Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim. This week I invite you to join me in my conversation with David Armstrong. David Armstrong has a podcast called Broadway Nation, which is also the name of his new book,

Broadway Nation, how immigrant Jewish, queer and black artists invented the Broadway musical. I was so thrilled when David invited me to be on his podcast. What I'm sharing with you today is just an excerpt from it. I cut out most of the stuff that you've heard from me before and really wanted to focus on where I got to talk with David about how our books are similar and different.

I love doing compare and contrast with people who tackled similar subjects to those covered in my own book.

Let's set the scene. I am in the offices of the Broadway Podcast Network, which is the network that supports both David's podcast and this very one as well. We are overlooking Broadway, not just Broadway, the Avenue, but Broadway, the theater district where they're located. You might happen to hear a slight hum at times.

This was not a hum coming through our wires. Actually, it was a hum coming from the street. We couldn't figure out what it was, but if you happen to hear it, I like to think of it as maybe the ghosts of past shows of Broadway who are outside rooting us on, encouraging us to keep telling their stories.

Enjoy.

David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation , the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical. I'm David Armstrong. It's my great pleasure today to have as my guest, Barry Joseph, who is the author of the very recent book, Matching Minds with Sondheim. Since Sondheim's death, there have been so many books about Stephen Sondheim and various aspects of his life and his career, of course, including an amazing number of really, really good books that I've been, and so blown away by that and have had the honor of having many of the authors of those books on this podcast. So today it's my great pleasure to welcome Barry here. Whose book is up there with those fantastic books. I have to say it's right up there, but is completely unique and original in that regard. It's a real sort of, entirely new way of looking at Sondheim, even though we knew, people who were in the Sondheim world knew, he had this interest over the years from the very beginning. I remember that first Sondheim concert album, which had the Scrabble pieces and right there that was a clue, whether you knew it or not, that was somebody was giving us a clue that Sondheim had these interests. So first of all, Barry, welcome.

Barry Joseph: David, thank you so much for inviting me. It's such a pleasure to get to be with you, and it's a real honor for me.

David Armstrong: Can you pinpoint when this interest in games started for him? Where did he first begin to play games?

Barry Joseph: So those who know and have read multiple times, Meryle Secrest's biography know that there's a moment in the book where he says the phrase and the concept "order out of chaos". And it's in that conversation when he's talking with Meryle Secrest, where he talks about when his parents got divorced, when he was in his teens, I think maybe 11. And it was at that moment when he started trying to figure out how to bring order into his life. He started playing music for the first time. He started appreciating getting sent to military school. He loved the structure and order. And he found that structure and order in games and puzzles as well. What we don't read in the book, because Meryle Secrest didn't describe it this way, is that it was the question itself that led to that realization. It wasn't something he'd always known. He says, I never thought about this before. And he thought about it because she specifically asked him about his interest in games. She says, "I don't understand this thing about you. Can you help me understand it?" And he starts trying to explain why he loves puzzles and games. He gets up to get some water and then when he comes back, this is when he says: "I've never realized this before. It was because my parents got divorced." And so this exploration that she did with him, with her trying to understand what did puzzles and games mean for him, why does he care about them so much? That led to this deep, personal revelation that was then shared with us that this divorce from his parents led him on a path to look for how to bring order in his life. And so that was when he started designing board games. He said he spent one summer every day playing a different board game and analyzing its game mechanics. We call 'em mechanics. The things you do in the game that make it unique. It's like the affordances in a show. And he designed one and tried to get it published. He learned about the puns and anagrams column in the New York Times and submitted one, which was rejected. So we already see, as a teenager, he's both designing games and creating puzzles and getting rejected on both fronts.

David Armstrong: And how does Oscar Hammerstein fit into that story?

Barry Joseph: So Oscar Hammerstein introduced him to the puns and anagrams. He learned how to play chess from the chef or the cook in the house. And he then taught chess to Hammerstein.

David Armstrong: He teaches Oscar Hammerstein how to play chess.

Barry Joseph: That's right. He teaches him, right. Whichever count in the book. And he learns how to play not cutthroat anagrams, but anagrams like the more traditional version. He don't, I don't think he learns the more competitive cutthroat version till he's with Leonard Bernstein. So in that household play was what people did and whether it was, playing croquet outside or , anagrams with words at night, it was part of the household.

David Armstrong: They were a game-playing family.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

David Armstrong: And I find that so fascinating because this same influence that Oscar Hammerstein has on Sondheim, which makes him who we know Sondheim, is as this great musical theater creator, is also then part of what creates this separate passion, this side passion for him, this other career he almost has.

Barry Joseph: Yeah. You talk in your book about this DNA of five figures in Broadway. Where we can see Lin Manuel Miranda was inspired and mentored in some ways by Sondheim. Sondheim experienced that from Oscar Hammerstein back... going back and going back. And so yes, we see this as well in the game and play space. And in fact, Sondheim said his first contribution to American musical theaters was during that time, it was for the opening of Carousel. When, he was asked by Rogers and Hammerstein to come up with a treasure hunt to open it up. 'Cause they knew he loved designing these things. And so he designed it for them. And of course they chose not to use it. Instead we have a clam bake. But Sondheim said that was his first contribution. It wasn't used, but it's the first thing he carried.

David Armstrong: Oh, it was supposed to be in the show? i thought it was just for the party or something? No, this was supposed to be in the plot of the show?

Barry Joseph: It would be the opening of the second act. They would start with the treasure hunt.

David Armstrong: Wow.

Barry Joseph: And I've never seen it. I don't know if anyone has any records of it, but Sondheim did speak about it later in life saying it was the first thing he ever made for Broadway.

David Armstrong: Talk about an amazing piece of trivia right there. You mentioned my book, and thank you very much for mentioning it. There are a lot of parallels between our books, Are a lot of crossovers, surprisingly in some ways between our books.

Barry Joseph: On my way over here, I had so much fun just writing them down. Both the things we have in common and things that are different. Tell me what you think.

David Armstrong: I can't wait hear it.

Barry Joseph: So, first things we have in common. We're both telling stories that are marginalized and little known.

David Armstrong: Yes.

Barry Joseph: The reasons why the marginalized are different.

David Armstrong: Yes.

Barry Joseph: Yours are political and cultural and writ large. And mine are personal

David Armstrong: But things you have to hunt for. That are out in the world. We didn't make any of this up. It's not that no one has ever talked about them before, but they're not regularly talked about. And you have to really sort of, , like an archeologist, find them.

Barry Joseph: And we had to make that decision and we had to come from the right orientation and background to know how to find what we're looking for.

David Armstrong: Right. And you have to do the research to do that.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

David Armstrong: I mean, the level of research in your book is phenomenal.

Barry Joseph: Thank you.

David Armstrong: I mean, it's just you look in, especially the photos and the images that are in there are just staggering how, just I understand how hard it was to find all those, to get the rights to them, to get permission to use them.

Barry Joseph: You know!

David Armstrong: Oh God, that's a year of the three years you took writing the book. I'm sure.

Barry Joseph: But when you say that, that also makes my heart break a little bit because it's been six months since the book came out. As I mentioned earlier, the research for me never ends. I have my Instagram channel Matching Minds with Sondheim. I'm constantly posting new things that people send me. 'cause the more that people discover that there's someone thinking about this, the more people say, "oh, I have this photo in my drawer. I have this treasure hunt from 50 years ago in this folder." And so I just posted. I think is one of the best photos I've ever seen of Stephen Sondheim with his puzzles and games in 1960, and I spent five months trying to track it down. Every time I went to a public event, I showed it at the end and said, can someone tell me who took the photo? And this week someone did. Michael Mitnick. Of course, if you don't know him, he's the one. Yeah, he's the one he knows where everything's hidden. And he was able to tell me who the photographer was and I was able to post it. And if I ever get to just redesign the back cover of the book or put it in somewhere that's going in. But the photos, that's the second thing we have in common. Because as you know, we both use the same photo of Sondheim on the cover.

David Armstrong: Exactly!

Barry Joseph: I love that one. Can you describe it?

David Armstrong: I love this photo 'cause it's him fairly young. He must be in his thirties I think, or maybe 40 ish. And he's looked so impish and has this, uh, sort of devilish expression on his face and his looking in my book I have in positioned, so he is looking up at the title. And you have a similar-

Barry Joseph: He's looking up at his name, Sondheim.

David Armstrong: Yeah. Looking up at his name, Sondheim. And it's just a delightful picture. It's one of my favorite pictures of him.

Barry Joseph: It's wonderful. And I have a second photo of him 'cause I want this not to be seen as, "oh, this is Sondheim from this period in his life. It's his whole life. So I needed a young Sondheim And an old Sondheim." And I found this wonderful photo of him with his finger, like on his lips, like going, Hmm..

David Armstrong: He's perusing! Exactly what can I think up next?

Barry Joseph: And there's two versions of it. They originally used one that was looking out at the camera. And so I felt like that was way too abrupt. Like you're looking at the cover and Sondheim's staring at you going. Instead, he's now looking up at the title saying, Hmm, what is this book that I'm in? And I love that.

David Armstrong: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Second thing is we share publisher.

David Armstrong: We do indeed.

Barry Joseph: And we don't. My publisher was Applause Books and you, yours is... I can't pronounce.

David Armstrong: And Methuen Drama.

Barry Joseph: And Applause was bought by..

David Armstrong: Bloomsbury.

Barry Joseph: Bloomsbury. And yours is also owned by-

David Armstrong: Matthew and Drama is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. And I guess Applause sort of is now, although the, is that name gone?

Barry Joseph: It's gone. You don't see it in my book. I was so excited when Applause.

David Armstrong: Of course we all grew up on Methuen drama books and, and Applause books. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: And I wanted to see that name on the outside. I'm happy that Bloomsbury is on the outside. But I was like, oh, I don't get applause. Okay. Um, we're both educators.

David Armstrong: Absolutely.

Barry Joseph: I teach at NYU and I've been teaching afterschool program for 25 years. And how long have you been teaching?

David Armstrong: Just since 2019 at the University of Washington School of Drama.

Barry Joseph: And we both got to interview Richard Schook, who I adore.

David Armstrong: What a great guy and what a great book that is fantastic.

Barry Joseph: It's amazing ways that it's different. Your path, I think was having a class that led you to a podcast that you did to write a book?

David Armstrong: Started with my course that I teach on the history of the Broadway musical. Absolutely. And then my publisher, Dom Hanlin at Methuen Drama it knew about it and reached out to me to see if I would be interested in writing a book based on that, which was the best case scenario as far as I was concerned.

Barry Joseph: That's awesome. And I flipped the whole thing. I wrote a book, which I turned into a podcast. and then I teach now I'm not teaching this in a classroom. My classroom is the road. I love speaking at libraries and synagogues and theaters.

David Armstrong: You are everywhere. I see you all over the place.

Barry Joseph: I love getting up there. And what I've loved doing is doing something different every single time. I have like elements and I combine them together. Is this a puzzle solving crowd? And then we're gonna pull up Sondheim's puzzles and we're gonna see if we can tackle 'em and see what it tells us about Stephen Sondheim. Is this a musical crowd? We're gonna talk about the anecdotes and the stories about how people told us interesting things we didn't know before about Sondheim to understand him and his work in new ways.

David Armstrong: And I've listened to several of those episodes that you've turned into podcast and you put on a show. They're very, very entertaining and you understand your job there, which is to be a showman and put on a show in these lectures, which really to engage the audience, have to be very entertaining and you certainly do that.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, David. When I finished the book, I had 60 hours of original interviews and half of those I had permission to reuse in other multimedia context to continue the stories and tell 'em in new context. So I had 30 hours of interviews that I could turn into podcasts. So I said, okay, how can I not do that? Everyone in the book who I interviewed, nearly all of them are people who somehow had a connection with Sondheim. They were collaborators, they were friends, they were at a party. The people I couldn't interview were the next step out, which was people who had expertise on that topic but didn't know Sondheim. So I said, here's the perfect opportunity to talk to them. So I take those clips. Of the people whose voices you hear in the book now you can hear them in your headset or your speakers and then hear me and experts who did not know Sondheim, but have expertise on that topic, dig deep into those conversations and take it even further. So in those contexts, my job is just to set them up and facilitate the most amazing conversation. And that's why I love the conversation with Richard Schook. 'Cause in that context, it was about us talking about like we're doing now, the similarities and differences in our projects but most of the time it's about getting people who like. Are experts on cryptic crosswords or love designing escape rooms, and then helping us understand that aspect of Stephen Sondheim in a new way.

David Armstrong: That's fascinating.

Barry Joseph: Finally, a big difference between our two books. Your dedication can be read and mine cannot because it's a whole bunch of dashes. 'cause it's one of the. Oops. Almost said it. It's one of the puzzles in the book.

David Armstrong: It is a puzzle. I remember opening to it, said, oh, he's being very tricky here. 'Cause we now have to, he's making me work to figure this out, which I have not done.

Barry Joseph: I'm gonna tell you, your listener, something now I haven't said anywhere else. You can hear I caught myself for a moment there, but I think it's time. There are two puzzles in the book. The dedication puzzle. 'Cause it's the dedication tells you it's there right in the beginning, but there's a second one. And the second one ends by me getting an email, it's been solved by two people so far. I love getting those emails. It's thrilling and I never know when they're gonna come in or where they're gonna come from, but it means they both found the puzzle and they have solved it.

David Armstrong: And will you give us a clue of where to look for this puzzle?

Barry Joseph: I will say that the dedication puzzle is solved in part through a good read of the book, but also through thinking about how books are structured. That leads you to understanding one aspect of how books are structured. There's an a flip side of that. The second puzzle's connected to that side.

David Armstrong: I see. So you gotta solve one to get to the other.

It helps.

Yeah.

Barry Joseph: It helps. And yet, whenever people solve the puzzles, I always ask them how they figured it out. And that's the wonderful thing about making a puzzle. Until someone solves it, it doesn't exist and it doesn't mean they're gonna do what you want.

David Armstrong: So that leads me to, I thought, really fascinating little section of your book was, what's the difference between a puzzle and a game?

Barry Joseph: Hmm. So this is something that people can always discuss and debate. So I use my own definitions for the book to be what's useful. So I talk about what they tend to be. Games tend to be social, they tend to be things that are repeatable. We talk about resetting the board, here we are was originally called square one. 'Cause that's about resetting the game board, right?

David Armstrong: And you can play Monopoly a thousand times and not feel like you've finished it or we wouldn't wanna repeat it.

Barry Joseph: The rules are the same every time. But the story of each gameplay is unique. Who you play it with, how you play it, what happens, right? And games are designed so that there's an artificial obstacle that you need to get over to achieve a goal. So, one way of thinking about it is like there's a hole in the ground and you have a ball and you have to put the ball in the hole. You can just pick up the ball and put it in the hole, but instead, you have to stand far away. And in fact, you can't throw it. You have to hit it with a long stick and then you don't wanna hit it in the sand. And now you have golf. And rationally it makes no sense. But it is fun because we all agree to those constraints. And they're designed in a way to be challenging in the right way. So let's talk about games like that. Puzzles are a type of game that you can only play once. Not always true, but usually true. Most people I know do a jigsaw puzzle once.

David Armstrong: Yeah, I was gonna just say, even with a jigsaw puzzle, you could do it again. And sometimes you might years later do that same jigsaw puzzle again, but you most people would not finish it and then take it apart and do it again right away.

Barry Joseph: Right. And same with the crossword puzzle. You're not gonna erase it and do it again. Unless you forget it, in which case have fun. And puzzles are not always but often done solo. So, again, I say often 'cause escape rooms is a series of puzzles.

David Armstrong: Right?

Barry Joseph: I wouldn't wanna do one by myself. I could not do it by myself. So we have tendencies. And so , we're talking about parlor games that tend to be social things where there's artificial obstacles with goals that are designed to get people to interact with each other and take on roles and do things. Board games that are designed to do the same thing, but then treasure hunts, which embed puzzles inside a game where you and I are gonna be on a team trying to solve a series of clues, but we are competing with other people. And now it's a puzzle in a game and crossword puzzles, which explicitly are puzzles.

David Armstrong: Yeah. And what's interesting is that Sondheim's passion seems to run the gamut. He loves board games, parlor games, treasure hunts, crossword puzzles, and really all manner of word puzzles, much harder than crossword puzzles. He loves, jigsaw puzzles and, all other kinds of physical puzzles, those puzzle boxes. And then even to me, very surprisingly, video games becomes something he's really, really invested in and interested in. And then later thinks about becoming the designer of video games.

Barry Joseph: So I think his interest in video games comes from his puzzle interest. So the kind of games he played in the late eighties on the Macintosh. Games like a Fool's Errand, and Three and Three. Those are games where you're solving puzzles and moving through a narrative. Oxid, which is a game he played in the nineties and early knots, was also a series of puzzle games and with variations on the puzzles. And so those are things that when we think about video games, yeah, he did play Atari. He had Atari in the late seventies. John Weidman in the book talks about going to his house and Sondheim having every game that's out. But not because he thought they were good games to play. He was just interested in their designs. Just like when he was a teenager playing board games. Maybe good ones, maybe bad ones. He was interested in their form and what he can learn from the form.

David Armstrong: And was it Mist when he was particularly

Barry Joseph: Oh and Mist. Thank you. He played Mist before anyone knew about Mist. Probably 'cause it was in Games magazine, but I'm not sure., And again, that's immersive puzzle solving.

David Armstrong: And that's very story driven. It's an immersive story. So it's like a play in a way. It's an interactive play. Sort of like the interactive books you were interested in.

Barry Joseph: That's right. And not in the book.

David Armstrong: Choose your own story.

Barry Joseph: Choose your own story. And not in the book, because I learned it later. It's in one of my podcasts and in my Instagram. A gentleman named Dennis Osborne who lives in LA was friends with Stephen Sondheim and they would play games together. And they would play these games together. And Sondheim, Dennis says, would fly him out from LA so they could spend a whole weekend playing Mist. And then he would send him versions of the game so he could catch up back in LA so he can get on the phone and solve puzzles together. Like that's how much he enjoyed doing them and doing them with his friends.

David Armstrong: I can't help just to be a little bit of Debbie Downer here is, . Concerned that because

Barry Joseph: he said he did this to avoid work. And so part of me thinks how many more musicals would he had if he hadn't spent all this time playing games.

David Armstrong: I'll be more gracious than that.

Barry Joseph: It's fair to think about anyone who's doing something that is so important in the world and looking at anything else they're doing, saying it's a distraction. Are we who love plays upset that Tony Kushner's now working with Stephen Spielberg making movies. Maybe. And if you love movies, holy cow. What a gift. It is not for us to decide. If that's what made Stephen Sondheim happy, if that's what made him function.

David Armstrong: And maybe allowed him to write the shows that he wrote.

Barry Joseph: Exactly. We can't know.

David Armstrong: Yeah, exactly.

Barry Joseph: But I can imagine. What if he had taken that path not taken.

David Armstrong: The Road He Didn't Take. take Do you think of all those things he was interested in. Was there one that was at the top of his list of prime interest in either games or puzzles, or was it really just a, he was a Renaissance man in that regard.

Barry Joseph: He's definitely a Renaissance man. It's hard to pull out which ones were more important to him because whenever he was talking about them, he was always shaping how people viewed his legacy and his work. And often when he talked about puzzles and games, he minimized them. And sometimes people would push him from the puzzle in games world, is this high art? And he'd be like, no, call it art, but it's not high art. You know? And he might compare it with a child making a drawing on a fridge and they're really proud and they're getting to this incredible zen state of creation. And that's beautiful. But that's might be as far as he'd go. So it's hard to separate that from the separate thing, which is his impact. His impact in treasure hunts is important. But cryptic crosswords. Wow, that's tremendous. That is what I say would've got him in an obit in the New York Times, even if he'd never written a single song.

David Armstrong: So in the game world, he's very significant in that regard...

Barry Joseph: That's right. In short, crossword started in America. When England started doing them, they made a different version called cryptic crosswords, where the clues weren't straightforward. There was a certain way that you had to decode them, which is too complicated to explain right now, but they're rich and complex and heady and brilliant.

Exactly the kind of things Stephen Sondheim would like. And so he would get them from England. They'd arrive here on Thursday. We can go into an anecdote now. In West Side story,, production period when he would want to be alone, as you mentioned, David writing his music. And Leonard Bernstein collaboratively wanted to meet with him in person. They would struggle with when they would be together and when they would be apart. The resolution? Thursday morning. The paper would arrive. They would meet together to do the cryptic crosswords from England, and then when it was done, they could work together in person. On West Side story. Most Americans had never heard of cryptic crosswords, and even if they did, they didn't know how to break into them. When Stephen Sondheim became the puzzle editor for New York Magazine, he removed the British-isms. He wrote an essay to explain to people how to use them. And he created them in a way that both honored where they came from, but made them accessible to an American audience. And from then on, even though there had been some cryptics in the us, that's when they break broke through. And then he needed to leave New York Magazine to make a show called Company, and he trained his predecessor Richard Maltby Jr.

David Armstrong: Another great musical theater lyricist. One of the other greatest. Who I love talking about on my podcast.

Barry Joseph: And who in January of this year just finished 50 years of writing cryptic crosswords, once a month for Harper's Magazine.

David Armstrong: Wow.

Barry Joseph: Trained-

David Armstrong: -by Stephen Sondheim.. So he passed it on to Richard. That's right. That's amazing. Is there one of these that is of most interest to you? Of everything Sondheim did in the game and puzzle world... which style of thing is of interest to you? I know I have one that I was most drawn to.

Barry Joseph: Oh, i'm gonna tell you mine, but I'd love to hear yours.

David Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. The treasure hunts, if I could go back in time, I want to experience that treasure hunt that Mary Rogers talked about in her book. I forget what year that is.

Barry Joseph: 68. 68. Halloween.

David Armstrong: That's a time travel, goal is to go back and be with that group of amazing people on that treasure hunt. Is there a difference between a treasure hunt and a, a scavenger hunt? What's the difference?

Barry Joseph: So I grew up designing scavenger hunts. I love scavenger hunts. I would design a scavenger hunt at the American Museum of Natural History, where you have to go and find things. It could be information, it could be take a photo of yourself doing something, you're scavenging or getting objects. A treasure hunt is about. Getting the treasure at the end. So Sondheim's treasure hunts are not about collecting things or doing things. They're about solving puzzles. And their puzzles are layered.

So you solved, let's say, 12 puzzles and solving each of those gives you a piece of some information, which if you combined it will then lead you to the treasure. And he loved doing treasure hunts. I don't know why treasure hunts over scavenger hunts, but it took me a while. I had to break myself of not writing scavenger hunts when I was writing the books 'cause he loved treasure hunts.

David Armstrong: And I've heard them described as both ways in other people's books. I think Mary Rogers calls it a scavenger hunt possibly.

Barry Joseph: Incorrect. Incorrect.

David Armstrong: Yeah. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Incorrect. But she had fun and maybe she remembers collecting some stuff. But it's not like he wrote up a book about it and handed it to them. It's just language. And so everyone adapts it and that 1968 treasure Hunt, the most famous of them all. 'cause that's the one everyone spoke about. And I was most surprised 'cause it's the one Sondheim would talk about his entire life. And again, we who know, Sondheim knows he had his anecdotes and he would retell them. In different context, but you could string 'em together if you wanted. Right.

David Armstrong: And often with different facts or different times a day or different things. But the idea is still there.

Barry Joseph: And it was as if that was the only treasure honey ever did. But, alongside that one, I was able to document at least six others. When I say document, I mean I have the clues. I was able to figure out with others what the answers are and I know there's more. And for some reason he picked that one to talk about maybe 'cause the most famous people were there. Maybe, 'cause it's in the most people's autobiographies, it always shows up.

David Armstrong: So, who was at that treasure hunt? Who were the participants?

Barry Joseph: Oh my God. They're like a who's, who of theater at the time? Hal Prince, Broadway producer. Roddy McDowell, actor. Sondheim's close friends. Actress: Lee Remick. Composer: Mary Rogers. Arthur Laurents. Grover Dale, I think in fact, Grover Dale is the only person still alive today who was there.

David Armstrong: And did you get a chance to talk to him?

Barry Joseph: I did. I did through, through email. And he talked about what it was like getting into that limousine and being given a list of clues they had to find. Driving all over Midtown and how exciting that was.

David Armstrong: And there were four limousines, right? Sondheim had set them up in teams. Yeah, with four different-

Barry Joseph: he gave them instructions. He gave them objects that they had to use, and then he opened the door to his Turtle Bay apartment and there were four limousines waiting for them. They piled in their teams into the limousines, and they drove all over. I don't know how far they drove, but I believe they drove as far east as the water. They went to, I think his psychologist's house. And Anthony Perkins' mom's apartment. And so there were people they were interacting with. There were audio recordings that were on doorsteps they had to listen to.

David Armstrong: I love that story of Anthony Perkins mother sort of being this silent woman. I guess they didn't know who she was, right? Just they showed up at this townhouse and here's this woman who doesn't speak and brings them in and serves them tea-

Barry Joseph: And cake. And that's the most famous story that was told so many times. And, the stories keep changing who made the mistake, but the idea essentially is that everyone was given a piece of cake. Someone starts eating the cake, and once they're eating the cake. Someone says, wait, we need to put the pieces of the cake together. There's a message on the top, oh no, we already ate the piece.

David Armstrong: So, of course these two worlds of Sondheim are not entirely different from one another because very famously lyrics are puzzles. Every lyricist I know loves puzzles, does crossword puzzles, is obsessed with that kind of thing. And to work out a lyric, you have to be solving the puzzle in your mind. And I actually think it's one of the power of lyrics is that as an audience member, we're also solving the puzzle in our minds as we're hearing it. We're here the rhyme and we're already primed, but what's that rhyme going to be? How is it going to play out? It's why I think musicals are so engaging and so effective... and then the music itself is also a puzzle. The way the music is constructed, it's all based on math basically. And it's natural that these two worlds would come together and from the show business aspect, Treasure Hunt is putting on a show. The Murder Game is basically a show. It's an interactive performance like we have so many of now today. That's right. But these are kinds of theatrical performances.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

David Armstrong: What I want to hear more about though is what do you see as the direct connections between Sondheim's passion for games and puzzles and the shows that he created? Where do those two worlds intersect that we can point to and say here... here are examples of that?

Barry Joseph: When I asked Will Shortz, when I was interviewing him for the book, who does cryptic crosswords? He told me mathematicians and lyricists. People who are interested in understanding how these things are composed and looking at the hidden structure are interested in both how words come together, in song, and how they come together in puzzles. I often show a video in my talks of Stephen Sondheim. Speaking in an interview about how when he was young, he walked past a movie theater. And it, it was a new format in movies, and it said Cinerama. Cinerama. Ciner ama.

David Armstrong: Cinerama. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Cinerama! I pronounced it wrong.. Cinerama. And as soon as he saw it, he said, oh, American. And the anagram was immediate for him, not for me.

David Armstrong: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: And what I say is, "when I see a word I see meaning. And when he sees a word, he saw possibilities". And the ability to look at the underlying structure of things like Neo at the end of The Matrix when he sees the code underlying the world that he's in. That was the ability Stephen Sondheim has. That's the ability many lyricists have and also mathematicians and musical composers. So it's should not be a surprise that there's a strong overlap between lyricists and puzzle designers. Is it a coincidence that the person who took over at the New Yorker from Sondheim was Richard Maltby? No. And Richard Maltby, my book talks about sitting at a table with, Leonard Bernstein, kinda shaking, I can't believe I'm sitting with him. And all that Bernstein wanted to talk about was all the other lyricists who also loved doing cryptics like him.

David Armstrong: Right.

Barry Joseph: There's that connection, and that was new for me when I got into this project. I'm not a lyricist. I had no idea of this connection. I kept being surprised. So I initially thought how odd that Stephen Sondheim has this incredible passion and interest and skill in word puzzles. Not totally surprising, but okay. And then discovering, actually this is rather normative.

David Armstrong: This is part of the musical theater world. Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I assume poets maybe to a certain sense, although they're not usually as well... certainly modern poets are not as meticulous about the rhyming and the structure of poems in the same way that lyricists tend to be.

Barry Joseph: I've had poets on my podcast as well, going deep into the structure of the lyrics and the puzzle. Mostly for me it's just I have so much to learn and when I see how people can look at the world through those eyes, when I watch someone solve a cryptic crossword,, knowing that I don't feel like I have that capability, they tell me I do. That anyone can.

David Armstrong: Sure.

Barry Joseph: And I've learned to be better at them, but I'm also terrified of them at the same time. And when I see people who don't have that terror, who have that facility, I see, oh, our minds do work in different ways. And how beautiful. All the different ways that our minds work. And I've loved getting to write about this one particular way that people can view the world.

David Armstrong: Are there specific songs and shows that are very revealing of these two worlds intersecting?

Barry Joseph: So many! But because we have probably a little time left, I will button where we started. You mentioned earlier the murder game. I mentioned the murder game, but we never talked about it.

It was a parlor game that was created in the 1960s for his friend Phyllis Newman, and she was outta town. Show had flopped. She said, when I come back to New York, I'll feel better if you can throw me a games party and make me a new game. So he had always played versions of a murder game where one person is the secret murderer and the lights go out and they have to go around and squeeze everyone's hand or tap them on the back or wink at them or something, and then everyone, they fall over dead and then everyone has to figure out who it is. He loved the theatrics of it. He thought it was still pretty boring.

David Armstrong: It had atmosphere, but it was dull because-

Barry Joseph: Trying to guess who it was.. Was kind of boring.

David Armstrong: And once you were dead, you were out of the game.

Barry Joseph: And if you were the murderer, you knew it was you. Right? And so, but he still tried to figure it out and throughout a decade or a decade and a half, he kept iterating it. So he came up with a version in '65 called the Murder Game, and he started sometime, depending on when you hear him talk about it, eight or seven at night. And for the next 11 or 12 hours, he didn't stop. He was in a creative fugue. He loved being in that state. And he was seeking that state often in his music writing, but here he was doing it in a game. And that experience, the game itself, we can talk about has its own history, but that experience.

David Armstrong: That amazing history, resulting in many other plays and movies and things, but-

Barry Joseph: Which I could have written the book just about that. I thought that would be the spine at one point. And then moved away from that.

David Armstrong: But what is amazing about that particular experience of him going into this trance basically for eight hours and loving every minute of being in this creative thing. What's the result of that?

Barry Joseph: It inspired him when he was writing the song, Finishing the Hat, in Sunday In With Park With George. So when we in the audience are watching Seurat, lost in his world, painting a hat that never existed.

David Armstrong: Obsessed with this painting, and with getting that hat so perfectly perfect, I guess-

Barry Joseph: Realised in the world-

David Armstrong: Realized. And out of nothing. Creating something out of nothing. Order out of chaos, as you said before. The basis for that song is his experience that he had creating the murder game which is just so..

Barry Joseph: That's right.

David Armstrong: Mind-boggling in a way.

Barry Joseph: And to me, so moving.

David Armstrong: Because you think it would be about some song that he wrote.

Barry Joseph: Or about what it means to be creative in general!

David Armstrong: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Because you're thinking, okay, he's talking about painting. I imagine he's really talking about himself writing songs.

David Armstrong: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: What he's talking about is creating a game for a friend to make her feel better. A game that, as you mentioned, has reverberated over the decades, but it was that creation process and being moved to use games to create moments of awe and clarity, and to use games to create connection. That was underlying why he wrote that song and what he's writing about.

David Armstrong: That is really amazing. And so anytime I hear that song from now on, of course that will be in my head. Oh, this is this tunnel that you go into and I, we both know what that's like. You get on something and I've spent hours and hours working on my book and not realizing that all this time had gone by. So it's so much a part of the creative process and it does seem obsessive to many people who are not in that world. That's like, why are you spending so much time? Because it is so engaging. I'm gonna ask you about your t-shirt.

Barry Joseph: I was hoping that was the segue. He said, obsessive, I have a T-shirt. And it says, what does it say, David?

David Armstrong: It says "appropriately obsessive."

Barry Joseph: Do you recognize the typeface at all? You might, if you don't, it's okay.

David Armstrong: I don't, I don't, I don't.

Barry Joseph: It is the title typeface for articles in the New Yorker.

David Armstrong: Oh, wow.

Barry Joseph: Cause the New Yorker, now that you mentioned that.

David Armstrong: York, yes.

Barry Joseph: In my review, called my book "Appropriately Obsessive", and after here I'm gonna go give a talk of my book and this is the shirt that I designed that I can wear because just like my book, I am appropriately obsessive about whatever it is that I'm involved with, whether it's. Talking about Stephen Sondheim, whether it's running my museum on Seltzer, whether it's any of the multiple things that get me excited in my life that I want to bring out into the world. This is what I want on my footstone, appropriately obsessive.

David Armstrong: I think that's very appropriate and we all should get one of that at least. I feel like I should have one of those t-shirts as well, because you know, people have said, why would you spend two years of your life writing a book about the Broadway musical?

I can think of no better time spent than this time I spent doing that. And I'm sure you feel the same way about Matching Minds with Sondheim, this amazing book. Thank you so much, Barry, so great to have you here on Broadway Nation.

Barry Joseph: David's such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

It's gone. You don't see it in my book. I was so excited when Applause.

David Armstrong: Of course, we all grew up on Methuen Drama books and Applause books. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: And I wanted to see that name on the outside. I'm happy that Bloomsbury is on the outside. But I was like, oh, I don't get applause. Okay.