal Grounds. I have a shirt on that would be similar to what he would wear. And while he's working, his name is Salvador Durante, after Sally Durant, the character who sings Losing My Mind. And he meets a man who died during the Stonewall era, and he realizes that there's an injustice that he wants to correct. Now he doesn't really want to do this because it would be great for the LGBTQ community. He thinks it's going to really make this man fall in love with him.

So he has ulterior motives. And we talked about Easter eggs. I'm pretty sure my story has the most Easter eggs of all of them. There are 32 of them. I've counted them. Everything from references to the song Losing My Mind to the show Follies to other shows I've thrown in there. And then there's a personal reference in there. One of my favorite musicals of all time is Rent. And it has a connection to Sondheim in that Jonathan Larson was mentored by Sondheim. So I threw that in there. So there's a very brief mention of that will reflect for people who know Rent. And I just had a ball with it. It was just a great thing, and I'm enjoying spending so much time in hell. I'm writing other stories set down there.

[36:09] Michael Portantiere: Thank you, Chris. And when we do the signing later on, you need to take a close-up look at the shirt that Christopher is wearing. It's actually the logo from the coffee shop in hell. So when I edit these books, obviously a book needs a title, and I'm always looking for one song by the artist, which would be a good title for a book of crime stories. And for this particular book, it seemed logical that the title of the book should be Every Day a Little Death from A Little Night Music. And I almost always will write the title story myself. And in this case, I did. So even though I'm not sitting next to Christopher, I'm gonna talk about my story a little bit next. And I want to actually start out by saying that when David introduced me at the very beginning, he mentioned that I'm recently retired from a lengthy career in education.

And my first ever job as a teacher was not in Ypsilanti, but not too terribly far away. I taught at Cass Technical High School in Detroit. And right in the third row, there's Beth Halloween, who was one of my students years ago at Cass Technical High School, my first ever year as a teacher. And that year, the department that I was teaching in, the performing arts department, our department chairperson was able to wangle tickets to see the first national touring company of A Little Night Music. And the faculty in the department all got invited to go and see the show. And she, Fran, actually was able to get us a backstage visit with the star of the show, Margaret Hamilton, who was the wicked witch of the West, of course, in The Wizard of Oz.

And I couldn't go for reasons I have long forgotten. But this was the performing arts department. So melodramatically, I said to my department chair Fran, Margaret Hamilton's autograph, I'll die. So Monday morning came, and Fran brought me a program from the show, and on the cover of the program was written, Dear Josh, don't die. Margaret Hamilton. Which ever since has been one of my very most prized possessions. So I was delighted to give myself the opportunity to write a story inspired by Every Day a Little Death, like the show A Little Night Music. My story is set right around the year 1900 in Sweden. And I did something that's really very different for me. Usually in my crime stories, the crime is pretty much front and center.

But because in Sondheim's work, often subtext is where a lot of what's important happens. I decided to write a story in which, if you read the story superficially, you may wonder what it's doing in this book. Because absolutely nothing whatsoever happens in this story on a surface level. But if you read beneath the surface, there's an awful lot going on. And that's all I'm going to say about it.

[39:19] Michael Portantiere: Okay, now we'll go back down to the front row. In 1976, Sondheim's show was Pacific Overtures, and here to talk with you about his contribution to our anthologies, David Spencer.

[39:33] David Spencer: About 15 years ago, my friend and colleague Jerry James and I attempted a small jazzy noir musical about a career thief in the big city. Jerry would be librettist, I would be composer lyricist, but we were hammering out the story together. Our process was enjoyable, but the output was feeling labored and the urgency slipped away. But I really liked the trio of central characters we created. And they never completely stopped gestating at the back of my mind. When I got the invitation to be part of this lovely anthology, my reflex was to ask for Pacific Overtures. Recurrently my favorite Sondheim musical, It Changes. And despite the show's more poetic song titles, I kept returning to the advantages of floating in the middle of the sea.

Then, of course, I thought about the orphaned characters from our caper musical. And I asked Jerry if he'd want to help plot a new story featuring them. Jerry didn't have the spare bandwidth at the time, but he encouraged me to go out and do it on my own. I had long since begun thinking of the characters as continuing series leads, and because the triumvirate were being transplanted from a one-off theatrical project set in the 70s to a kind of mid-season episode in 2025. I revised their skill sets and backgrounds, but their personalities, interrelationships, and functions remained essentially the same. They are, from the barrio, a master thief known as Teaser, because he has the rep of being able to open anything he gets his hands on, to tease open anything he gets his hands on.

Pran, civilian importer of exotic fruits for Asian markets, underworld exporter of blueprints and security grids. He plans the heists. And from Brooklyn, Gadge for Gadget. Chattery little guy might remind you of a 1940s movie stoolie, but in fact, a former aerospace engineer and an eccentric genius. He devises what Pran imagines and Teaser puts to use. Now I had to figure out what the hell to do with them. In these troubled times, I take a lot of refuge in animal videos on YouTube. And one day I saw one in which an animal fairly conscripts a fellow off his course to help with a problem. Now we've all seen variations on that trope. But what the guy was doing and the specificity of the animal and the animal's problem struck me as unique.

And I thought, okay, Teaser's going to steal something. He gets waylaid, and instead of being a criminal, he's a good Samaritan. And that idea sucked. At best, it was facile. Look how Teaser uses everybody's skill set for good. Phoei. And then I thought, what if I reverse that?

[42:27] Josh Pachter: Rather than have teaser get way-laid on the way in, what if he gets waylaid on the way back when everybody thinks they're free and clear? With that, the entire story unlocked. The heist object became the ancestral link to Pacific Overtures. The title earned its keep, the stakes became very high, and writing it was some very serious juice. And I hope you like it. Thank you, David. And since I bragged on Chris and Drew Ann's Beatles story, I should brag on David's here too for a moment. There's a writer-critic named Robert Lepresti, who once a week puts out a blog post about he reads a lot of short stories, and he promotes the best short story that he has read during the previous week. And two weeks ago, his pick for the best short story of the week was David's The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea.

And as long as I'm bragging on contributors to the book, can I just take one minute and brag on one of the authors who is not here with us this evening? When you get to the story called Hello, Little Girl from Into the Woods by Rebecca K. Jones. I don't think it says this anywhere in the book, but I should mention that Rebecca K. Jones is an award-winning novelist whose father happens to be me. Okay, so moving right along here. Next up we have my good friend Joe Goodrich, whose story comes from is inspired by the nineteen seventy-nine musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Joe?

[44:12] Joe Goodrich: Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Drama Bookshop, and fellow contributors. As is my custom on such occasions, I've carefully prepared a few spontaneous remarks. Call it the playwright's curse. If it isn't on the page, it isn't on the stage. Sown Minnesota. Time. A Sunday morning in nineteen seventy-nine. Goodrich addresses the audience. A review of the Sweeney Todd original cast album in the Minneapolis Star Tribune piqued my curiosity. I wouldn't say I was a morbid child, but I was reading Stanley Ellen when other kids were reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I worshipped at the shrines of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. That Sunday afternoon, I bought the two record set from Musicland. My friend Kevin Egiland had a record player with a built-in cassette deck, and he made a tape of the show so we could drive around late at night on deserted country roads and scare the hell out of ourselves.

My story, No Place Like London, is set in the early eighties. I was a rabid Anglophile back then, and I'd have sold a kidney to set foot on that sceptered aisle. I didn't make it to that other Eden, that demi paradise, until much later. But Celia Swanson, a college friend, studied theater in London for most of nineteen eighty-five and told me all about it. So I drew up on fragments of her experience, suitably transformed, for parts of the story. Thank you, Celia. And thank you, Clive Saunders, who once lived in number nine, Coronation Court, Brewster Gardens, W106AL, UK. I'd also like to thank Anna Malloy and Maeve Price. In the trough of the pandemic, we would we three would gather to listen to records and sing loudly and lift each other's spirits. Sweeney Todd was our flat out favorite. I don't think we'd have survived those terrible years without each other and Mr. Sondheim. Thanks so much.

[46:26] Josh Pachter: Thank you, Joe. We're gonna roll right along. Easter egg. I'm thinking gladly, happily. Anyone have a better suggestion? Come on, merely. We will merrily roll along with the 1981 show, Merrily We Roll Along, and we'll hear from Julie Henrikus.

[46:50] Julie Henrikus: I was really thrilled to be asked to be part of this anthology. Short stories are not my happy place. I tend to start novels when I very start a short story. But I love theater, and Josh knew that. And like others, I was towards the end, so we're gonna figure out what we're gonna get here. And Merrily We Roll Along came out when I was in college. And I had a friend who was determined to be a musical director on Broadway, which he ended up being, who met Mr. Sondheim and kept trying to get me on a bus to see the show when it was in previews, because he wasn't sure. He was so excited about it, and of course, it closed very quickly afterwards. But he made he bought the album and made me listen to it a million times.

And so I know the show well enough. I've not seen great productions of it. And I think for most of us who love Sondheim, you once in a while see a great one, but sometimes wow, that was something. So I chose Not a Day Goes By because that's like a torch song. That is it stands alone. You've heard it sung in bars and cabarets and everywhere a million times. It makes me weep when you listen to the words. And if you're in a tough place in your life, it really makes you weak. It's very cathartic. So I found as many versions as I could and just put them on a loop and kept working on this story. And I was also I'm doing research on art forgeries for a project. And I was rereading the Vicky Bliss series.

I promise I'm gonna get here. And she falls in love with a master thief who at the end is says he's redeemed, he goes straight. Like when he meets her, he goes straight. And I'm crying over not a day goes by, and I'm thinking about this fabulous Vicky Bliss series by Elizabeth Peters, which I highly recommend. And I thought, what happens if he didn't go straight? What happens if he lied to her? That's the heartbreak. The I love you so much I cannot stand to have you in my life. And I think most of us know those, have those moments where it's yeah, get out. And so I thought, wouldn't that be interesting? Now I worked in theater for many years and in the performing arts on the admin side. So I think Josh was expecting a theater inspired, but it was like, no, this is the idea that came about.

So Not a Day Goes By is one of his great songs, standalone songs. I also love that in Merrily We Roll Along was a failure that he kept rewriting and rewriting. And as a writer and as an artist, that inspires me that he never gave up until he figured it out. And that's what we all do, and I'm so glad that he kept going.

[49:42] Josh Pachter: Thank you, Julie. Not the last story in the book, but the last contributor that we'll hear from this evening, Cheryl Davis, who selected as her inspiration one of the songs from the 1990s show, Assassins. Cheryl?

[49:58] Cheryl Davis: Thank you, Josh, and thank you so much for inviting me to take part and to play with y'all. One of the reasons I chose Assassins is I remember seeing it off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, and I went in, I personally adore history myself. I'm a big history buff. So I thought, oh my God, it's not I'm in history, I'm so there. But then I was trying to think of like, how the hell do you musicalize the Kennedy assassination? And I went in that from the moment I went in, it's like, how is he gonna do it? How's he gonna do it? But I was so caught up in how he musicalized the other situations that by the time we got to Kennedy, I was like, I totally forgot about Kennedy until the time we got there.

So that's one of the reasons I really enjoy Assassins. And as Josh pointed out, the gun song title would be perfect, which is of course why I didn't choose it. Because I was the kid who, when they gave you uh say assignments, I always tried to think, what if I write about something else though than what you suggested? How about that? And one of the things that always struck me about another national anthem was not even so much the songs uh the song lyric but a statement and the mailman won the lottery. And that just always stuck with me as a thought. Like the mail mailman, the mailman won the lottery. It's like it's but it's supposed to be hopeful. There are people who are not gonna be too happy that this idrid in your neighborhood won the lottery and you didn't. And why is that?

How does he deserve to win the lottery? And I don't, which is essentially the whole motif of assassins. So then I got into the period of like now, unfortunately, with dissatisfied people looking at somebody having something that they don't, and trying to think, how do I get that from myself? And not being very competent, kind of fall into rabbit holes of messing up how to conduct the theft, which then becomes a kidnapping, which then becomes a variety of other things. But so that's another national anthem.

[52:00] Josh Pachter: Thank you, Cheryl. We were actually supposed to have one other contributor here this evening, Alison Hubbard, who did take on as her show Sondheim's last show, Here We Are. Uh, but unfortunately she had uh an issue that cropped up at the last minute and wasn't able to join us. And I was really hoping that she would be here, especially because that show was the biggest challenge of this entire book. Because at the time that we were getting the book ready to go to press, the not only had the lyrics to the songs not yet been released, but not even the song titles were available yet. So we were really struggling to figure out how we were gonna get a story inspired by the lyrics from that show to happen, given that the lyrics and even the titles weren't available.

But bless Allison's heart, she figured out a way to do it and made it work. Well, thank you all. Our contributing authors, as I said, I read this book on the train. I was actually in Alexandria, Virginia last night to do a show with Melissa Erico, who I met because she did an event here at Drama Bookshop. Tess was here for that, but which which was the album drop of her album, Sondheim in the City. And she called me up the day before and she said, David, I just need to make sure that I'm gonna have a real Sondheim nerd up there with me to just geek out over all of the Sondheim minutia. And I was I said, Melissa, I've got you. So this being the event that was today, when I was planning my travel from this show that I did last night, I said, I have to get back to New York in time to be at drama bookshop for this Sondheim event.

And it I'm there, I think I've got three stories left, and it's so much fun. One of the things that I'm really loving about this is that we do have authors, you mentioned this in the in the intro that come from so many different backgrounds. So I just wanted to take a quick poll of who you've assembled tonight. Whose background is in crime writing? Okay, so about kind of half for tonight. Who here writes about the theater? For and who here is a playwright? It's and it I love the overlap as well. So also about half. So I love that we have so many different perspectives. Plus, plus so many of you took the inspiration in so many different directions. We like we have a story that is about a production of Sweeney Todd.

We have a story that is about an updated Romeo and Juliet, not Westside's story, but a different updated Romeo and Juliet. And then some that really say, here's a lyric, and I'm just gonna go from there. So it's it's such a fun and you're you guys are gonna have so much fun with it. And we did want to open it up to you all if you have questions for our editor or for any of the authors as well. We probably have about 10 minutes or so for questions.

[55:10] Audience Member: Yes. Were any of these stories directly based on the song itself?

[55:19] Josh Pachter: Or they took the song and they just were and the question is were any of these stories directly based on the content of the song? Let me tell you the prompt that I gave to the authors. Um, and this will at least partially answer the question, and then I'll fill in the second half of the answer. What I asked the authors to do was to write a story that first of all had to be a crime story, and surprisingly enough, some of the stories that I get for these books have nothing even remotely resembling a crime in them. So I need to read I I need to turn those down. Some people just you had one job, write a crime story. So it has to be a crime story, it has to clearly be inspired by the song, and I think it was uh Michael or David, who said something about that the prompt is to be inspired by the title.

That's actually almost right, but not quite right. The story has to have the same title as the song, but it needs to be inspired by the song. And you cannot quote the lyrics to the song. That would be a copyright violation. Titles cannot be copyrighted under American copyright law. So we can use the title of the song, but we cannot use the lyrics to the song. You can use a single word, a two or three-word phrase, and that's where Easter egging, or one of the places where Easter egging comes into play.

[56:36] Josh Pachter: So I encourage authors to use an image from the lyrics, to use a phrase from the lyrics, but not to quote entire lines from the lyrics. I also say please don't simply retell the story that the song tells. Because that's really not much in the way of a challenge. That's something pretty much anybody could do. Just take the song's story, if it has one. Not all songs tell a story. But allow the song to spark your imagination and see where it takes you. And sometimes it doesn't take you particularly far, but sometimes it can take you, as you'll see when you read the book, really very far afield. I hope that answers. To Upper Michigan and to hell. Same thing.

[57:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hey no, hey no. Do we have any other questions? What I would love to know, Josh, and then if any of the authors want to chime in, you've talked about this a little bit, but what was the selection process in terms of how you gave people the choice of show and then of song?

[57:46] Josh Pachter: As far as let me turn that backwards. As far as the choice of song goes, I leave that entirely up to the author. In terms of choice of show, it's really pretty much first come, first served. The first one of these books that I did, which was the Joni Mitchell book, I was willing to have up to two authors pick the same album. And so although Joni at that time only had 17 studio albums, there were 25 stories in the book, so that some number of the albums had two stories each. But because Sondheim had 20 shows, I knew there were only going to be 20 stories. I didn't want to leave any shows out, so I wanted there to be exactly 20 shows. And I don't remember at this point who I invited first, but whoever I invited first got first crack.

I pick whichever one of the 20 shows you want. Actually, no, wait, I got first pick. Because I knew that I wanted the book to be called Every Day a Little Death, and that meant I was gonna write that song. So whoever I invited next got the pick of the remaining 19 shows. And as another Pacific Overture would get to a point where there aren't all that many shows left. And I did have one or two people who said to me, I'm not interested because the show I would want to do is no longer available. So then you go to the next person on the list.

[59:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Did anyone obviously you're like, okay, Sweeney Todd's gonna go fast, Into the Woods is gonna go fast. Did anyone jump for an obscure show right away?

[59:17] Josh Pachter: Yes, we know the story. I think it was one of the first people I invited, and Jeff surprised me by jumping right on to Evening Primrose. And then I also I knew that maybe oops. I also two of the people in the book are friends of mine who I could recommend. David Spencer also was a friend of Sondheim's, and I know it was a talented writer, so I instantly recommended him. And Cheryl Davis is an old friend and a writer I knew when I so I thought it would be nice to have real playwrights who were part of the community who could draw on that. So I will take credit. And that's credit where credit is due. And they're paying me 10% of the...

[59:57] David Rigano: And that raises another point that's maybe worth mentioning, and that is, and this is where I thought you were going, David, with the question, but you veered off in another direction, which is how do I pick the contributors?

[1:00:11] Josh Pachter: Yes, that's something that I want you to do. And discuss that a little bit in the intro, but I would love more of.

[1:00:16] Josh Pachter: I have a couple of different criteria that I use. One of them is geographical. So that for example, when I did the Beatles book, I wanted to use a lot of writers who are English. When I did the Grateful Dead book, I wanted to use a lot of writers from the Bay Area. Billy Joel, I wanted to use a lot of New York writers. Same thing with Paul Simon, same thing with Sondheim. So for Sondheim, I wanted to use a bunch of New York-based or people who are originally from New York. A second thing that I'm always looking for is I want my contributors to be as diverse as possible a group of writers. I'm sick and tired being one myself of books that are populated exclusively by aging straight white men.

Enough already. To to women, to transgender authors, to members of the LGBTQIA community, to people of color, to members of underrepresented communities. I'm also always looking to give people who are early in their writing careers the opportunity to get a professional publication, even to people who have not yet previously published fiction. That's why I reached out to Chris and Drew Ann for the Beatles book. I knew that they were people who were active members of and extremely popular members of the crime fiction community, but had not written fiction themselves, and I had a hunch they would want to, which turned out to be true. I know that David had not previously written crime fiction.

[1:02:01] David Spencer: I actually did. In the mid-90s, I had the opportunity to write a TV tie-in novel, and I wrote an original novel based on the TV series Alien Nation, which was half science fiction, half cop show.

[1:02:14] Josh Pachter: Good thing I didn't know that. Because yank.

[1:02:21] Josh Pachter: So I have a variety of different criteria, and I'm also finally, and then I'll stop. I'm also looking to combine, and I referred to this earlier, people who I already know with people who I don't know, because I'm a social character and I like to meet new people. So this is always an opportunity for me to meet people that I haven't met before.

[1:02:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is anyone here was a first timer to your club of books?

[1:02:46] Josh Pachter: Yeah, I'd not worked with Brian before, although I knew him. I had not worked with Jeff before, although I knew him. I'd never worked with Cheryl before. I knew Julie, but had not worked with her before. Joe has written for me a couple times before. David, I had not worked with before, Chris once before. Michael, I had not worked with before. Marcia, I've known for some years, but she had not written for me before. And then the Ten Who Are Not Here, same kind of thing. Some I knew before, some I did not. Rebecca K. Jones, I've known her whole life.

[1:03:11] Josh Pachter: Yes. In fact, I first encountered her nine months before her birth. She was small then.

[1:03:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is anybody else?

[1:03:25] Josh Pachter: Yeah.

[1:03:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, you're right here. I can give you mine. Okay. Does Did you ever ask somebody to write about a book like in Sondheim that you knew wasn't in a Sondheim aficionado or didn't love Sondheim, or if you did Joni Mitchell that didn't like Joni Mitchell? You ever do that?

[1:03:39] Josh Pachter: Oh yeah.

[1:03:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Go ahead.

[1:03:43] Josh Pachter: Let me pass this one down. It'll be easier. I always like to joke that for the Beatles book that we did that we won the story for Ticket to Ride. Drew and I were probably the only people in the collection who knew the monkeys version of Ticket to Ride better than we knew the Beatles version. But the lyrics were the same, so we went with it. And even more so than that, when I did the one that was not based on songs, I did the Marx Brothers book, Monkey Business, Crime Fiction inspired by the films of the Marx Brothers. I wanted the stories in that book to be funny because Marx Brothers. And one of the people in the mystery crime fiction community who writes the funniest is a woman named Barb Goffman, who has won 75,000 awards for her short fiction.

And I approached Barb and asked her to do a story for the book, and she said, but I hate the Marx Brothers. And I said, Great, then you should take as your inspiration the Marx Brothers film Humor Risk. Now, how many of you have never heard of the Marx Brothers film Humor Risk? That's because there is no such film. The Marx Brothers actually made a silent film called Humor Risk that was shown one time to a preview audience and then was apparently destroyed. And it it doesn't exist. It has never been seen by anyone except that one preview audience. And I said, So because the film has never been seen by anybody still alive, you can do anything you want, Barb. And Barb took on that challenge and wrote a story that's actually quite funny about a search for an apparently not lost copy of that film. And it's a really good story, and it worked well in the book. Later, Barb came back to me and said, you know what? It's not the Marx Brothers I hate, it's the three Stooges.

[1:05:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And while you're on the subject of monkey business, that book is getting a re-release.

[1:05:42] Josh Pachter: Yeah. The first three of the books in the series were published by a company called Untreated Reads that wound up being sold to another publisher. And when that publisher doesn't like short stories, so I asked them to return the rights to those three anthologies to me. So it's out and available. The second and third ones, and that's Billy Joel and the Marx Brothers, those are going to be published later this year by a Level Best Books, which is the same company that has now done the Sondheim book. So those are coming. Monkey Business and the Billy Joel one is called Only the Good Die Young. So if you love this book and you love crime fiction, and aside from Sondheim, you also happen to be Billy Joel fans, or you happen to be Marx Brothers fans, we all have something to look forward to this summer.

[1:06:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the Billy Joel book is going to have one extra new story that wasn't in the original version based on the newest Billy Joel single, Turn the Lights Back On.

[1:06:51] Josh Pachter: So does anyone we can take one more, if anyone has. And if not, that's okay too, because you all have books that need to be signed. And I have to thank Josh and all of these wonderful authors for coming and joining us tonight. Please help me one more time in thank you.

[1:07:17] Audience Member: I want to read all of those stories.

[1:07:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes. You read a few of them.

[1:07:22] Josh Pachter: I've read all of them at this point. It is so much fun. And part of what they were saying is that they could really take their inspiration from anywhere. And some of them were theater people, theater writers writing this fiction. But some of them were just fiction writers who also were theater fans or musical fans. And so some of the stories live in the world of the theater. One of them is the West Side Story one is backstage at a production of West Side Story. Whereas others, like really most of the others, have nothing to do with the theater. Again, the Sondheim connections are all just little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout. It is so it's really fun that while they're all crime fiction, they also all feel like they own have their own little personality, their own genre.

[1:08:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I met a lot of the authors, and they were that same way too.

[1:08:40] Josh Pachter: Yes, yeah. It was afterwards, and it was just what a group. Of personalities and types, especially when you saw like some of them were just extemporizing and talking about whatever, and some of them were like pulling prepared speeches out of their lapel pockets to discuss their process. So yeah, it was such a fun, weird mixed bag of people who wrote this really fun, weird mixed bag. Because they all agreed on one thing that Sondheim is a legend.

[1:09:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes. But speaking of legends, yes, we had a legend in the store recently, which is inspiring our next one. If you hear the disappointment in my voice, it's the second time that this legend's been in the store that at a time that I have not been.

[1:09:29] Josh Pachter: Yeah, and I got to meet them twice now.

[1:09:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. We're talking about the legendary Bette Midler.

[1:09:36] Josh Pachter: Which the Divine Miss M.

[1:09:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Exactly. And recently, not recently, a while back, we had an event.

[1:09:44] Josh Pachter: Yes.

[1:09:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so that is gonna be our next episode.

[1:09:47] Josh Pachter: Yeah.

[1:09:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which is not by Bette Midler.

[1:09:50] Josh Pachter: No, it is not by Bette Midler.

[1:09:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But we're gonna have some Bette Midler stories.

[1:09:53] Josh Pachter: Yes, we are.

[1:09:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: All right, so remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Please subscribe to the Drama Book Shop on Eventbrite so that you can be alerted whenever we add in-person events to our calendar. Give us some likes and some reviews on all the places that you can. It's fun to have some correspondence, and it really does help in the world of podcast algorithms. Remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Drama Bookshop. And so can we. And we will see you at the bookshop.