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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation. 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. I've been so blown away by that and have had the honor of having many of the authors of those books on this podcast. 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. An 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. 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. First of all, Barry, welcome. Thank you for being here.

[1:12] Barry Joseph: 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.

[1:16] David Armstrong: It's my pleasure. How do you describe the book?

[1:19] Barry Joseph: I describe the book as an exploration into the barely understood, hardly known side aspect of who Stephen Sondheim was when he was not writing lyrics and composing music. Puzzles and games were a side hobby of his that he had a passion for from when he was very young, from when he was a teenager until he passed away. And throughout those many decades, through parlor games, board games, treasure hunts, word puzzles, and mechanical puzzles, his passion, his interest in creativity was expressed in a whole other way than we get to see when it's on the stage.

[1:54] David Armstrong: Fascinating. And I'm going to ask you about how you started this in a minute. But first of all, how did you structure the book to talk about all those various elements in this one volume?

[2:04] Barry Joseph: So jumping into something that was both really rich and deep and yet never ended, because there was always new research coming in, gave me an exciting challenge to figure out, how do I tell the story? Essentially, what is the story? What is there? What does one need to understand about, if you're looking at an encyclopedia, all the details? And how do you shape that in a compelling way from readers? So the first thing that made sense to me that ended up on the page was structuring around those categories I just talked about. What is Sondheim's relationship with cryptic crossword puzzles? What are his relationships with escape rooms? They're completely different relationships. So for each of those modalities of games and puzzles, we're hearing about a different side of Sondheim.

But we're also looking at how they all connect together. The way they connect together is how they connected him with other people. He used games to create moments of connection with the people he loved in his life, his family, his friends, his colleagues. And he used puzzles to create moments of awe and wonder and moments of clarity. And so whether you're talking about an escape room, a crossword puzzle, or even a parlor game, you are seeing time and again these stories of him connecting with people and making these moments of awe and wonder. And those stories, what it meant for people to have that connection with Sondheim, to be connecting with others in his inner circle, to have those moments of awe and wonder, those are the stories that I wanted to lead with.

So in some ways, this is just hearing recollections of people who went to that famous 1969 party in his house or was in the cast of Little Night Music. And in 1973, were invited to a treasure hunt based on the lyrics. Or in 2013, went to a birthday party. And at the cocktail party, Stephen Sondheim stepped up and said, I have a game for you all. People who were at those locations who knew Stephen Sondheim and could not only tell the stories about what it was like to engage with Sondheim, not through his lyrics and music, but through his puzzles, but also could reflect on what it meant for who Stephen Sondheim was, his personality, how his mind worked, and how a different side of himself was expressed through his puzzles and games.

That to me was the lead for about the four-fifths of the book. And so it's somewhat of a biology. I call it ludological biology. Ludology is the study of play. This is looking at Stephen Sondheim from the lens of play. So everything in the book is talking about when Stephen Sondheim was a play, who was he? What was he like? But then the last section of the book, which is pretty much a tease without it, is how can you do this yourself? How can you run your own Stephen Sondheim game parties? How can you design treasure hunts in a Stephen Sondheim style? How can you try out some cryptic crossword puzzles that are in the style that Stephen Sondheim loved to create and innovated when he brought them over from England in 1968?

So for me, the book is this deep dive from all these different angles that are for people who love Sondheim, who want to understand a new side of him, for people who never heard of Stephen Sondheim, but love puzzles and games, and where everybody feels welcome and inclusive in this conversation, wherever you come from. So at the end, everyone feels like they understood games, puzzles, and Stephen Sondheim in a whole new way. In that last section, you can literally match your mind with Stephen Sondheim. That's right. When you see a Stephen Sondheim show, you're seeing him in collaboration with directors and performers and musicians. And we can always, those who love Sondheim, know where the DNA is at Sondheim.

But we're also pulling it apart. Did that come from Sondheim? Did that come from a collaborator? But when you're doing a Sondheim puzzle, when you're playing a Sondheim game, it's almost always something he created by himself. So you're mainlining Stephen Sondheim. You're getting right into his mind. And when a puzzle designer designs a puzzle, they're not trying to trick you. They're not trying to make it so hard you can't do it. They want you to succeed, but they want you to be challenged. So that's where you're matching mind with Sondheim. You're getting into his brain thinking, what is this puzzle designer trying to do to help me be the best who I can be? And in that process, understand myself, understand him in a new way.

[5:44] David Armstrong: I think it's interesting that what you just said, because I think that's the same thing with his shows. He wants his shows to be successful. He wants them to be hits. He wants audiences to love them, but he also wants it to be, he's not making it necessarily easy for audiences to do that. And that's so interesting. I also think the collaborative aspect of it, making a musical is perhaps the most collaborative thing you can possibly do. And yet, because he writes both music and lyrics, writing the songs is a very singular, solitary thing. You do that by yourself in your room. It is such hard work. Every, especially lyric writer, will tell you there's no magic to it. It is just hard, hard, hard work figuring it out. So it seems to me that these games were in a way to, because even though he designed them by himself, he wanted to play them with groups of people.

[6:35] Barry Joseph: That's right. Games are inherently social. He was, that was his social, main social outlet in a way, was playing these games with a very interesting specific group of people, which we'll talk about, which evolves over the years. And when he's doing that, of course, he's no longer just the creator of the puzzle. He's now the game master. This is his party. He's the host. He's in charge. He's the host. He shows who to invite. He shows what food you're going to have and what you're going to be drinking. It's like going to an Everything Sondheim production, where you're not just in the audience watching, you're realizing it by participating, because without your participation, there is no game.

[7:09] David Armstrong: Exactly. So you don't come from the world of theater to begin with.

[7:12] Barry Joseph: I come from the seats in theater.

[7:14] David Armstrong: From the seats.

[7:14] Barry Joseph: From a little kid growing up on Long Island, my mom would take me and my sister in to see Broadway shows. I remember seeing Annie. I remember seeing Really Rosie in the late 70s, in the early 80s, and Grease. I remember seeing Chess when we were in London and lucky enough to see its original production on the West End. Cats when we were back in the U.S. But I never saw Sondheim until I was an adult. I knew his music, not knowing it was his, because my parents had the soundtrack to West Side Story, of course. So when I was lying on my red shag carpet in my living room, listening to my albums, Free to Be You and Me, and Really Rosie, as I mentioned, when I would get through those, here were my parents' albums, Jacques Brel's Alive and Well and West Side Story.

And I loved listening to West Side Story. I can't tell you what I loved about it, but I knew I felt something. And it was so exciting for me to listen to that whole album and then get up when the first side was over, flip it over, and listen to the second side, looking at the cover on the album. That style of lyrics, that depth of the emotions, really spoke to me. And when I started experiencing other Sondheim productions, I started noticing a commonality in what those shows made me feel. West Side Story, Passion, Merrily We Roll Along, Assassins. And I started recognizing that there was someone out there in the Broadway world that I thought were all different people, but were all the same. And I want to follow that person, because that person has given me something magical that I'm not getting from anybody else.

So sometime in a separate conversation, I love to talk about you and I being 12-year-old boys and being in love with Jacques Brel's Alive and Well and Living in Paris. That's a whole other talk about a psychological study. We talked just a little bit about what your exposure was to Sondheim as you're growing up. But your career path, what is the career path you went down?

[8:50] Barry Joseph: Oh, that's such a great question. And I'm only pausing because I don't have a traditional career path.

[8:56] David Armstrong: That's what I'm just hard to figure out. I noticed that.

[9:00] Barry Joseph: So the way I often talk about it is I grew up in the 1970s. I was in elementary school at the time when Sugar Cane Island came out, which if that doesn't mean anything to you, for some people they'll say, oh, that was the first choose your own adventure book. Books where it would say, if you want to go through the cave door, go to page seven. But if you want to go up the ladder, go to 23. And those exploded in popularity when I was in elementary school. Everyone had to have them. And that taught me about multilinearity. And it taught me about agency. Most books you read, you just turn the page. But now I, like in a game, got to choose my direction. I never experienced agency like that before.

And this is when Atari came out and Intellivision. And I started being able to program when I was 12 years old and make my own games. So I learned early on about that power of designing digitally stories where people had agency in it. And it was a collaboration with people. And that led me into an interest in both puzzles and games, but also education. I've spent the last 25 years in afterschool education. I taught at the American Museum of Natural History where I worked in the education department for many years. I teach at NYU. I teach in many contexts. And in this framework of mine where I'm an educator, I approach all sorts of things. And so I co-founded an organization called Games for Change over 20 years ago.

It's the largest and oldest organization in the world now. That's about the social impact of games, not just the playful, fun aspect of them, but looking where the two fit together. And all of those are about me trying to figure out how games can have an impact out in the world to move people, to shape people, to have an impact and make things better. And so in that context, as someone who's designed games, who's worked with young people to design games, who's worked with nonprofit organizations to design games, I followed my passion around Sondheim and was shocked when I found the two come together.

[10:43] David Armstrong: So that's my next question is, how did you then come to write a book about Stephen Sondheim? And how did you even become aware of his interest in games?

[10:48] Barry Joseph: So Stephen Sondheim passed away in November 2021. And when I look back at the New York Times, I see what I chose to ignore. I was focusing just on the impact he had on me through his music, through his lyrics, through his collaborations. And I ignored the section that talked about the fact that he was the founding puzzle editor at New York Magazine, where he created 42 cryptic crosswords, which is one of the hardest puzzles in the English language and esoteric and hard to get into and figured out how to translate them for an American audience. Since that moment on changing puzzles in America, I ignored that. The information was in front of me. And even though I love puzzles, and I love games, I didn't pay any attention to it.

Then a few months later in March, my birthday was two days after his, my wife got me three books about Stephen Sondheim. It seemed appropriate since he just passed away. Merrill Seacrest's biography, the postmodern analysis of all of his shows, and then the most recent book, which was James Lapine's oral history of Sunday in the Park with George. And it was in that book that I read the line that led to my book today. As many of us know, Stephen Sondheim had just come off Merrily We Roll Along, barely made it through nine productions. The critics savaged it. Sondheim felt put upon, set upon. And when James Lapine met him, he could tell he wasn't in a good space. And in the oral history recounting decades later, he's talking with Stephen Sondheim about how he felt at that moment.

And he said, yeah, I wasn't in a good space. And I'm paraphrasing here. I thought I would leave musical theater. I'd go into another profession. I thought I'd go into games, video games. That's what I really...

[12:21] David Armstrong: Welcome back to Broadway Nation. I'm your host, David Armstrong, and today I am thrilled to have with me Barry Joseph, the author of the recent book, Matching Minds with Sondheim. Since Stephen Sondheim's passing, there have been so many books written about him and various aspects of his life and career. Barry's book stands out as a completely unique and original way of looking at Sondheim.

[12:51] David Armstrong: As Barry describes it, Matching Minds with Sondheim is “an exploration into the barely understood, hardly known, side-aspect of who Stephen Sondheim was when he was not writing lyrics and composing music.” Puzzles and games were a side hobby of his that he had a passion for throughout his life, from when he was very young until he passed away.

[13:21] David Armstrong: Throughout those many decades, through parlor games, board games, treasure hunts, word puzzles, mechanical puzzles, and video games, his passion, interest, and creativity were expressed in a whole other way than we get to see when it's on the stage. The book also serves as a sort of “alternate biography” of Sondheim and explores how his life, Broadway career, and gaming hobby were intricately intertwined.

[13:51] Barry Joseph: Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk about Sondheim in this different light.

[14:01] David Armstrong: Absolutely! So, Barry, what inspired you to write this book?

[14:11] Barry Joseph: Well, I’ve always been fascinated by Sondheim's work, but I realized that there was this whole other side to him that was not being explored. His love for puzzles and games was a significant part of his life, and I wanted to delve into that aspect and show how it influenced his creativity and artistry.

[14:41] David Armstrong: That’s really interesting. Can you share some examples of how his passion for puzzles intersected with his work in musical theater?

[14:51] Barry Joseph: Certainly! For instance, many of his lyrics and musical structures can be seen as puzzles in themselves. He often played with language and form in a way that challenges the audience, much like a good puzzle does.

[15:21] David Armstrong: That’s a great point. It’s fascinating to think about how those elements come together.

[15:31] Barry Joseph: Exactly! And I think understanding this side of him gives us a deeper appreciation for his work and the genius behind it.

[16:01] David Armstrong: I couldn't agree more. So, what was the process like for you in researching and writing this book?

[16:11] Barry Joseph: It was quite an adventure! I immersed myself in Sondheim's life, his interviews, and his personal letters, and I also explored the world of puzzles and games. I spoke with people who knew him and those who shared his passion for gaming.

[16:41] David Armstrong: That sounds like a labor of love.

[16:51] Barry Joseph: It truly was. I wanted to honor his legacy while also shedding light on this lesser-known aspect of his life.

[17:21] David Armstrong: And I think you’ve done a wonderful job of that. What do you hope readers take away from your book?

[17:31] Barry Joseph: I hope they come away with a new perspective on Sondheim, seeing him not just as a composer and lyricist but as a multifaceted individual whose love for puzzles enriched his creative process.

[18:01] David Armstrong: That’s a beautiful sentiment. Thank you for sharing that, Barry.

[18:11] Barry Joseph: Thank you for having me, David.

[18:21] David Armstrong: We’ll be right back after this short break.

[24:43] Barry Joseph: 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 Meryl Streep 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 them mechanics, the things you do in the game that make it unique.

It's like the affordances in a show. 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. And how does Oscar Hammerstein fit into that story? 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. He then taught chess to Hammerstein. He teaches Oscar Hammerstein how to play chess. 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.

I don't think he learns the more competitive cutthroat version until he's with Leonard Bernstein. So in that household, play was what people did. Whether it was playing croquet outside or anagrams with words at night, it was part of the household. They were a game-playing family. That's right. 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.

[27:16] David Armstrong: 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, 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. He was asked by Rodgers and Hammerstein to come up with a treasure hunt to open it up because 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 created.

[27:53] Barry Joseph: Oh, it was supposed to be in the show.

[27:55] David Armstrong: It was supposed to be in the show. I thought you were saying for the party or something.

[27:58] Barry Joseph: No, this was supposed to be in the plot of the show. It would be the opening of the second act. They would start with a treasure hunt.

[28:03] David Armstrong: Wow.

[28:03] 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.

[28:10] 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. There are a lot of crossovers, surprisingly in some ways, between our books.

[28:21] Barry Joseph: Yes. In fact, 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.

[28:28] David Armstrong: I can't wait to hear it. First things we have in common. We're both telling stories that are marginalized and little known. The reasons why they're marginalized are different.

[28:37] Barry Joseph: Yes.

[28:38] David Armstrong: Yours are political and cultural and large and minor personal. Things you have to hunt for that are out in the world. It's not that no one has ever talked about them before, but they're not regularly talked about, and you have to really, like an archaeologist, find them.

[28:54] Barry Joseph: 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.

[29:00] David Armstrong: Right, and you have to do the research to do that.

[29:03] Barry Joseph: That's right. The level of research in your book is phenomenal.

[29:06] David Armstrong: Thank you. I mean, especially the photos and the images that are in there are just staggering. I understand how hard it was to find all those, to get the rights to them, to get permission to use them.

[29:19] Barry Joseph: You know.

[29:19] David Armstrong: Oh, God. That's a year of the three years you took writing the book, I'm sure.

[29:23] 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, because 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 what 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. 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 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.

[30:17] David Armstrong: Because as you know, we both use the same photo of Sondheim on the cover.

[30:20] Barry Joseph: Exactly.

[30:21] David Armstrong: I love that one. Can you describe it?

[30:23] Barry Joseph: I love this photo because it's him fairly young. He must be in his 30s, I think, or maybe 40-ish. And he's looked so impish, and he has this sort of devilish expression on his face. And he's looking, in my book, I have him positioned so he's looking up at the title. And you have a similar.

[30:40] David Armstrong: He's looking up at his name, Sondheim.

[30:43] Barry Joseph: Yeah, looking up at his name, Sondheim. And it's just a delightful picture. It's one of my favorite pictures of him.

[30:47] David Armstrong: It's wonderful. And I have a second photo of him because I want this not to be seen as, oh, this is Sondheim from this period in his life. It's his whole life.

[30:54] Barry Joseph: Right.

[30:54] David Armstrong: So I needed a young Sondheim and an old Sondheim. And I found this wonderful photo of him with his finger on his lips going, hmm.

[31:01] Barry Joseph: Perusing.

[31:02] David Armstrong: Exactly. What can I think up next? 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. You're looking at the cover, and Sondheim's staring at you going, hmm. Instead, he's now looking up at the title saying, hmm, what is this book that I've in? And I love that.

[31:17] Barry Joseph: Second thing is, we share a publisher.

[31:19] David Armstrong: We do indeed.

[31:20] Barry Joseph: And we don't.

[31:21] David Armstrong: My publisher was Applause Books.

[31:23] Barry Joseph: Yours is, I can't pronounce it.

[31:24] David Armstrong: Matthew and Drama.

[31:25] Barry Joseph: And Applause was bought by Bloomsbury.

[31:28] David Armstrong: Bloomsburg.

[31:29] Barry Joseph: Bloomsbury.

[31:29] David Armstrong: Bloomsbury.

[31:30] Barry Joseph: And yours is also owned by Bloomsbury.

[31:33] David Armstrong: Bloomsbury owns Matthew and Drama.

[31:35] Barry Joseph: Matthew and Drama is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. So we have that connection. And I guess Applause sort of is now. Although, is that name gone?

[31:41] David Armstrong: It's gone. You don't see it in my book.

[31:43] Barry Joseph: I was so excited when Applause was acquired. We've all grew up on Matthew and Drama books and Applause books.

[31:49] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[31:49] Barry Joseph: And I wanted to see that name on the outside.

[31:51] David Armstrong: I'm happy that Bloomsbury's on the outside.

[31:53] Barry Joseph: Absolutely. I was like, oh, I don't get Applause. OK. We're both educators?

[31:58] David Armstrong: Absolutely. I teach at NYU.

[31:59] Barry Joseph: And I've been teaching in after-school programs for 25 years.

[32:01] David Armstrong: And how long have you been teaching?

[32:03] Barry Joseph: Just since 2019 at the University of Washington School of Drama.

[32:06] David Armstrong: And we both got to interview Richard Shook, who I adore.

[32:10] Barry Joseph: What a great guy.

[32:11] David Armstrong: And what a great book that is.

[32:12] Barry Joseph: Fantastic. It's amazing. Ways that it's different. Your path, I think, was having a class that led you to a podcast that led you to write a book.

[32:22] David Armstrong: Started with my course that I teach on the history of the Broadway musical, absolutely. My publisher, Dom O'Hanlon at Matthew and Drama, 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.

[32:36] Barry Joseph: That's awesome. And I flipped the whole thing. I wrote a book, which I turned into a podcast, which I can talk about if you like. 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.

[32:51] David Armstrong: You are everywhere. I see you all over the place.

[32:53] Barry Joseph: I love getting up there. And what I've loved doing is doing something different every single time. I have elements, and I combine them together. Is this a puzzle-solving crowd? And then we're going to pull up Sondheim's puzzles, and we're going to see if we can tackle them and see what it tells us about Stephen Sondheim. Is this a musical crowd? We're going to 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.

[33:17] David Armstrong: And I've listened to several of those episodes that you've turned into podcasts. 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, quote, lectures, which really, to engage the audience, have to be very entertaining. And you certainly do that.

[33:35] 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 contexts to continue the stories and tell them in new contexts. So I had 30 hours of interviews that I could turn into podcasts. So I said, OK, 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 Shook. Because 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 are experts on cryptic crosswords, or love designing escape rooms, and then helping us understand that aspect of Stephen Sondheim in a new way.

[34:43] David Armstrong: That's fascinating. And I was going to say, your podcast is also named Matching Minds with Sondheim.

[34:48] Barry Joseph: Yes.

[34:49] David Armstrong: On the same network.

[34:50] Barry Joseph: On the Broadway Podcast Network.

[34:51] David Armstrong: On the Broadway Podcast Network, that's right. Finally, a big difference between our two books, your dedication can be read. And mine cannot, because it's a whole bunch of dashes, because it's one of the...

[35:02] Barry Joseph: Oops, I almost said it.

[35:03] David Armstrong: It's one of the puzzles in the book.

[35:05] Barry Joseph: It is a puzzle. I remember opening to it, saying, oh, he's being very tricky here, because we now have... He's making me work to figure this out, which I have not done.

[35:14] Barry Joseph: I'm going to tell your listeners 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, because 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 going to come in or where they're going to come from. But it means they both found the puzzle, and they have solved it.

[35:42] David Armstrong: And will you give us a clue of where to look for this puzzle?

[35:46] 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 a flip side of that. The second puzzle is connected to that side.

[36:03] David Armstrong: I see.

[36:03] Barry Joseph: So you've got to solve one to get to the other.

[36:05] David Armstrong: It helps.

[36:06] Barry Joseph: Yeah.

[36:06] David Armstrong: 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 going to do what you want. So that leads me to, I thought, a really fascinating little section of your book was, what's the difference between a puzzle and a game?

[36:21] Barry Joseph: This is something that people can always discuss and debate. So I use my own definitions for the book to be what's useful. 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, because that's about resetting the game board, right? And you can play Monopoly a thousand times and not feel like you finished it, or you wouldn't want to repeat it. 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 the house rules are, 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.

[37:05] David Armstrong: Even with a jigsaw puzzle, you could do it again, and sometimes you might, years later, do that same jigsaw puzzle again. But most people would not finish it and then take it apart and do it again right away.

[37:35] Barry Joseph: Right. And same with a crossword puzzle. You're not going to 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 because Escape Room is a series of puzzles. And you do know I don't want to do one by myself. I could not do it by myself. So we have tendencies. And so in that construct, 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 going to 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. 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 box puzzles and puzzle boxes. That's what I mean. Yeah, exactly. 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, as you said earlier, becoming the designer of video games. So I think his interest in video games comes from his puzzle interest.

So the kind of games he played in the late 80s on the Macintosh, games like A Fool's Errand and 3 and 3, those are games where you're solving puzzles and moving through a narrative. Oxid, which is a game he played in the 90s and early noughts, 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 an Atari in the late 70s. John Wideman 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. And wasn't Myst one he was particularly interested in?

[39:47] Barry Joseph: Oh, Myst, thank you. He played Myst before anyone knew about Myst, probably because it was in Games Magazine, but I'm not sure. And again, that's immersive puzzle solving. 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.

[40:05] David Armstrong: That's right. And not in the book. Choose your own story.

[40:07] 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 these games together. And Sondheim, Dennis says, would fly him out from LA so he could spend a whole weekend playing Myst. 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. That's how much he enjoyed doing them and doing them with his friends. I can't help, just to be a little bit of Debbie Downer here, is concerned that because he said he did this to avoid work. And so part of me thinks, how many more musicals would he have had if he hadn't spent all this time playing games? But that's probably not, I'll be more gracious than that.

[40:50] 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 is now working with Steven 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. And maybe allowed him to write the shows that he wrote.

[41:14] David Armstrong: Exactly. We can't know. But I can imagine, what if he had taken that path not taken? What if he had gone into board games?

[41:21] Barry Joseph: The road he didn't take? Yeah. 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, he was a renaissance man in that regard?

[41:38] 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 and games world. Is this high art? And he'd be like, no, call it art, but it's not high art. And you 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 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 have got him in an obit in the New York Times, even if he'd never written a single song. So in the game world, he already, he's very significant in that regard.

[42:24] David Armstrong: That's right. And just explain that again for us, because he brings this certain kind of, tell us what he did.

[42:30] Barry Joseph: In short, crosswords 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 thing 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 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. Another great musical theater lyricist, one of the other greatest who I love talking about on my podcast. And who in January of this year, just finished 50 years of writing cryptic crosswords once a month for Harper's Magazine.

[44:06] David Armstrong: Wow. Trained by Stephen Sondheim.

[44:08] Barry Joseph: He passed it on to Richard. 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. I'm going to tell you mine, but I'd love to hear yours.

[44:22] Barry Joseph: 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, but 68. That's a time travel goal is to go back and be with that group of amazing people on that treasure hunt.

[44:43] David Armstrong: Is there a difference between a treasure hunt and a scavenger hunt? What's the difference?

[44:48] Barry Joseph: 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. You're getting objects. A treasure hunt is about getting the treasure at the end. Sondheim's treasure hunts are not about collecting things or doing things. They're about solving puzzles. And their puzzles are layered. You solve, let's say, 12 puzzles. And solving each of those gives you a piece of some information, which, if you combine 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 because he loved treasure hunts. And for me... And I've heard them described as both ways in other people's books. I think Mary Rogers calls it a scavenger hunt, possibly. But yeah.

[45:40] David Armstrong: Incorrect.

[45:41] Barry Joseph: Yeah. 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, right? It's just language, right? Of course. And so everyone adapts it. And that 1968 treasure hunt is the most famous of them all because that's the one everyone spoke about. And I was most surprised because 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 contexts. But you can string them together if you wanted.

[46:10] David Armstrong: Right. And often with different facts or different times of day or different things.

[46:14] Barry Joseph: That's right. But the idea is still there. And it was as if that was the only treasure hunt he ever did. 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 because the most famous people were there. Maybe because it's in the most people's autobiographies. It always shows up.

[46:34] David Armstrong: So who were the participants in that treasure hunt?

[46:37] Barry Joseph: Oh, my God. They're like a who's who of theater at the time. Hal Prince, Broadway producer. Roddy McDowall, actor. Sondheim's close friends. Actress Lee Remick. Composer Mary Rogers. Arthur Lawrence. Grover Dale. I think, in fact, Grover Dale is the only person still alive today who was there.

[46:55] David Armstrong: And did you get a chance to talk to him?

[46:57] Barry Joseph: I did. I did through email. And he talked about what it was like getting into that limousine and giving a list of clues they had to find, driving all over Midtown, and how exciting that was. And there were four limousines, right? Sondheim had set them up in teams with four 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.

[47:30] David Armstrong: I love that story of Andy Perkins' mother being this silent woman. I guess they didn't know who she was. Just they showed up at this townhouse and here's this woman who doesn't speak and brings them in and serves them tea.

[47:44] 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.

[48:01] Barry Joseph: Now, it has to be my favorite one. And it is also a treasure hunt. But it's towards the end of his life. And in fact, it's the last treasure hunt he ever did. In 2013, he designed a treasure hunt at City Center using all of the theater for a friend's birthday party. There were 12 puzzles given in packs to each of the teams. And they all had instructions except for one. It was just two sheets of paper. They kind of look like a crossword, like a grid with letters in a grid. And then there's a grill, which looks the same, except some of the squares are cut out. So you can like put them to your head and look through them. No instructions. And of course, you look at it, and you put one on top of the other.

And you're trying to figure out how do I make the words on the front on the grill have letters come through in the hole from the grid. And it's mind boggling, because you're kind of making words, but they're not real words. And this is a puzzle that he did in 2013. And he's fooling you from the beginning, because the way he puts the words on the page, right?

[49:02] David Armstrong: Oh, should we reveal it? Are we going to give a spoiler?

[49:05] Barry Joseph: I think you can sort of easily indicate how it worked. Yeah. So when you look at the puzzle, again, with no instructions, you automatically presume the top and the bottom, because the letter T can only be in one direction, right? The letter O, you can flip that, but not a T. And so you hold them in a certain orientation, and you will never solve it without orientation.

[49:26] Barry Joseph: And I've watched people many times try and solve it, and I see them in their mind because they physically start doing something and they stop, and I ask, what were you going to do? And they said, oh, I was going to turn it upside down. But of course, that wouldn't work because the letters don't work upside down, and then they keep being stuck. And that's what happened that day at the party. And Sondheim got up and said, okay, there's the one puzzle you're stuck with. I'm not going to give you the answer, but I'll tell you, you have to look at it a different way. And then one table said, oh, I got it. And then another table said, I got it, too. And I had been stuck with that puzzle myself because it was sent to me from the party planner so I could figure out how to write about them for the book.

I put it aside because I was stymied, and then I remembered that Sondheim had said that and that people had figured it out that fast. And I said, okay, this is a solution that's not what I'm expecting, but I'm going to get it right away. And then I turned it upside down. And even though my mind had said there's no way it's going to work because the letters can't be upside down, I then discovered that because I'm covering some of the letters but not others. When you put the grid on top of it, that letter doesn't show anymore. That's right. And the only letters that came through were ones that could flip upside down. And now I could discover that I needed to go into the women's room to find the clue.

Brilliant. And like so many puzzles, it's so simple once you discover it. And so like, well, of course, why was it so hard? But that's the genius of it. And I love it because it tells us how his mind worked. You had to think laterally. Once you got it, you'd say, oh, I see. It's so simple. And because I figured out where he designed it from, which is part of the joy and the pleasure of the research for the book, I discovered about a year after this treasure hunt that in 1995, he'd done a treasure hunt for the Edna St. Vincent Malay Society for his friend, James Lapine. And it used the same puzzle design, different words, different message. But I said, oh, he had reused it. And then I found out where he got it from.

When he published the cryptic crossword puzzles in New York Magazine, he always named the people from England whose puzzles he was theming his off of. He was always recognizing the people before him. But with his treasure hunts, he didn't have to because no one really cared. So I didn't know where he got it from. Right. And they weren't printed anywhere. They weren't, it wasn't, yeah. So without asking him, how would I ever learn where he got it from? Well, when the Doyle auction occurred and his private items were sold off, I was able to help the person acquire his collection of game and puzzle periodicals, which included the title Games Magazine from the first issue, 1977, until Sondheim passed away because he kept them all, organized them all in boxes by date.

A few months before he designed the one, the treasure hunt for the Edna St. Vincent Malay Society, there was a grill and grid puzzle in it. Now, most of the puzzles he did in Games Magazine, he did in his head. He just, there was no markings with his pencil.

[52:08] Barry Joseph: So you can't tell whether he did them or not, necessarily. But this one you were supposed to send in and you have to cut off a grid and grill so you can put them on top of each other. And he did. He wrote on it. He clipped it together and never sent it in, but left it in the magazine. And that was designed by Will Shorts. Wow. So Will Shorts designed this in Games Magazine. He then did it in 1995, once, and then again in 2013. And so being able to both experience myself, the brilliant lateral thinking required to solve it with his aid, with him at my back, and then being able to track the entire origin of how it was learned, how it was used, and then learn from Will Shorts, that's what I love about my book, that I can go back that far with the help only of other people.

[52:48] David Armstrong: Will Shorts, who writes one of the forewords to your book.

[52:50] Barry Joseph: That's right. And he's the puzzle editor for New York Times and was an editor at Games Magazine when Games Magazine interviewed Stephen Sondheim and did the profile in '83.

[52:58] David Armstrong: Amazing. Yeah. And we've, I assume many listeners to this will have heard him on NPR, all that, yeah. 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, loves, 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 hearing 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. It's natural that these two worlds would come together. 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. But these are kinds of theatrical performances. 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 are examples of that?

[54:25] Barry Joseph: When I asked Will Shorts, 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 was a new format in movies and it said Cinerama. As soon as he saw it, he said, oh, American. The anagram was immediate for him, not for me. What I say is when I see a word, I see meaning. When he sees a word, he saw possibilities.

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 should not be a surprise that there's this 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, kind of 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 love doing cryptics like him.

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.

[56:13] Barry Joseph: This is part of the musical theater world.

[56:19] David Armstrong: Absolutely. Yeah. And I assume poets may be to a certain extent, although they're not usually as certainly modern poets are not as meticulous about the rhyming and the structure of poems in the same way that lyricists tend to be. I've had poets on my podcast as well, going deep into the structure of the lyrics and the puzzles. 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 the capabilities, they tell me I do, that anyone can. 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.

[57:06] David Armstrong: Are there specific songs and shows that are very revealing of these two worlds intersecting?

[57:12] Barry Joseph: So many. But because we have probably a little time left, I will button where we started. 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 out of town. The 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 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.

[58:05] Barry Joseph: It had atmosphere, but it was dull because trying to guess who it was was kind of boring. And once you were dead, you couldn't do anything. And once you were murdered, once you were dead, you were out of the game. And if you were the murderer, you knew it was you, right? 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, 8 or 7 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. It has its own history, but that experience...

[58:30] David Armstrong: An amazing history and resulting in many other plays and movies and things, but...

[58:36] 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.

[58:41] Barry Joseph: What is amazing about this, 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?

[58:54] Barry Joseph: It inspired him when he was writing the song Finishing the Hat in Sunday in the Park with George. So when we in the audience are watching Surat lost in his world, painting a hat that never existed...

[59:05] David Armstrong: He was obsessed with this painting and with getting that hat so perfectly perfect, I guess...

[59:13] Barry Joseph: Realized in the world.

[59:14] Barry Joseph: Realized, 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 mind boggling in a way.

[59:26] David Armstrong: And to me, so moving. Because you'd think it would be about some song that he wrote.

[59:30] Barry Joseph: Or about what it means to be creative in general. Because you're thinking, okay, he's talking about painting. I imagine he's really talking about himself, writing songs.

[59:37] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[59:38] 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.

[59:57] David Armstrong: That is really amazing. And so when you hear... 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 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.

[1:00:17] Barry Joseph: 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. It's like, why are you spending so much time? Because it is so engaging. I'm going to ask you about your t-shirt.

[1:00:29] David Armstrong: I was hoping that was the segue he said obsessive. I have a t-shirt and it says, what does it say, David?

[1:00:35] Barry Joseph: It says appropriately obsessive.

[1:00:36] David Armstrong: Do you recognize the typeface at all? You might. If you don't, it's okay.

[1:00:39] Barry Joseph: I don't. I don't.

[1:00:40] David Armstrong: It is the title typeface for articles in The New Yorker.

[1:00:44] Barry Joseph: Oh, wow. Okay. Now that you mentioned that, yes.

[1:00:47] David Armstrong: Because New Yorker, in my review, called my book appropriately obsessive. And after here, I'm going to go give a talk about my book. And this is the shirt that I designed that I can wear. Because just like my book, I'm 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.

[1:01:17] Barry Joseph: Appropriately obsessive.

[1:01:18] David Armstrong: I think that's very appropriate. And we all should get one of, at least I feel like I should have one of those T-shirts as well. Because 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.

[1:01:38] Barry Joseph: Thank you so much.

[1:01:41] David Armstrong: Barry, it's so great to have you here on Broadway Nation.

[1:01:45] Barry Joseph: David, such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[1:01:47] David Armstrong: Thank you.