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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's episode is Matching Minds with Sondheim, the puzzles and games of the Broadway legend.

[0:29] David Rigano: Which if you never have attempted to match minds with Sondheim, I would recommend don't.

[0:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No.

[0:36] David Rigano: But do read the book.

[0:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Absolutely.

[0:38] David Rigano: I mean, just the way his mind worked, just listening to his lyrics and listening to his music.

[0:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like it is right there, you gotta know that he likes puzzles.

[0:47] David Rigano: But if you weren't aware of that, he was an infamous puzzler and was constantly not only doing puzzles and looking forward to new types of puzzles, but he would create puzzles.

[1:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And at one point, I think it was like right after Anyone Can Whistle, or something like that, when he needed some money that Broadway wasn't bringing in.

[1:10] David Rigano: He wrote word puzzles for I think The New Yorker.

[1:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh wow.

[1:14] David Rigano: Okay.

[1:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:15] David Rigano: Some something like that.

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

[1:18] David Rigano: He wrote word puzzles.

[1:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And that's how it was like his day job.

[1:22] David Rigano: We had some of the examples, because we had a really cool exhibit here that Barry Joseph brought in of many of Sondheim's puzzles, whether it was the puzzles that were cast gifts, casting crew gifts after the show, or puzzles that he wrote.

[1:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it was really incredible to see.

[1:37] David Rigano: There was one that it was an invitation for a dinosaur scavenger hunt.

[1:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He wrote the scavenger hunters.

[1:47] David Rigano: Hosted by Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker.

[1:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my god.

[1:51] David Rigano: Of course.

[1:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The Natural History Museum, obviously written or created by Stephen Sondheim.

[1:56] David Rigano: And I looked at that invitation and thought there is nothing on here that does not call my name.

[2:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Sondheim, Dinosaurs, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, like imagine also like being Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, so that you can just be like, let's ask Steve Sondheim to make a puzzle for us.

[2:12] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my gosh.

[2:12] David Rigano: I would have loved to have had Steve Sondheim write a puzzle for me.

[2:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And at one point, at one point, Greg Edelman was just in the store.

[2:19] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Just in here.

[2:20] David Rigano: And so we started talking about Sondheim.

[2:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he's oh, I have that passion puzzle at home.

[2:27] David Rigano: That was an opening night gift.

[2:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, with his initials on it.

[2:30] David Rigano: Because the one we had here, the poster we had here of the puzzle was Marin Mazzie's.

[2:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then we had another one of the puzzles for Into the Woods, the revival.

[2:40] David Rigano: Um, not the recent revival, but the early 2000s.

[2:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, exactly.

[2:45] David Rigano: What was fun is I got to help put together that puzzle inside the display.

[2:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, and it took us so long.

[2:50] David Rigano: I thought I'm gonna hop over here.

[2:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There's not a line at the register, and Flora looks pretty covered, so I'm gonna help.

[2:56] David Rigano: He said, Do you want to help me put this together?

[2:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I was like, absolutely, I'm so honored.

[2:59] David Rigano: And then we were going for a while, and he had a time-lapse camera going, and I'm so glad because it would have been so long.

[3:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I know he posted on Instagram a video of us putting together that puzzle.

[3:11] David Rigano: But what's really interesting, putting together that puzzle.

[3:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[3:14] David Rigano: Putting it together.

[3:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[3:16] David Rigano: What was really interesting though is the puzzles don't have flat edges.

[3:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So you don't know if you're working with the sides of a puzzle.

[3:24] David Rigano: Like you know how we get like those little corner pieces, those side pieces.

[3:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That does not happen with these.

[3:29] David Rigano: Like it's kind of like his songs.

[3:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[3:31] David Rigano: There's no edges.

[3:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You don't know if you're at the beginning of the edge.

[3:36] David Rigano: Exactly.

[3:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But you get to the end of it and suddenly you're like, oh, now I can't.

[3:40] David Rigano: It all makes sense.

[3:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[3:42] David Rigano: All makes sense.

[3:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's all coming back to me now.

[3:45] David Rigano: Famous Sondheim lyric, right?

[3:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We could yes, yeah, infamously.

[3:49] David Rigano: We could go on and on about our experience with Sondheim puzzles, but why don't we listen to Barry talk about how he put together this entire book of and about Sondheim puzzles.

[4:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Absolutely.

[4:00] David Rigano: Let's do it.

[4:01] Barry Joseph: First of all, thank you all so much for being here. I'm really excited to be at the Drama Bookshop.

[4:06] Barry Joseph: I want to thank David and Mark for organizing tonight.

[4:09] Barry Joseph: It's been really exciting to think about getting to be here with all of you and also getting to set up for the month of October the pop-up exhibit from the collections of all the magnificent games and puzzles that were sent to me over the course of my research that have been sitting in a drawer that were required to write this book that I can now make available for folks to see over this month, thanks to the bookshop here.

[4:29] Barry Joseph: So let's give it up for them and thank them.

[4:34] Barry Joseph: And I'm especially thrilled to be sitting next to my friend Michael Mitnick.

[4:40] Barry Joseph: Without whom this book would not exist.

[4:42] Barry Joseph: If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, the acknowledgments section is three pages long, three pages long towards the end.

[4:50] Barry Joseph: I thank my family, and then after my family, I thank Michael.

[4:56] Barry Joseph: I say, lastly, there is the singular Michael Mitnick.

[5:01] Barry Joseph: From the very beginning, he offered his vast contacts, incomparable collection, and deep knowledge of all things Sondheim.

[5:09] Barry Joseph: Whenever I hit a wall, he showed me how to build a door and encouraged me to walk through it.

[5:14] Barry Joseph: Together with Dan Oakrant, we shared a multi-year email chain that was a wellspring of inspiration, encouraging each other in our distinct but equally obsessive Sondheim pursuits.

[5:25] Barry Joseph: Michael, thank you so much for doing this with me tonight.

[5:28] Michael Mitnick: Thank you.

[5:28] Barry Joseph: And Barry, there's just when I read that, I was just really honored and touched.

[5:34] Michael Mitnick: And so thank you for writing that, man.

[5:36] Barry Joseph: At least I could do.

[5:37] Michael Mitnick: I want to return your kindness with this question to kick us off.

[5:42] Michael Mitnick: Do we really need another book on Sondheim?

[5:46] Barry Joseph: I love that. That's a great question.

[5:48] Barry Joseph: Three things come to mind.

[5:50] Barry Joseph: The first one is yes, if we have changed enough.

[5:55] Barry Joseph: It's almost like asking, do we need another Sondheim revival?

[5:58] Barry Joseph: Yeah, do we have a new perspective to look at his work?

[6:01] Barry Joseph: We in the last 10, 20, 30 years, I think have a new understanding and appreciation of puzzles and games.

[6:06] Barry Joseph: So I think we have a new perspective to look back at that piece of his life.

[6:10] Barry Joseph: So a book about that topic, I think we're ready.

[6:13] Barry Joseph: Number two, has Sondheim changed enough?

[6:15] Barry Joseph: And unfortunately, he's no longer with us.

[6:17] Barry Joseph: But we are also a few years past when he passed away.

[6:20] Barry Joseph: So there was a period of time when we were in kind of public mourning, recognizing his passing.

[6:25] Barry Joseph: We're this book is now coming out towards the end of that phase or into the next phase, let's say.

[6:30] Barry Joseph: So we are ready to look back and look in a comprehensive way at his whole life, his oeuvre, as it were, but also the arc of his life and how he changed.

[6:38] Barry Joseph: And part of what I try and do in the book is look at what he was like when he was a teenager, what he was like when he was in his 20s and 70s, 80s, and the whole that whole arc, and we're able to do that.

[6:47] Barry Joseph: And so I think finally, is there something new to say?

[6:50] Barry Joseph: We haven't had a book yet about his puzzles and games.

[6:53] Barry Joseph: This is the first one, not the first person to talk about it nor write about it, but this is the first book that really addresses this whole part of his life.

[7:00] Barry Joseph: So I think for now, yes, I think we need a new book.

[7:03] Michael Mitnick: And this one's it.

[7:04] Barry Joseph: I'll take it.

[7:06] Michael Mitnick: Exactly.

[7:07] Michael Mitnick: How did you balance scholarship and accessibility?

[7:10] Barry Joseph: Writing something rigorous enough for die-hard fans, but still inviting enough for newcomers.

[7:15] Barry Joseph: That's oh, that's nice.

[7:18] Barry Joseph: I am someone who loves research.

[7:21] Barry Joseph: You wanted all the citations you needed in the back of the book to follow up on your own, but never to have that be a distraction from letting you just immerse yourself in the story and immerse yourself in what we find through that research process.

[7:34] Barry Joseph: So I try and make everything always accessible.

[7:36] Barry Joseph: I'm always explaining terms.

[7:38] Barry Joseph: Maybe you don't really, maybe you're not coming into the book to Sondheim.

[7:41] Barry Joseph: So I'm gonna explain these references.

[7:43] Barry Joseph: Maybe you love Sondheim, but you're not a puzzle or a games person.

[7:46] Barry Joseph: Again, I'm gonna then explain those things.

[7:48] Barry Joseph: So try and make the book as welcoming and inviting as possible, free of lingo, or lingo that will make someone feel on the outside, and just try and make everyone feel welcome.

[7:56] Barry Joseph: So keeping the citations strong and deep.

[7:59] Barry Joseph: Pack them at the end of the book, and then just really make dramatic stories that make the research come alive.

[8:05] Barry Joseph: Put you in those moments when I interviewed somebody, they told me about that time in the 1960s where they almost ruined one of Sondheim's games, or it was the 1990s when they were so excited to be the winner in one of his treasure hunts, and then put the reader in that moment from their perspective, and then just use that to flesh out the larger lessons that we can take from it about who he was, how his mind worked, and the game and design values that we can all apply in our own lives.

[8:28] Michael Mitnick: I'm gonna ask a question and then we can go to the audience for some questions, and I have a few more.

[8:33] Michael Mitnick: But I was wondering if you would tell the one of my favorite anecdotes in the book of Sondheim at the escape room and crawling.

[8:42] Barry Joseph: Excellent, excellent.

[8:43] Barry Joseph: Stephen Sondheim was living in New York City when escape rooms arrived.

[8:47] Barry Joseph: That was in the teens, I want to say 2016, maybe is when he went to his first one.

[8:53] Barry Joseph: So if you do the math for a moment, he's 86 years old.

[8:57] Barry Joseph: And he's going to escape room.

[8:58] Barry Joseph: So what are escape rooms?

[9:00] Barry Joseph: They're an opportunity to pay for an event that's gonna be hosted for you and your friends and loved ones, that's gonna challenge you with a narrative, that's gonna present you a number of puzzles and give you an opportunity to work with each other to hopefully within an hour solve that problem.

[9:15] Barry Joseph: Over Sondheim's life, what was he doing?

[9:17] Barry Joseph: He was spending time organizing games parties, designing his own parlor games, designing his own treasure hunts, or bringing people together to give him these moments of clarity when they would solve his puzzles, moments of connection when they would play with each other.

[9:31] Barry Joseph: And now here come escape rooms where they were gonna do it all for him.

[9:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He must have loved that.

[9:34] Barry Joseph: I have no direct connection to know exactly what he felt about them.

[9:37] Barry Joseph: Other than that, he thought they were a swell idea.

[9:40] Barry Joseph: I'm quoting him, a swell idea.

[9:41] Barry Joseph: He said that in 2021 in an interview for Games Magazine.

[9:45] Barry Joseph: And so during the teens, he would go with his friends to escape rooms.

[9:47] Barry Joseph: Who are some of these friends?

[9:49] Barry Joseph: John Wideman, Sherm, John Mark Sherman, John Mark John.

[9:54] Barry Joseph: Jonathan Mark Sherman, Mia Farrow, Bernard Peters, Mia Farrow's son, Ronan Farrow, the woman who worked with him, who did Mary Pat Walsh who did friend and chef.

[10:04] Barry Joseph: Friend and chef, thank you, and so on, right?

[10:06] Barry Joseph: And his boyfriend and fiancé then husband.

[10:08] Barry Joseph: So you're specifically asking about a particular moment where there was a mid-town escape room that was one of the first ones that also had actors in it.

[10:17] Barry Joseph: So maybe the actors were gonna help you solve the puzzles, or maybe they were part of the obstacle.

[10:22] Barry Joseph: You didn't know.

[10:23] Barry Joseph: And so Stephen Sondheim contacted, no, let me rephrase it.

[10:26] Barry Joseph: One of his friends contacted them and said, my friend Stephen Sondheim wants to come with me.

[10:30] Barry Joseph: We're gonna get some folks together, and we're gonna try out your room.

[10:33] Barry Joseph: And in one of them, yeah, there's a tunnel.

[10:35] Barry Joseph: Now, if you didn't want to do the tunnel, it was an accessible escape room.

[10:38] Barry Joseph: You can go around it.

[10:39] Barry Joseph: But we know he went through the tunnel.

[10:41] Barry Joseph: Let me go back a moment and say, how do we know that?

[10:43] Barry Joseph: Because there were actors there, someone needed to be giving the actors notes.

[10:48] Barry Joseph: So it had someone who was responsible for helping people solve the puzzles in the escape room, but also someone whose job was to make sure the actors were on point.

[10:55] Barry Joseph: And that person who was the director of the actors was there that night when Stephen Sondheim was there and still has his notes.

[11:01] Barry Joseph: From that remembers what the security cameras looked like and was able to share those descriptions with me, which were in the book, and he describes how spry Sondheim was to and willing to crawl through that tunnel at 86 years old, and how excited he was to come out the other side.

[11:17] Michael Mitnick: You can ask me what was on the other side?

[11:18] Barry Joseph: What's on the other side?

[11:19] Michael Mitnick: What was on the other side?

[11:20] Barry Joseph: This is 2016 was a puzzle he had created in 1968.

[11:27] Barry Joseph: There was a treasure hunt that he designed with Anthony Perkins, and there was a particular puzzle that was often spoken about.

[11:34] Barry Joseph: It had to do with a song that the lyric was it's a quarter to three, so the answer was 245, right?

[11:41] Barry Joseph: And when he climbed out of that tunnel, he heard the song playing, and then he needed to resolve with the 245 and he got a big smile on his face.

[11:49] Barry Joseph: And it wasn't a coincidence.

[11:50] Barry Joseph: When that room was designed, the person who designed it knew about this, purposely included it, but never knew that Stephen Sondheim was gonna one day come and experience it.

[12:00] Michael Mitnick: Oh, I didn't realize that it wasn't done especially for him on that night.

[12:04] Barry Joseph: That's incredible.

[12:05] Michael Mitnick: And two in 245 referred to I think an apartment number.

[12:09] Barry Joseph: That's right.

[12:11] Michael Mitnick: Let's go to the audience for some questions.

[12:16] Barry Joseph: We're gonna go back and forth.

[12:17] Michael Mitnick: So any of your you're like suddenly on the spot, but that's a person who maybe is called Melissa.

[12:25] Barry Joseph: So how many, how long have you spent doing all this research from I started, so how long have I done the research?

[12:36] Michael Mitnick: I'm repeating the question so it could be heard for the microphones and the podcast.

[12:39] Barry Joseph: Hi, podcasters.

[12:41] Barry Joseph: This project started in April 2022, just a few months after Sondheim had passed away.

[12:48] Barry Joseph: And it started on the afternoon when I literally turned in a manuscript for my previous book.

[12:54] Michael Mitnick: Which is what is that?

[12:55] Barry Joseph: Making dinosaurs dance, uh toolkit for digital design, uh, which is about my six years at the American Museum of Natural History. And if you'd asked me that morning if I had an idea for a next book, I would say, don't talk to me. I'm done. I'm turning into manuscript. I'm not writing anything for a decade. Within an hour of sending send on that email, I said, wait a second, I think I have an idea. And the reason I had the idea was I just read three books that my wife had gave me for my birthday in March about Sondheim, and I learned this idea that he once said he wanted to go into video game design, and that got me to start exploring what could this possibly mean? What was going on in this man's life that I knew so little about clearly?

And again, we're talking about 1982 when he was saying this. So I spent two years doing research, and that research meant contacting research institutions and finding out if they had anything related to his games and puzzles. It meant talking to people who were in the room where it happened, as it were, right? People who played games with Sondheim, people who party managed some of the events where he was at, people who had even co-designed some of them with him. And it meant really, again, this was a few months after Sondheim had passed away. It meant saying, Hi, you don't know me. Would you be willing to open up your memory box and trust me with this piece? And you can imagine many of these people had been spending months talking about this is what it was like to work with Stephen Sondheim.

Here's how brilliant he was. Here's what how remarkable it was to have him in my life. But no one was asking them, I think what I was asking. What was it like to play with Stephen Sondheim? And so for many of them, it was an opportunity to explore an aspect of their relationship that they had never had a chance to do publicly and maybe hadn't even done privately for years. And often in the beginning they would say, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna remember what I was doing in 1970 in a particular evening. We'll see if I can do anything. And then we would start and they would never want to stop. Because once they got rolling, not only would the memories flood back, but their memories would overwhelm them in a way where they were so excited and passionate to share them.

And so that created both an honor for me but also responsibility to own those stories until I could shape them together for the book. So that took about two years to put that all together because the third thing was I needed the games and puzzles, of which I had none. And I didn't know if any of them still existed. That meant someone, for example, who was in the cast of a little night music had saved her winning sheet from the treasure hunt Stephen Sondheim designed from 1973 and still had it in a drawer and could share it. And then people who had party managed his last treasure hunt at no, not his last one at City Center, who still had all the print materials that had never been used and could make them all available.

So it took these years in part just to build the relationships. And then sometime towards the end of those second years, that second year, I could start the writing because I saw how it was coming together. But the research never ended. The research continues today. Michael, you just brought me something new tonight, right?

[15:47] Michael Mitnick: Yeah.

[15:48] Barry Joseph: Yes. Yeah. The stage manager prepared as the opening night gift a collection of logic puzzles that it must be 24 pages long that traces the whole narrative of the history of the production of the show, but all in puzzle form. And we just got it. I say we because we did it together on eBay. So it's never ending.

[16:12] Barry Joseph: So we just talked about the research process, but I want to talk about the structure of the book. The journey that it takes the readers on. How would you explain that?

[16:23] Barry Joseph: I talked a bit about how now is a time to get to write a book about his whole life, right? And so I didn't plan to do that in the beginning. But when I started looking about how to structure the material, I landed on focusing on first the genres. So Stephen Sondheim and Parlor Games, Stephen Sondheim and board games, treasure hunts, word puzzles, specifically crossword puzzles, and then physical puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, puzzle boxes, and escape rooms. And so I did write about them separately, but when I started looking at where they fell in his life, they actually had a chronology. Obviously, escape rooms weren't till later in his life. And the board games he made were in the 1950s and 60s. So as I started structuring the order of those chapters, they had a natural organic feel to them that even though we were going in loops, so he would pass away and we'd be talking about after he passed away in a number of the chapters.

And I say not era, but eras in Sondheim's life. So the bulk of the book, about 250 pages of it, is a biography, which I never planned to write, but told through looking at his games. I study games, that means I'm a ludologist, lithology is the study of games. This is a ludological biography. It's looking at Stephen Sondheim's life from the very thin perspective and lens of games and play. But then I had an opportunity to share some of what I found. The things that people had rights to that they were able to ascribe to me for the book. So people who designed crossword puzzles for Stephen Sondheim, some of the parlor games or oral histories, so I can recount them in my own words. And so the last section of the book are the games and puzzles of Stephen Sondheim that you can do yourself.

And more interesting to me as a ludologist, is the design values. What are the things that we can learn from Stephen Sondheim's game designs and puzzle designs? Those who know Stephen Sondheim's two books of lyrics opens with his a description of three principles with a fourth one on top. We don't have him writing that for games and puzzles, but he gave us enough clues to pull from. Because he gave instructions to people for how to do some of his treasure hunts. You can see embedded in the game certain values that are consistent. So the end of the book talks about these values and gives you access to them as well. And then I will say, because I've been asked this a few times at a number of these events, there is a structure to the book.

There's a place that one would go to find the structure in a book. And there's also all right, I'll say it. There's two puzzles hidden in the book. And if you're trying to solve them and you think about what I just said about the structures of books and how those are documented within its pages, that'll help you solve at least one of them.

[19:05] Barry Joseph: Would you talk quickly? We'll go to another question in just one second. I just I would love for you to talk about the murder game and what that is.

[19:15] Barry Joseph: The murder game. So do you have a place you want me to start with it, or do you want me just to jump in?

[19:19] Barry Joseph: Jump in. I love the murder game. If I had to choose one thing to write the entire book about, it is the murder game. There was a while, I gotta interrupt myself for a moment because I forgot to introduce him. In the back is Chris Chappelle, who is my editor, who I am meeting for the first time in person. I'm so excited he's here. The book also I thanked Michael. I'm also thanks, Chris. Without him, the book could not be. It wouldn't be available for you right now, and certainly not in the format that it currently is. And one of the questions that I had early on was can it be structured the way it is? Is it boring or pedantic to go from one genre to another? Does it need a through line? And the murder game creates that through line.

So even though I didn't write it that way, I often give presentations based around this. So the murder game is a parlor game that Stephen Sondheim designed in 1965, I believe, for a friend of his. The murder game, many games like the murder game, where everyone gets something like a piece of paper and someone gets like an X on it, and that means they're the secret murderer, and then they have to, depending on how you play the game, murder people that way, whether it's like winking at them or shaking their hand with a squeeze or whatever it might be. And these are games that Sondheim had been playing for at least 15 years, and he liked the mystery of it and the drama, but there was things about it he thought were just bad design.

If you died, you were done. You're out for the rest of the game. You know who the murderer is. You don't get to take part in trying to argue for who it is, and what are you gonna do? And then the people who are arguing for the murderer, he found that wasn't really engaging. They didn't really have a lot of information. So for him, he saw it as a design problem and he wanted to solve it. So he had the opportunity in 1965. He was with his friend Lee Remick. Was it Lee? No. For the murder game? Yeah. I don't know. Yes. Phil Snowman? Phil Snowman, thank you. She had a show out of town. It flopped. He went backstage. He spoke to her and said, Don't worry, I'm so sorry. There'll be other things. What can I do for you?

And she said, When I come back to New York, I want you to make a games night party for me, and I want you to design me a new game. So he went home, I think it was about March 1965, and he started coming up with this idea for a new way to do the murder game that would solve this design problem that he had. And he started working on it, something around eight o'clock at night. He tells it differently every time, but roughly around eight o'clock. And then eight in the next morning, he realized he was done, and that he'd been sitting there for 12 hours in this flow state, creating. And he loved the game that he created, but he also loved the experience of creating it. So then he did the game. It was really popular amongst his friends.

People he went to England, people would ask him to do it there. And one of the people who did it was Schaefer, Peter Shaffer, who wrote a play called Sleuth, which was made into a movie called Sleuth. Anthony Shaffer. Thank you. His brother. Anthony, his brother. Anthony. And so that movie, Sleuth, has a character who's very much like Stephen Sondheim that inspired not just that play and movie, but a whole series of versions of it here and in Indian Pakistan as well. It turns out. Oh, I didn't know that. But what we experienced here was the one, the movie that was based on it that Herbert Ross directed. It might have been his first or one of his first movies. He'd been at the murder game, and he said to Sondheim, I'd love to turn this into a movie.

And Stephen Sondheim said, I am willing to do that, but not on my own. He contacted Anthony Perkins for whom he had designed a number of puzzles before, like the 68 Treasure Hunt that I mentioned earlier. And so the two of them then made this movie called The Last of Sheila. Right? The Last of Sheila is a fun, cheesy, intricate murder mystery. And the first half of the movie could essentially have a little caption that says based on a true story. Because it's based on the murder game, but also two other series of puzzles and games that Sondheim made. That's not the end of it. In 1983, in the January issue of Games magazine, there's a five-page profile of Stephen Sondheim and about his connections with puzzles and games.

And they invited Sondheim to create a custom puzzle for that issue. He adopted the murder game for it. And in it it says Stephen Sondheim invites you to solve this murder mystery. And he writes a narrative as if you're at his house in the 1960s. And all the other people you're playing with are all the people who he played with at the time. And he didn't want them to print the solution. Because the way it's designed is that once it's solved, you can never play it again. So it's a game, but there's a puzzle built into the core of the game. That's what made it so different from all the other murder games. And so he didn't want Games Magazine to print the solution because he said I'll never be able to do the game again.

And they said, I'm sorry, we're games magazine with puzzles. We have to put the answers in. And so they did. And then two months later, someone wrote in a letter explaining there was something wrong with how it was printed. That was Stephen Sondheim. He noticed something in it wrong. And so he printed the correction. And that's still not the end of the murder game. Did anyone here ever hear of a show of Sondheim's called Sunday in the Park with George? And there's a song in it called Finishing the Hat. And for those who know the show, they know it's about this artist on the stage who's making a painting who's finishing a hat that's only in his mind. It doesn't exist in the real world and it's being created out of nothing.

And to us in the audience, we are seeing the act of creation. It's about not just that character George on the stage painting, it's about all of art and creativity. Maybe Sondheim talking about making writing his own pieces. Actually, what he was writing about was those 12 hours creating the game. And he's been he said this in many interviews. This is quite definitive. And it wasn't because he loved making the game, it was that flow state that he was in. And writing about being in that flow state, and then that moment of breaking out of it is what happens in that song. And that's what he wanted to capture. And yet there's one more thing. Who saw the movie Glass Onion? Which was the second movie The Knives Out.

So who remembers Sondheim's appearance in that movie? It's in the opening scenes when we first meet our detective who was returning from the first movie, and he's in the bathtub with Stephen Sondheim.

[25:16] Barry Joseph: And Angela Lansbury, and Redhair, Natasha Leonardo, and one more person, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Except they're all on the screen on his laptop, because he's in the bathtub playing the pandemic era hit Among Us, which is a game where all the characters are in a spaceship and people have tasks to do, and someone's the murderer, and they have to figure out who it is.

[25:40] Barry Joseph: And in it, our detective is the murderer, and Sondheim is one of the many saying, "You did a terrible job." They throw him out the airlock. But that game that they're playing, Among Us, is a version of the murder game.

[25:51] Barry Joseph: And what Among Us did that made it work so well is it gave people tasks to do, and that's exactly how Sondheim solved it in 1965. He gave all the players a task. Go to a room, get a photo, and bring it back. And so Sondheim's last in-person himself, his face, his voice in a movie was him playing Among Us, which was coincidentally a version of the game that he innovated in 1965 and kept returning to throughout his life.

[26:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's incredible.

[26:18] Barry Joseph: You see, I got a whole book on that, right? Can we go to another question?

[26:23] David Rigano: Yes, the gentleman who I think his name might be Sandy.

[26:34] Barry Joseph: So the question was are there any artifacts that aren't in the book? But I wish were. I adore his treasure hunts. They are events that were created for groups of people, either because they were his friends, or because someone asked him who was his friend. So they were opportunities to think about large groups of people who can be together at the same time. They had to be designed to meet different people in different places. Some people might love puzzles, some might hate them, some might like the people they're with, they might not like them. But this was going to be a design group experience to give them something that was going to give them, as I described earlier, these moments of clarity, these brilliant moments where this he often said, right?

And so looking at how he thought about groups of people and how he designed them, I find really exciting and inspiring. And so I'm able to show pieces of some of those games in the book. But what I would love is to be able to, for people someday to be able to look at a collection of those puzzles. Some of them require you to be in a space to do them, but many of them don't. So they can be solved at home. And for people who like to design for people who like to design games, they still give you an opportunity to think about how you might adapt them in your own places. Many of you know I have a museum background, so I love thinking about how to design games in museums. And a lot of his designs can work really well in a museum space.

So that's one. And the other one is the thing that people know most about him in the puzzle world. That is that he was the puzzle editor of New York magazine when it was founded in 1968 and early 1969. He created cryptic crosswords, which are, Will Schwartz called the hardest word puzzles in the English language. And Stephen Sondheim learned them when he was younger from the original British sources and was the first one to really successfully adapt them for an American audience. So I like to say that if Sondheim had never written a single musical, he still would have had an obituary in the New York Times because of the impact he had on American puzzles through those cryptics. And there was a version of them that New York magazine reprinted in the early 80s, and it's a collector's item. Do you have a sense of what they sell for now on eBay?

[28:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: One just sold for $4,500.

[28:46] Barry Joseph: Some people in the audience have one, right? And so sometimes you can find a PDF passing around.

[28:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You have one?

[28:52] Barry Joseph: I have a PDF of one, though I certainly did not spend $45. Yeah. So to be able to spend $30 and get them in a store, people would love them. And Stephen Sondheim liked to design his puzzles usually so they weren't time sensitive. They weren't based on where you were culturally or where you were in time. There's a few exceptions to that, but most of the puzzles hold up, and their designs are brilliant. I can't solve most cryptic crosswords, but I love understanding the meta puzzles that he loved to explore. Where, you know, maybe in one of the puzzles it's like you have a six-sided cube, but then you've unfolded it and flattened it, but then you have to rebuild the words as if they connect in that form, and then you have to cut out the lines in the allergy sub puzzles and you put them back together, and then they create a logic puzzle, and you have to figure out the logic, it just goes on and on. And I don't say that because oh, they're so hard, but because they're so brilliant in their design, because they just keep challenging you at every stage of the game and rewarding you all along.

[29:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

[29:51] Barry Joseph: The last person to tell me what they took away from it was someone just a few days ago. And they said it was a healing experience. That is not what I was expecting. This is someone who's involved in musical theater, and it helped him think through his own relationship with Stephen Sondheim and his regrets and opportunities. And I've heard this from a few people, seeing how, even just tonight, how Sondheim connected with people to mentor them, to respond to their letters, to give them critical feedback, to sometimes be harsh in his response, but truthful, meant a lot to a lot of people. And people reading about that, not just in my book, but things like the Instagram group, what is that called?

Sondheim's Letters, I believe, where people share their letters from him. Seeing this community that existed out in the world that Sondheim was part of, we've usually seen it only in the theater space, but in the book you get to see it in the puzzles and game space as well. That seems to touch people in some ways. But again, that's not what I wrote it for. I'm happy it's had that impact. I wrote the book because I want people to understand how Stephen Sondheim's mind worked in the way that you can by looking at how he constructed his puzzles and games. Many of us who love his songs and adore his shows are not just appreciating what they give us directly, but the insights it gives us into who he was and how he changed over his life.

And when I look at the games and puzzles, it gives me a new way to understand that. I look at how in the 1960s he played games with names like The Murder Game, Hostilities, Cutthroat Anagrams. You might start seeing some themes. But later in his life, when I'd talk with people about what it was like to play games with him, the term, rather, the word that came up most often was generous. Even when they were playing cutthroat anagrams, it became a very different game. The Leonard Bernstein children played cutthroat anagrams with Stephen Sondheim when they were growing up in the 60s. It was required, as they said, in their household, if you wanted to engage with any of the adults. And they were playing with him in the years before he passed away.

So you can do the math there from the 60s to late teens, early 20s. And they talked about how much more avuncular he became, how he would tease them when they won something versus being actually angry about it. And so that level of generosity says a lot about how his personality changed over the years and how again the games and puzzles give us that insight. Like I said, I wasn't planning to write a biography, but I think it helps us understand him in a new way. And I'm also hoping what it'll do is inspire people. If you come into the book from puzzles and games, I hope it makes you want to learn more about Stephen Sondheim. And if you come in from the Sondheim perspective, I hope it teaches you how to look at his work in a new way from a ludological lens.

One of the people who was so significant in helping me with my book is Gail, and she said, and she teaches Sondheim. She runs communities that get together of people who study Stephen Sondheim. Like she's in the Sondheim world. But she said, after reading the book, she now approaches anything that comes from Sondheim and says, How is it playful? So it just gives her a new lens to understand the work.

[32:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's wonderful.

[32:57] Barry Joseph: Yes. I was wondering as part of your process of doing the research and learning about games. Did you try playing or becoming meeting the most with the games? And can you talk a little bit about that process of getting playing out?

[33:12] David Rigano: Can you repeat the question?

[33:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, the question was in the process of writing the book, did you actually recreate any of the games and play them yourself?

[33:21] Barry Joseph: One of the wonderful things about Sondheim's treasure hunts is that he knew all the answers. So the party planners who were able to give me almost everything that came from the event, all of the hints and clues, the instructions, the invitations, the actual puzzle sheets, the one thing they couldn't provide me? The answers. It made sense. Sondheim was there. But now here I am a decade later, a few decades later, trying to understand his designs. And if I don't know what the answers are, I can't understand the designs. So it meant I had to bring people together to play them. And so to do that, I invited people together who both knew Stephen Sondheim and were somehow connected with puzzles and games.

One of them is sitting right next to me to my left. And we would get together on Zoom and we would have recreations. And I would pretend to be almost like we're playing Dungeons and Dragons. Okay, imagine we're now at City Center. It's the first Sunday in March, 2011, and you're at the cocktail party. And Stephen Sondheim walks up to the mic and says, We're now gonna play a treasure hunt. And so we'd walk through them, but after each puzzle was solved, we would then pause and say, Okay, teach me what kind of puzzle is this, and now teach me what does this tell you about Stephen Sondheim? What does it tell you about his personality? What does it tell you about how he thought about people? And sometimes how does it connect with the way he designed musical theater and how is it just talk about his hobbies and his interests?

So we did that for the treasure hunts for the board games, which were crazy. The timing of this book is crazy. I talk about how I started the research right after he passed away, not really realizing that I was talking to people while they were in mourning. Even for the first year and a half, every interview was someone who knew Stephen Sondheim and was dealing with that mourning period. But part of what that meant was this was the period where his homes were being sold. His home in Turtle Bay in New York City, his home in Connecticut. And that meant, Chris, was it like the week before I was supposed to turn the manuscript? The Doyle auction was being held. For those who don't know, that was the auction of Stephen Sondheim's items from both of his homes.

They had to sell the homes and all of his, I'd just say his extra stuff, the stuff that wasn't going to be donated to Library of Congress, the stuff that might not end up in a Sondheim museum that I'd love to visit someday. It's the other stuff, like the cat box in his house and some half-used pencils, right? But what that also meant was about a third to maybe 40% of the items were all puzzles and game related. That means the puzzles, excuse me, the board games that he hung on his walls that were decorative from the 18th century France. It meant his remarkable collection of Matt Games magazines and periodicals, which totaled almost a thousand individual issues. It meant his books on puzzles and games, just so much stuff.

And two boxes were found in that collection that were not, I believe, intended. And they were both board games that we thought were lost from the 1950s. And so for the first time, things that I'd heard Stephen Sondheim talk about as being lost in a fire were suddenly available on the website for the auction because they photographed everything to show you look what we have to sell. And did I mention it was a week before my manuscript was due? So luckily, my epilogue of the book was about the experience of going to both the exhibit that was available for the public to come in before the auction, so everyone can touch the objects and imagine buying them and taking them home, and then being at the auction itself.

But by the time we got to the auction, those board games were no longer available. They were both pulled. And in fact, they were still in the slide deck during the auction. So when they appeared, I'm making up the lot number. Lot 122, and everyone saw it, and then they skipped it. Everyone's sort of booing. They're like, oh, because we knew. But what it meant was we got to read the instructions for the board game of Stardom, or a game that also had the name of Camp, because you're supposed to camp it up. So did I get to play the game? No. But I got to read the game instructions with someone who is a game designer, Jeffrey Engelstein, whose game came out last year. Get ready. The game, the board game that was created by Kurt Vonnegut.

If you're saying, I didn't know Kurt Vonnegut made a game, most people didn't. He wrote a novel. It didn't succeed, and he thought, maybe I'll go into board game design. The board game didn't work. And then he went back into novels, the rest is history. Jeff learned about this and recovered it and brought it back out. So I said, Great, you know about working with someone who don't expect to be writing a board game. Can you just walk through the whole game with me and help me understand it? So I got to do walkthroughs like that.

[37:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. Sorry, a very long answer to an excellent question.

[37:47] Barry Joseph: Looking at through looking at this through the puzzle enhanced lens. I can't stop thinking about Into the Woods in the game now. Are there any other things?

[37:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You're not alone.

[37:58] Barry Joseph: No one is alone.

[37:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Sorry, we gotta start with Into the Woods.

[38:01] Barry Joseph: So the question was Into the Woods feels so gamey. Are there other gamey shows? But let's start with Into the Woods. In the late 80s, it would be wrong to say Stephen Sondheim played point and click adventure games. But it's also hard to look at Into the Woods and not recognize that it feels almost just like one. He did play a number of Macintosh-based puzzle games in the late 80s by a gentleman who made a game called, for example, Three and Three. And one of those games in the credits, thanks to Stephen Sondheim, because he play tested it. They contacted each other. And something about that experience came up when he sat with James Lapine, who said, okay, we're gonna do a new show.

[38:44] Barry Joseph: What are you interested in that we might adapt?

[38:46] Barry Joseph: And he said, Well, I like these games, these puzzle games.

[38:49] Barry Joseph: And James Le Pine said, I like fairy tales.

[38:52] Barry Joseph: Let's combine the two.

[38:53] Barry Joseph: So can you help me share the rules in Into the Woods of what the characters in the woods have to go get?

[38:59] Barry Joseph: Oh, yeah.

[39:00] Barry Joseph: Can we all do it?

[39:01] Barry Joseph: A cape as red as blood.

[39:05] Barry Joseph: Cape as red as blood.

[39:06] Barry Joseph: Quite as well.

[39:07] Barry Joseph: Cow is white as milk.

[39:08] Barry Joseph: Hair as yellow as corn.

[39:10] Barry Joseph: Corn as cool.

[39:11] Barry Joseph: Slipper's pure as gold, just like a point and click adventure game, right?

[39:14] Barry Joseph: So it had that format to it.

[39:16] Barry Joseph: So after the show came out, Stephen Sondheim had the idea of doing an educational CD-ROM to teach music.

[39:23] Barry Joseph: Some of this is a bit blurry because we get pieces.

[39:26] Barry Joseph: We know there was a period in the early 90s where he brought a number of performers together to perform the cut shows, excuse me, the cut songs from that show.

[39:35] Barry Joseph: Why?

[39:36] Barry Joseph: He didn't make the game, he said, because uh the movie uh company that owned Into the Woods, the rights to it rather to make the movie, controlled the songs.

[39:45] Barry Joseph: Maybe they didn't control the cut songs.

[39:47] Barry Joseph: The people who were recording it said they don't know why they were recording it, except for that it was for a CD ROM and something educational.

[39:54] Barry Joseph: So I think we can put two and two together.

[39:55] Barry Joseph: And then he was in a process of thinking about making an educational game using Into the Woods.

[40:00] Barry Joseph: There's even like a CompuServe Forum uh transcript from the early 90s where he was talking about it and saying, Yeah, you're not gonna make a game about carousel.

[40:09] Barry Joseph: There's no mystery in that.

[40:10] Barry Joseph: But Into the Woods had that structure.

[40:11] Barry Joseph: So that's a long answer to that first question, because you can't jump over into the woods.

[40:14] Barry Joseph: Maybe someday we'll see his notes.

[40:16] Barry Joseph: He wrote emailed with Doug from the New York Public Library.

[40:20] Barry Joseph: Reside.

[40:21] Barry Joseph: Reside, thank you.

[40:22] Barry Joseph: And in that he described that he did take some notes at the time.

[40:24] Barry Joseph: So maybe they'll end up somewhere.

[40:25] Barry Joseph: We don't think they're in the Library of Congress collection that arrived this summer, but there's a lot there.

[40:29] Barry Joseph: We'll still see.

[40:30] Barry Joseph: So is there not notes?

[40:33] Barry Joseph: It's not like you so as far as we know, he took he made notes and he recorded some songs for some reason.

[40:39] Barry Joseph: How they would be using it, we don't know.

[40:41] Barry Joseph: That's as far as we when I say we, we have seen publicly.

[40:44] Barry Joseph: There's people who know more, and maybe they'll share more and we'll learn more.

[40:48] Barry Joseph: But can you look at games and puzzles in his shows?

[40:51] Barry Joseph: Can you look at one of his shows and not see one?

[40:53] Barry Joseph: The opposite order of Merrily We Roll Along that feels like a jigsaw puzzle that you're constructing as you go through it.

[40:58] Barry Joseph: His last show, Here We Are, where the first act is essentially a board game.

[41:02] Barry Joseph: Remember it used to be called Square One before it was changed.

[41:04] Barry Joseph: Going back to Square One is the first square of a board game.

[41:07] Barry Joseph: They keep having to repeat starting the game over and over because they keep going to restaurants and not getting fed.

[41:11] Barry Joseph: What's the second act?

[41:12] Barry Joseph: They finally get fed.

[41:13] Barry Joseph: They can't get out of a room until they solve the puzzles.

[41:15] Barry Joseph: An escape room, maybe.

[41:17] Barry Joseph: Anyone, right?

[41:18] Barry Joseph: And so all of his shows have things like that.

[41:20] Barry Joseph: Whether it's moments in the show where characters are playing with each other in Pacific Overtures, when the two characters are doing the poems with each other, or A Little Priest and Sweeney Todd, where they're trying to rhyme with each other in fun, playful ways to talk about who they might eat next.

[41:34] Barry Joseph: It's throughout his shows.

[41:35] Barry Joseph: And of course, many of the shows actually have puzzles and games.

[41:37] Barry Joseph: In Merrily We Roll Along, they play a game called Taking Hostages.

[41:41] Barry Joseph: And that game very much sounds like the game of hostilities that he played back in the 60s.

[41:46] Barry Joseph: Now he didn't write the book for Merrily, but I heard that.

[41:48] Barry Joseph: I'm like, wait a second, is this a coincidence?

[41:50] Barry Joseph: What happened here?

[41:51] Barry Joseph: So when you go back at all of his shows, and I have a whole chapter in the appendices doing just that.

[41:55] Barry Joseph: Because Gail, who I mentioned earlier, said you've got to do that.

[41:59] Barry Joseph: You can't not talk about this.

[42:00] Barry Joseph: And I said, No, I'm gonna write about the puzzles and games.

[42:02] Barry Joseph: I'll let everyone else do the analysis in the shows.

[42:04] Barry Joseph: And she was like, No, we'll get it started.

[42:06] Barry Joseph: And so we actually crowdsourced it.

[42:08] Barry Joseph: We made a spreadsheet and we went to finishing the chat, which is the Facebook group that's been a tremendous resource for me.

[42:13] Barry Joseph: And we said, fill it in.

[42:15] Barry Joseph: Go to the shows that you know and write every time games and puzzles in the structure of the show, played out in the mention of the show, or something even in the book.

[42:22] Barry Joseph: And so then using that crowdsourced spreadsheet, we then built out this chapter where we go show by show and talk about all the ways that games and puzzles had impact in his musical theaters.

[42:32] Barry Joseph: And afterthought for me, like I said, an appendices, but I'm hoping it is then the platform to help others go much deeper.

[42:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Terrific.

[42:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I think we have time for about one one or two more.

[42:43] Barry Joseph: Yes.

[42:44] Barry Joseph: What can you tell us about the play Getting Away with Murder?

[42:44] Barry Joseph: Getting away with murder is the murder mystery that Stephen Sondheim wrote in the 90s.

[42:56] Barry Joseph: I am not coming to this as a murder mystery person.

[42:59] Barry Joseph: I talk about Last of Sheila because we need to, because it's based on the puzzles and games.

[43:03] Barry Joseph: But I'm hoping someone else is gonna write that book about Stephen Sondheim and his love for murder mysteries, both for what he did with things like Last of Sheila, like he did with the murder game, like he did with the cryptic crossword puzzle he did in New York magazine, that is based on a format of a murder mystery story and some of his unpublished works that are awesome murder mysteries as well.

[43:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Damien, right?

[43:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: When you write it, let me know.

[43:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm gonna be the first one to read it.

[43:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I want you to sign it.

[43:32] Barry Joseph: This doesn't have too much to do with the book specifically, but you said that your birthday is in March, and I was wondering how close it was to Stephen Sondheim's first time.

[43:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He's asking when my birthday is in March, because I mentioned it was close to Stephen Sondheim's, it's two days after his.

[43:46] Barry Joseph: Alright, I'm gonna wrap things up with my own question.

[43:50] Barry Joseph: Do you have a favorite line in the book that always makes you laugh?

[43:54] Barry Joseph: And how about one that also makes you cry?

[43:56] Barry Joseph: Oh boy.

[43:57] Barry Joseph: That's risky, because I might.

[43:59] Barry Joseph: Well, okay, always makes me laugh.

[44:02] Barry Joseph: This is the beginning of the second section in the chapter Sondheim at Play.

[44:07] Barry Joseph: The section is called The Parlor Games of Sondheim's Creation.

[44:10] Barry Joseph: Sorry, I'm laughing already.

[44:12] Barry Joseph: I just love this.

[44:13] Barry Joseph: I just I loved writing it because it always made me laugh.

[44:16] Barry Joseph: I wrote it 20 different ways.

[44:17] Barry Joseph: They all made me laugh.

[44:18] Barry Joseph: Okay, this starts with a quote: quote, everyone I used to have games nights with is either divorced or dead.

[44:24] Barry Joseph: Sondheim once lamented to his friend Schirm.

[44:27] Barry Joseph: Neither divorced nor dead.

[44:29] Barry Joseph: Schirm was not buying it.

[44:35] Barry Joseph: I really wanted to open the book with that.

[44:37] Barry Joseph: Chris was right to shift it back a little bit, but that to me is the spirit of the whole book.

[44:42] Barry Joseph: You're in there at that moment when Sondheim is talking with his friends, it's playful, it's edgy.

[44:52] Barry Joseph: Alright.

[44:53] Barry Joseph: What was the second half of that question?

[44:54] Barry Joseph: One that makes you cry.

[44:55] Barry Joseph: Oh boy.

[44:56] Barry Joseph: Okay.

[44:56] Barry Joseph: So you asked me, Michael, about that escape room.

[44:59] Barry Joseph: We're gonna go back to that escape room.

[45:01] Barry Joseph: We're gonna go back to that escape room now.

[45:03] Barry Joseph: And I'm gonna pull to the back of it.

[45:04] Barry Joseph: And this is pretty much technically for me the end of the book.

[45:08] Barry Joseph: This is the end of the first section I was talking about.

[45:10] Barry Joseph: And after this is the analysis of his game values and the his ludological timeline that shows you everything he created, games and puzzles, like one year after another, and the analysis of his shows and the the games and puzzles you can play.

[45:24] Barry Joseph: But of the story of the book, this is the end.

[45:27] Barry Joseph: So here he is in Paradiso.

[45:29] Barry Joseph: That's the name of the escape room.

[45:33] Barry Joseph: In the final moments of Paradiso, Sondheim and his friends disarmed a bomb, solved a crossword puzzle, and then a door, the final door, opened into a hallway.

[45:44] Barry Joseph: Outside the boundaries of the escape room's magic circle that separates the play space from the real world.

[45:51] Barry Joseph: The hallway was filled with staff and performers ready to receive them as if at the end of a play.

[45:57] Barry Joseph: Let Sondheim and his friends take their final bow and victory photo and deliver to them the final lines of the show.

[46:04] Barry Joseph: Your escape test has completed, but your journey toward liberation has just begun.

[46:09] Barry Joseph: They did it.

[46:10] Barry Joseph: They beat the room with only a minute left to spare.

[46:14] Barry Joseph: Before anyone left the room, however, when that door first opened, Sondheim looked up and declared, loud enough to be heard through a microphone by a director in a security booth.

[46:25] Barry Joseph: But I want to stay.

[46:28] Barry Joseph: Sondheim had spent the past hour treating the world around him as one great puzzle to be solved, matching minds with designers, offering him a path from chaos to order.

[46:39] Barry Joseph: More importantly, he was never alone, walking that path and sometimes crawling along it with friends to be with the people he loved and who loved him in return.

[46:49] Barry Joseph: I would like to think that Sondheim saved all this as he looked over at that waiting door at that transitional hallway, ready to take him out, when he playfully uttered his childlike cry in resistance to facing the end.

[47:05] Barry Joseph: Thank you so much.

[47:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That solves everything.

[47:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And and everything that they talked about, and it can't even like really scratch the surface.

[47:22] Barry Joseph: No, this book goes into.

[47:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which is why it's so popular.

[47:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We can't keep it on our shelves.

[47:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[47:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like, even just to do the podcast, and I had to go get one of the ones on hold, and now I have to put it back because it keeps selling out.

[47:32] Barry Joseph: Yeah.

[47:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which to Barry, if you're listening, congrats.

[47:35] Barry Joseph: Yes.

[47:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the fact that I haven't even had the time to like really go through because as he mentioned in the interview, he snuck puzzles into the book.

[47:45] Barry Joseph: Ah.

[47:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So I'm like, oh God, I have so I have to read this book not just with not just for pleasure, but with a really critical eye.

[47:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: For puzzles.

[47:58] Barry Joseph: Yeah, it's it is just incredible.

[48:00] Barry Joseph: An incredible night.

[48:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the fact that we had that that display up for well over a month.

[48:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was so interesting that we never took it down.

[48:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And people kept coming in.

[48:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And taking pictures of it?

[48:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like some not just fans, but like some Broadway people.

[48:13] Barry Joseph: To be fair, so I don't know if you're aware, but you can now make your own connections puzzle.

[48:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[48:19] Barry Joseph: Oh, you were showing it.

[48:20] Barry Joseph: I saw that.

[48:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[48:25] Barry Joseph: Puzzles.

[48:26] Barry Joseph: And so I made a Sondheim themed basically.

[48:30] Barry Joseph: I found out about it because I saw someone on Facebook did it.

[48:33] Barry Joseph: I was really like I remember trying it next time.

[48:34] Barry Joseph: These are all songs from revivals.

[48:36] Barry Joseph: These are like it was really these were all songs from A Little Night Music.

[48:39] Barry Joseph: And I was like, oh, we can do better.

[48:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, you're like, no, I'm gonna make a David Rigano over here.

[48:43] Barry Joseph: I'm gonna throw in the red herrings that I love from when I'm playing connections, and it's really hard.

[48:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And to be fair, Liz Callaway does not play connections.

[48:52] Barry Joseph: So she was like, Oh, I don't know how to play the game.

[48:54] Barry Joseph: So but I've shown it to some other like Broadway people who worked with Sondheim and they started they were like, okay, these are all characters from I was like, Oh, you're going too easy already.

[49:04] Barry Joseph: See, you gotta think uh a little harder than that.

[49:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That was your way of matching minds with Sondheim then.

[49:09] Barry Joseph: Yeah, I guess it was.

[49:11] Barry Joseph: And if you, I don't know, message me on Instagram or something, I'll send you the puzzle too.

[49:15] Barry Joseph: But yeah, I was like, I think that Steve would be proud of this.

[49:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[49:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[49:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You know what?

[49:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Let's stay on the Sondheim theme.

[49:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[49:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And our next episode will talk about other people who tried to match minds with Sondheim with their murder mystery book, Every Day a Little Death.

[49:33] Barry Joseph: Ooh.

[49:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That was a fun one.

[49:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That was really fun where all of the stories were songs inspired by Sondheim.

[49:39] Barry Joseph: Yes.

[49:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which in a in and of itself, there were some fun little puzzles.

[49:43] Barry Joseph: Oh, totally.

[49:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So many references and red herrings.

[49:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Look at my copy.

[49:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It is full of notes in different colored pencil in the margins that I took while reading it because I was playing along and finding all of the references and the little puzzles that these authors put in the book.

[50:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: A little trivia on that night, though.

[50:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was our biggest panel.

[50:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We had 10 guests up there talking.

[50:09] Barry Joseph: Which will be fun for me to edit when it's time to edit that episode.

[50:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I feel like they were pretty good about past.

[50:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, they were absolutely great.

[50:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But it was quite to the crap.

[50:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[50:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[50:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it's a really it's a really fun book.

[50:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's if you're a fan of mysteries and crime thrillers, you'll like it for that.

[50:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: If you're a fan of Sondheim, you will find all sorts of fun stuff to enjoy.

[50:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And if you're like me, and that is exactly like you were saying, like the intersection of Sondheim and dinosaurs and puzzles is for you.

[50:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It like the intersection of Sondheim and crime fiction, that is absolutely where I live.

[50:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I cannot wait to get into this on the next episode.

[50:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So remember, follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show podcasts.

[50:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Please remember to subscribe to our eventbrite so that you can be alerted every time we add a new in-person event to our calendar.

[51:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And subscribe and heart and comment on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

[51:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Just because it helps us.

[51:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We're just a little podcast that that can.

[51:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And remember, all of the books we talk about can be found here at the Drama Bookshop.

[51:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so can we.

[51:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we will see you at the bookshop.