Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, and this special edition in which we're gonna get to take you behind the scenes or rather into the audience on one of my recent presentations. I knew when I began scheduling my talks for this fall that I wanted to do something custom wherever I could. I really wanted people in the audience to feel like I was making something just for them that was specific to the occasion.

So when the Museum of the City of New York invited me to present. I knew I had to do something that wasn't just about Steven Sondheim and his puzzles and games but specifically about New York City. My book already has a lens games and puzzles. What would it mean to add yet another lens on top of it- New York City- and that gave me my title pretty quickly: how Stephen Sondheim Gamified New York City, and I had so much fun thinking about how, yes, we can look at the New York City of Stephen Sondheim's musicals, but what do we see when we look at the New York City of Stephen Sondheim's games and puzzles?

Because throughout his history creating puzzles and games, New York appears quite often whether we're looking at treasure hunts, crossword puzzles, even escape rooms, New York City is always there and the vision he creates of New York City as a place to be used to play with friends, as a place for people to discover mysteries that unfold, are quite different than the kind of New York City we discover in his musicals like Merrily We Roll Along and in Company. So I had a blast putting this presentation together at the Museum of the City of New York, just last Saturday. And if you wanna watch the entire presentation, check out my YouTube channel at the beginning of the year where you can see the entire video as well.

So you'll not only hear me, but you can see the slides and also the really cool videos I made of Google Earth images, jumping from location to location, to really physicalize the tour. Alright, with that, I'm excited to welcome you to a Saturday afternoon on the Upper East Side of New York City to the Museum of the City of New York.

Take a seat and get ready for the tour.

Nick Martinez: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Museum of the City of New York. I'm Nick Martinez, Vice President of Education and Engagement here at the museum. And welcome to New York by the book. Matching Minds With Sondheim by Barry Joseph. Barry Joseph, a very good friend of mine, is a games based educator, game designer, and founder of the Games for Change Festival. Barry previously worked at the American Museum of Natural History. That's where we first met. And the Girl Scouts of the USA. He's now the founder of Barry Joseph Consulting, dedicated to innovative solutions for learning in the digital age, and the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum. So welcome Barry Joseph.

Barry Joseph: Hi everybody, and welcome. As you heard, I am Barry Joseph, and welcome to How Sondheim Gamified New York City. Now, before we get started, I want to again thank Nick Martinez and the entire crew at the Museum of the City of New York for bringing me here today. Can you please give it up for them? They've been amazing. As Nick mentioned, he's a dear friend of mine and an old colleague, and I'm really excited to get to be part of his new life here at the museum. I've always loved this museum and I even bring my graduate students from NYU here as well to study it. So it's really a thrill for me to be here today and to be here with all of you.

So thank you for coming out on this somewhat flu ridden December afternoon in New York City. This is my 20th event this year, promoting my new book, Matching Minds with Sondheim. But I'm at a museum dedicated to the city of New York City, so I wanted to offer you all something completely new. So this is the first time I'm gonna be offering this presentation. And perhaps the last. Now when I think about auteurs and cities, what comes to mind for me is Spike Lee's Brooklyn, Fellini's Rome, David Lynch's Los Angeles. There are many artists in different mediums whose work has helped to frame our understanding of a city or place. Who comes to mind, for some of you? Go ahead and just shout them out. The person in the place.

August Wilson and Pittsburgh. Yep. In theater. Woody Allen. Woody Allen, and what city? Paris. Anyone else come to mind? Charles Dickens, London. Right? And the list goes on. Now, Sondheim certainly loved to write about New York City and here he is talking about it in a 1973 interview:

Interviewer: Start at the very beginning. Where are you from?

Stephen Sondheim: From Manhattan.

Interviewer: How did that affect what you're doing? Do you think you could have written for the theater coming from any place else?

Stephen Sondheim: Sure, sure, of course. Just it's, um, I find myself often writing about New York 'cause it interests me and the kind of life that people live here.

Barry Joseph: We see this in much of his work. For example, 1971's Company, which in many ways is a show about New York City made explicit in the last Broadway revival, literally in the set design itself. Here's a clip I imagine maybe none of you have heard before from a radio-ready version of "Another 100 People" from that very show, which was recorded, I believe, before the show even arrived in New York City. Let's listen to what interested Sondheim about the way people lived their lives in New York City back then.

Singers: Another hundred people just got off of the train and came up to the ground. While another hundred people just got off of the bus and are looking around at another hundred people who got off of the plate and are looking at us who got off on the train and the plane and the bus maybe yesterday. It's a city of strangers. Some come to work, some to play. A city strangers. Some come to stare, some to stay. And everyday, the ones who stay. Can find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks, by the the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks. And they walk together past the postered walls with their crude remarks.

Barry Joseph: Has anyone heard that before? I never heard that until last week, so it's good timing. Let's turn now to one more Sondheim show, which frames New York City. Merrily We Roll Roll Along. And here's a clip from Opening Doors performed in the recent pro-shot that some of you might have just seen in the theater. Oh, this, by the way, his only song that he ever admitted to being autobiographical.

Charlie: Who wants to live in New York? Who wants to worry? The noise, the dirt, the heat? Who wants the garbage cans clanging in the street? Suddenly I do! They're always popping their cork. I'll fix that line. The cops, the cabbies, the sales girls up at Sack's. You gotta have a real taste for maniacs. Suddenly I do!

Barry Joseph: "The postered walls with the crude remarks". "You have to have a taste for maniacs". That's the New York City of Sondheim's musicals, a romanticized roughness. Well, that's one of Sondheim's frames for the city he lives. Today we're gonna look at a very different framing by Sondheim, of New York City. One found not in his musicals, but rather from his games and his puzzles. This is the presentation I made for MCNY and for you today. My book looks at Sondheim from a ludological lens, a playful lens. All of the games and puzzles we're gonna look at today, I wrote about in great detail in my book to understand how his creative mind works. But when I started preparing this talk for today, I had no idea what I might see. Looking through this second lens, a civic lens, and let's discover together what I found. Sondheim's playful passions motivated him from when he was a young man until the final years of his life, before his passing, to treat the city as a game board, a set for hiding treasures and so much more. And that's what we're gonna explore together, this afternoon. We're gonna look at how Sondheim gamified New York City through board games, crossword puzzles, treasure hunts, and even it turns out, escape rooms. Hang onto your hat as this tour will move at a fast clip. Let's start with our first step, which is gonna take us back to 1968 to an address: 246 East 49th Street. Stephen Sondheim's apartment in Turtle Bay. It's time for a treasure hunt! Sondheim had heard about an annual treasure hunt in Chicago and thought it would be fun to reproduce a version closer to home. Could a grand treasure hunt be created for the city that never sleeps? Of course. All he needed was a creative partner and he found that in actor Anthony Perkins. Together in 1968, they created the Eleanor Clark French Memorial treasure hunt. On the eve of Halloween, four empty limousines pulled up to Sondheim's Turtle Bay townhouse, and waited for the 20 guests inside. It was time to begin. Sondheim arranged them into four teams, one per car before he unleashed them on the city each team was properly equipped with objects. Pins, scissors, strings, detailed maps, and advice: "keep talking to each other". Sondheim told them. "Do not try to solve these things individually. Talk about them. And in talking about them, you will come up with solutions."

And with that, they were off. Hal Prince, Broadway producer. Roddy McDowell, actor. Sondheim's Close friends actress Lee Remick and composer Mary Rodgers. Arthur Laurents . The door to Sondheim's townhouse opened like a clown car, the best of New York City's theater world pouring out into the street. They then filtered into the four limos and sped off into the night. Grover Dale, pictured here, climbed into one of those cars. When asked to recall the treasure hunt exactly 55 years later, Dale was perhaps the only person still alive who had experienced it. " Inside the limo", Dale told me "the map of clues dazzled us." He told those in his car, "bring on the clues folks. Grover Dale will be able to spot them and spot them." He did, starting with location on East 66th Street. When their limo pulled up, they were instantly rewarded by an envelope, tucked into a mail slot. "It got all of our brains ticking." He told me they sped off in their limo in search of the next clue, racing to be the first to return to Sondheim's townhouse. Dale imagining how sweet the victory might be upon their return.

Mary Rogers described one stop in her brilliant memoir "Shy". She wrote somehow he'd rig a record player or tape to keep repeating the song, "One for my Baby", referring to a song frequently covered by Frank Sinatra, but first performed by Fred Astaire. Specifically, it was the opening musical phrase, played on repeat. We all knew the lyric, of course. "It's quarter to three. There's no one in the place except you and me." They'd clearly found the clue, but what could they do with it? Could anyone here, guess what the answer is to this clue?

All good guesses. Is there a clock? Grand Central? Is it a cryptic? In fact, it's a little bit simpler than that. 2:45. It's a quarter to 3. 245. That's what they figured out. 245. The next address they had to find on the map must be at 2 4 5. The evening was Sondheim's New York City as locations for clues in a grand game.

Ready for stop two. We're now gonna move over from Turtle Bay to Times Square. Designed most likely in the late 1950s. As a present for his friend Hal Prince, this was the location for the board game, either called Producer or simply The Game of Hal Prince. Sondheim, based his design on the game of the real economics of a Broadway theater in the late 1950s addressing in his own words, how do you balance the cost of putting on the show, the possible weekly grosses, if you get good reviews, what you do if you get mixed reviews. In other words, Sondheim wasn't gamifying the geography of New York City, but its underlying economic engine, at least for Broadway. Players take on the role of a New York City theatrical producer trying to make a profit over a 36 week theatrical season. Players would open the gilt leather box you see in the middle, to find 36 production cards. Each featuring the name of a pretend play or musical, a list of its actors and director, the running cost, the point value of the production, and a space to indicate the theater rent. The back of the card listed the capitalization costs. Another set of cards, backer auditions, provides the capital required to launch a production. Sondheim once explained that during each round, the theater trade magazine Variety comes out, announcing weekly grosses. Take a look. For example, Broadway's Sturdy: Cab Ads Attract Cab Drivers. Or, Broadway Bleak: Chic Clique in Peak. Weak Week. . Finally, the game offered Monopoly-style chance cards called "Gossip Along the Rialto". Some included biting commentaries on Broadway producers, quote: " you rob the dressing rooms, receive only $1,000 because you underpay your cast so outrageously that they don't have much to steal." Others humorously took on Broadway talent. "Elia Kazan has to go to Washington to name a few more people. His employer has to get a new director." Other cards spun barbs at well-known Sondheim collaborators like Jerome Robbins, who abandons his show to spend weeks with his therapist. These cards often direct players to move to locations like theater parties, the actor studio, and Sardis suggesting that the game came with a board. In other words, Sondheim not only gamified the economics of Broadway, he also gamified its geographical landmarks. After playing with Hal Prince, for whom it was designed as a birthday present, Sondheim was pleased that Prince always won. To Sondheim, this indicated that his producer friend understood the underlying principle of the game, which is also to say Sondheim had successfully created an economic simulation for producing a Broadway hit.

"The game is so accurate", Prince told Games magazine "that if you can win at Steve's game, you can produce a successful show on Broadway". Prince also found one problem with it. "The game was" quote, "so complex, it takes almost as long to play as it does to produce a show." In The Game of Hal Prince, Sondheim's New York City is a challenging system, only a master like Prince can conquer. Let's move on to stop three. We're gonna go just a few blocks to a theater on Broadway, 225 West 44th Street for another treasure hunt. A Little Night Music. Imagine you're in the cast, the original cast of A Little Night Music. The show has done so well, it needs to move to a bigger theater. It's time to say farewell to The Schubert. But wait, what's this in your mailbox? An invitation from Glynis Johns, the star of the show, to a party. Oh and does it say game? I wonder what sort of game.

Well look, there's the show's composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim. And who is he with? Is that Anthony Perkins? What could they be working on? The party begins and Sondheim explains. He has created a treasure hunt across the Schubert Theater for cast and crew, as only you could answer his questions as it relies on knowledge of the theater, but also the show itself.

For example, if I filled in these lyrics, I would say, let's see, uh, "how can I wait around for later? She twitters my word". And "the orchards and the hay". "That dilapidated Inn." How word.? Haines. Howard Haines That's the show's general manager. Let's go find him. And when we do, he gives us a ticket. We go to the seat on that ticket, which gives us a letter. And that letter we put on the side of the sheet, one down. Nine more questions to go. Up to the catwalk, onto the stage, out to the lobby. The clues send us all over the theater. Eventually we've done it. We've solved them all. And somehow, I honestly don't know how, the meta puzzle leads us into the lobby where we find the treasure hidden in the big ticket box that's used for cancelled tickets. And inside Mum Champagne, which is mentioned in the show, and a card signed by Steve S. and Tony P. reading, "Go eat, and don't gloat". In Sondheim's A Little Night Music Treasure Hunt, Sondheim's New York City is full of dazzling mysteries to be unlocked, but the clock is ticking. Let's move now from the Broadway district, a few blocks south to 38 West 32nd Street for an escape room, up on the 14th floor. We're also gonna jump ahead, not by a single year, but by decades. When the first Escape room landed in New York.

In late 2013, Sondheim was 83 years old. Decades earlier. He was the one designing the puzzles, setting the scenes, playing Game Master, all just spend time in a playful way with friends and colleagues. Now, his city was filling up with empty office spaces and random apartments with open invitations to a seemingly never ending list of personalized parties.

It must have been a dream come true. Three years later, after defeating many in escape room, Sondheim stepped into a nondescript Midtown Manhattan office building, arriving for a job interview. It was September 14th, 2016. An unseasonably hot day, peaking at 90 degrees. Sondheim took the elevator to the 14th floor and exited left, stopping before a time worn, putty gray door, displaying nothing save its number 1409. And the name of the business within, printed in all caps, Virgil, named after one of the guides to the afterworld in Dante's Inferno. As he opened the door and stepped into the sparse corporate lobby, Sondheim did not enter alone. In fact, he was there with a number of loved ones who were also invited to interview with its global Mega corporation, which was led by a team of mysterious behavioral scientists. With anticipation and excitement, Sondheim and his crew stepped into the narrative of the most elaborate escape room ever to open in New York City entitled Paradiso: Chapter one. The receptionist in character welcomed Sondheim and his friends with the guidelines sending them on their way with an enigmatic promise:

" At Vigil Corps, our goal and our commitment is to you, to your journey, to your transcendence, whatever that may take. Good luck and may the escape you find for all time paradise." The experience began in the corporate lobby, but soon a passageway was revealed that required a crawl through a tight space. In went Sondheim. 86 years old. Until he came out into a well appointed parlor. On the security camera, the staff could see him smiling and having a grand old time. Entering the parlor triggered a song with one line repeating as if on a skipping record. A line Sondheim knew quite well. "One for my baby." Wait, how is this song back again? Sondheim heard Frank Sinatra crooning "It's a quarter to three" from the song "One for My Baby", which when decoded to the number 245 opened a lock on the middle drawer of a desk. This puzzle sent Sondheim back in his mind nearly five decades, as it was the very clue that he and Anthony Perkins had used in their 1968 Halloween treasure hunt, included by paradiso's designers unaware that one day Sondheim himself would be asked to solve it. How did an obscure clue from a half century old private party wind up in a cutting edge commercial experience?

Michael Counts, the founder and artistic director behind Paradiso knew a friend of Sondheim's, George Steele. And told him he was designing his first escape room. Steele told counts how Sondheim would have quote these crazy experiences for friends where people would zip around the city in a limo and have these bizarre theatrical experiences.

And Steele told counts about the song. As an homage to Sondheim, Counts decided to incorporate this puzzle into Paradiso. Quote "we cribbed it exactly as Sondheim had done" Counts told me. Counts was honoring Sondheim, not just for his impact on the world of theater, but for his impact on gaming. Counts was struck that many decades before the arrival of escape rooms, Sondheim was creating something so similar. Sondheim loved puzzles, Sondheim loved theatrical experiences, and by combining them Counts, figured that quote. In some ways you can almost consider him the inventor of escape rooms. When Sondheim heard Sinatra, he knew exactly what he was listening to and chuckled to himself, quote "Sondheim was particularly tickled by that." Taylor Meyers, the room's director told me, "once he figured it out." I spoke with Jonathan Mark Sherman, who was there that day with Sondheim. He told me he could still picture his friend in a short sleeve polo shirt, just beaming with sheer delight. "The numerical age just sort of faded away" he told me, "and it's like he became the kid that he was when he first discovered that he loved games."

I included the stop because in Sondheim's New York City, it's not only about what Sondheim saw when he viewed his home through the lens of play, but what it allows others to see when they did the same, especially when his work inspired others in mediums that were decades away from being invented. So Sondheim's New York City here is a city of inspiration and creative invention.

Let's now go a few blocks north to New York City Center at 131 West 55th Street. It's time for the 2013 Treasure Hunt, created as a birthday present for his friend Perry Granoff. I don't have a picture of Sondheim with Perry, but I have one with me, so here it is. I'll keep this visit short as I often draw from this hunt in my talks.

But just as he did 40 years earlier at the Schubert, Sondheim gamified this classic New York City theater, sending almost a hundred party guests scampering across four levels of the building. However, while the 1973 one were all word puzzles drawn from his show's lyrics, this went different in two ways. One, he was also gamifying the life of his friend, playfully framing her within each of the puzzles. And two, each of the dozen puzzles were unique from the others. Turning this into what I consider his treasure hunt masterpiece. For our sixth stop. Well, we need to step back, way back. as Sondheim did, we'll need to take in all of New York City. Someone earlier mentioned Cryptics, it's time to talk about cryptics. In 1968, Sondheim became the founding puzzle editor of New York Magazine. If that's news to you, take a moment to let that come in. I'll say it again. In 1968, Stephen Sondheim became the founding puzzle editor of New York Magazine. Talk about gamifying New York. Into 1969, he would create 42 crosswords. The first one was perhaps humorously entitled, puzzle number one. These puzzles inspired by his beloved British Cryptics always had a hidden theme or meta puzzle.

Did anyone wanna know or want to guess what the meta-puzzle was for puzzle number one, New York? That's right. So here is the puzzle. Puzzle number one, and here is the solution. Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, and Richmond. Staten Island is Richmond County.

The theme was the five Boroughs of New York City, but of course that wasn't enough for him. Each borough has its own variant, as you can see on the bottom, which allowed him to include New York City landmarks like Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Bronx Zoo, and even a Bronx cheer. So Sondheim literally used words to frame the boundaries and icons of New York City as treasures to be discovered by anyone willing to "match minds" with him.

But wait, there's more. Let's zoom back now into Manhattan to perhaps an unexpected location for me. I put it in the East River. This is a clue from his puzzle called Chop logic and my favorite. Broken harmonicas found floating in Manhattan. The answer is 10 letters. Put up your hand if you do cryptics.

One, two. I see two people. If you don't, this probably looks like gibberish, but for those who put up their hands, if you put your hands up again. Uh, three. I see three hands. Do you have a guess about how one would begin to solve this? If not, that's okay, but if you do, just shout it out. so let's pause right there. So what he's saying is there's actually two parts of a cryptic, there's the clue part. The puzzly part part.

So it's an anagram and then whatever follows it or precedes it is a straightforward definition. So he's saying there's two parts broken harmonicas, of which you have to do an anagram of harmonicas. And whatever that answer is, is also something found floating in Manhattan. Please continue. You read the book! I got it.

Alright. Someone in the front row says they got it. So what is an anagram of harmonica that's also found floating in Manhattan? The lady in the front row. Maratino. Why would it be Maratino? Please explain. 'Cause it's in a Manhattan cocktail. Ah, that is correct. So when I look at this, broken harmonica is found floating in Manhattan, I'm thinking, okay, what would a harmonica be doing in Manhattan? And Manhattan's an island. So I'm picturing the river. So I chose the East River, which I know is not an river, it's a estuary nonetheless. And already I've been suckered in by the misdirection because it doesn't say around Manhattan. It says in Manhattan it doesn't make sense. But I ignored it. I let myself be distracted and to think that Manhattan meant the island, but that was intentionally misdirection.

Cause what I was supposed to be finally thinking about as you did, was thinking about, oh, it's not the island. But the drink, right? And then you can come up with it. And so that is one of the ways, that Sondheim, you reframe New York City as a city where one might be bamboozled, but when afterwards you're bamboozled.

You thank that person for the experience, but not everyone. Thanks Sondheim. In the one year issue of New York magazine, kind of celebrating, having survived a year, they ran a lot of parodies. Um, this was one of them. A puzzle called Do I Hear A Waltz? By it it says Stephen Sondheim, but the initials or, or the letters are missing, so it's not really him. And I won't read the first part, which is pretty crazy. I'll just read the part towards the bottom. "The answers to this puzzle contains six Serbo-Croatian Croatian words, a Nicaraguan idiom, 11 words made up by the author, four outrageous puns and a farfetched definition of tinderbox. Three of the definitions are in Norwegian and two must be held up to a mirror. One letter in each answer does not fit into the diagram. These unchecked letters may be rearranged to spell, feel free to read it out loud with me, I hate you Stephen Sondhe"- I dunno what happened to the "Iem" someone having fun. That's very cute. I love that. Alright, let's leave the East River now. And we are gonna go for our next to last stop and the final treasure hunt over Central Park. To 200 Central Park West. To a location many of us know as the American Museum of Natural History. A little Jurassic Treasure Hunt was held there in 2011, and rather than hear from me about it, I'm excited to introduce to the stage a special surprise guest, the party planner who worked with Sondheim to gamify the museum.

Brigid Walsh. Brigid, would you please join me at the base of the stage?

Brigid Walsh: Hi everybody.

Barry Joseph: Hello. Hi. I'm so excited that Brigid's joining us today. Um, I met Bridge of course through the research from my book, which she was so generous in helping me to understand this remarkable event. And this event was done as a fundraiser. Can you give people a little context for why it was Stephen Sondheim was trying to figure out how to take a cultural institution in New York City and turn it into a treasure hunt?

Brigid Walsh: Yeah. So, um, there was an organization called Friends Deed, which is a not-for-profit that, uh, raised funds to help people suffering from the AIDS crisis originally.

And that obviously ravaged, um, the theater world. And it was something that was very dear to Stephen's heart. So he was very close with the people that ran that organization and they hired me to produce their events. So, um, this was the second event I was doing for them. We did a gala. One year before that. But then they said, you know, we're gonna ask Stephen Sondheim if potentially he would wanna re, you know, create a new treasure hunt for us. I had no idea that Stephen Sondheim did treasure hunts and they told me the whole story about Lee Remick and Tony Perkins and a cake and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was like, this is, this is gonna be really fun.

Barry Joseph: And we see here that it ended up at the Museum of Natural History. But was that known from the beginning or did you explore some other locations first?

Brigid Walsh: No, it wasn't. Uh, Stephen wanted to really do it someplace that was indicative of New York City and really iconic. So we actually thought about a few places, but he needed to see it firsthand. So we first went to the New York Public Library and you know, I was sort of new to watching him work. And his mind just worked so fast and we're standing in the lobby and someone from the library's with us and they take us to a map room and he is like, okay, you know, we could do some clues in this map room.

And then they took us to a reading room and he was talking about, okay, maybe we could hide clues in books and do clues that send you to certain books. And then he went on this whole thing about using the Dewey decimal system and trying to utilize the cards and how to use the numeric symbols within the cards, but ultimately it kind of broke down. And this is how he and I worked together, is he would work on clues, but then I ultimately, as the producer, had to figure out if it was physically possible to get people from room A, and this was an event for 253, 300 people, 300 people. So I had to make sure that it actually physically would work. So then we would work together and, and ultimately we decided that the library was a little bit, there was almost too much to do there.

Barry Joseph: Too much to gamify.

Brigid Walsh: Yeah. It was getting complicated. So then we made our way up to the Natural History Museum. And we did go into other sections of the museum. We looked at the whale. We looked at the, you know, the room when you first walk in and there's the Inuit canoe. Which is where people did ultimately check in.

Barry Joseph: Just a correction it's a Haida Cano. I know 'cause I worked there.

Brigid Walsh: Oh, that's right. You did. You like canoeing. Excellent.

Barry Joseph: Thank you.

Brigid Walsh: Um, just don't do it in the east river.

Barry Joseph: Or at the museum.

Brigid Walsh: Or the Hudson. But we ended up in the dinosaur rooms, it's the dinosaur hall which was great because that gave us multiple rooms to work with and it could send people all over and you could spread out 300 people into teams. Right. So, it was just really fascinating to watch how his mine put it all together.

Barry Joseph: So is it almost like once you were on the, I think it's the fourth floor, the dinosaur, each hall was almost like a spot on a board.

Brigid Walsh: That's right.

Barry Joseph: And you were thinking about how to move people across the board, but you're actually moving them through the rooms.

Brigid Walsh: Yes, that's right. And they could move in any order. So you didn't have to solve the puzzle in a 1, 2, 3 order. So some teams solved clue number five first, and they were over here, and then that sent them over there. So it allowed us to sort of spread people out. We also had a formal seated dinner at the end. So we needed a venue that could house that and we could take, so there was some practicality involved. But, when we first went to the museum, he just honed in on things that the rest of us are just like, okay, this is just a bunch of dinosaurs and a bunch of very long words. 'Cause he was, he was looking at the scientific names of all of these critters. Right. And his brain is picking those apart like a computer and just finding clues within them. And then. You know, I didn't really know where he was going with it, but he was just taking notes and we're following him around. And then he is like, all right, I'm gonna go back to my house and think on this. So then we would do calls every few days and he would say, okay, it is kind of starting to take shape. So if we did this, do you think we could get people to here? And then I would have to run back to the museum and kind of study the geography of the space a little bit better. Um, and.

Barry Joseph: Would you then be walking from one clue to another to see- how long it would take?

Brigid Walsh: Yeah, and try to time things too, because we had to kind of keep it within a relative time and space. But you know, you also have to ask yourself, and this is probably with someone who's as brilliant as Sondheim. Is a regular person gonna get it right? Because he wasn't really a, a regular mind, like he, he's thinking way up here. So, you know, he would use some of us to say, you know, is this even something that's feasible? So we would use other staff members to kind of test out clues, and see if it would work and, and ultimately it actually worked. You don't want it to be too easy either, right? Like if someone had solved the whole thing in 20 minutes, that would be a total buzzkill. So it was like just hard enough where it took a solid hour or so for the teams to, someone finally figured it out. But..

Can you say a little bit more Brigid, about what it was like when it was running live? You talked about how Stephen Sondheim looked at that space and was able to turn it into a puzzle, turn it into a game. What was it like for people who were used to going to the museum? Looking at a dinosaur, trying to figure out how to spell the Latin name. But now we're being asked to play in that space.

It was, it was incredible. So it was a, it was kind of a star studded event. Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick hosted it. There were, you know, there were amazing people in the room. And we put together the teams very strategically too. Like who was on whose team? They were squealing, like squealing with delight as Sarah took her shoes off, she was running barefoot. It was incredible. And that the sense of playfulness and competition was really, really cool. And, you know, you had to solve this thing and you ended up in a theater. And then in the theater there was something on the screen and you had to unpuzzle that. And then it ultimately led you, led you to the thing. But, I have to say in the process of it, I think I got one of the biggest compliments of my life. When Stephen said, he was trying to explain it to me how it was gonna work, and I'm like, yeah. He goes, "are you with me"? And I'm like, "yeah, yeah, I got it". And he's like, "really? You got it?" I was like, "yeah, yeah, I got it. And he goes, most people wouldn't have gotten that. So I'm like, oh, great. I'm gonna take that one".

Barry Joseph: Brigid, thank you so much for joining us today.

Brigid Walsh: Thank you.

Barry Joseph: Really appreciate it. Bridig will be a round available afterwards for the q and a. All right. For our final stop of the tour, we're gonna have a type of metapuzzle. It's gonna bring us back to where we started. 246 East 49th Street, the home of Stephen Sondheim. To 1983. "The Murder Game." Now, those who've read my book or know about "The Murder Game" might think, Hey, is that a typo? "The Murder Game" is from 1965. To that, I would say: exactly. I told you this was a meta- puzzle. Now I know our hour's almost up, and you've been a very attentive audience and very generous. But see if you can follow me on this one. In 1965, Stephen Sondheim created a parlor game and played it with his friends called "The Murder Game". Then nearly 20 years later, he created a print version of it for Games Magazine, once again called "the Murder Game." Thus 1983. And when he wrote it, he framed it in the third person and you, the reader as a guest. Stephen Sondheim invites you to play detective at his house. So now he's created a puzzle about what? About a game he once hosted in his apartment. Let's read a little.

" It's midnight when Stephen Sondheim announces to you and nine other guests that a murder's about to take place. A game of murder that is Sondheim removes the ace to 10 of hearts from a deck of cards. He shuffles the 10 cards to ensure random distribution, places them face down on a table and asks each guest to select one.

He then gives each of you an envelope with a number that matches your card. As it happened, happens number one goes to composer conductor Leonard Bernstein. Number two to actress Phyllis Newman. Three to actor Tony Perkins, et cetera. You might notice these are names we have heard before. Which is not a coincidence. A reader at the time of Games magazine might have thought this was all made up, but I hope you now recognize actually it's all true. This is Sondheim, literally gamifying his previous gamification of his own Turtle Bay apartment in which each room had become a source of danger and discovery. It's like he's hanging a lantern in a meta way saying, look, I gamified my New York City life.

Alright, we started with the voice of Stephen Sondheim. Let's end with his as well.

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

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

Barry Joseph: When I see words, I see meaning. When Sondheim looked at New York City, like the word Cinerama on the side of a New York City movie theater, looking through the lens of games and puzzles, he saw an endless world of possibilities. Of opportunities for wordplay and more. And in my book, I speak about what Sondheim did with games and puzzles. Games were used to create moments of connection between colleagues, friends, and loved ones. And puzzles were used to literally create order out of chaos to design moments of brilliant clarity in his songs, New York York City might be a place full of postered walls with crude remarks for those with a taste for maniacs.

But through his puzzles and games, another city emerges, one whose borders and roads, museums, and theaters. Landmarks and Rivers invite us to experience moments of crystal clarity while playfully experiencing moments of connection. I want to end with a clip from my recent appearance on the Reality Escape Podcast. Where here, David Spira the host, puts into words precisely what I think Sondheim is offering us.

David Spira: Do you still get that sensation of being hypersensitive to patterns and things when you leave escape rooms? Because that used to be my favorite sensation, and I didn't know that I loved it until it went away at some point in my playing career that stopped, and I've never gotten it back. I've never had it ever again, and I miss it. I miss it so much. And the first time we were ever featured in any kind of news article, it was in Newsweek. And the closing lines of the article were about my friend Jason Casio. And the article closes. When you play these games, you see numbers and patterns everywhere. You start thinking everything is a clue. And I remember that experience and I think New York was an especially strong place for that sensation because you would leave the games and you would walk around an old city filled with things new and old, and numbers and patterns. And so stepping out of an escape room in the early days for me and onto the streets of New York, you felt high as you took in your environment, or at least I did.

Barry Joseph: So while Sondheim is no longer with us, his invitation to play remains. The only thing left is for us to make a decision. So when you leave here today and step out onto the streets of New York and recall this talk, pause a moment and take a look around. How can you accept Sondheim's invitation to invite your own friends and loved ones, to turn our great city into a magnificent playground, to bring us all more moments of connection and more moments of clarity. Thank you. In a moment, we'll turn to Q and A. Nick has the microphone. If you have any questions, let me first ask, is there anyone here, under 20 who has a question? Anyone here under 20? Oh, we have a question in the front row. Always say your name first, please, and then tell me your question.

Benjamin: My name is Benjamin and it's more like a comment.

Barry Joseph: Okay, I'll take that.

Benjamin: Remember when you mentioned West Side Story a bit.

Barry Joseph: What about West Side Story?

Benjamin: Uh, I have like a drama class at school and they kind like did something with it.

Barry Joseph: Yes. Uh, Stephen Sondheim worked on both the Broadway production and the movie of West Side Story.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Worked on the lyrics.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Do you like West Side Story?

Benjamin: I, I haven't really seen it, but I do remember doing something with it at school.

Barry Joseph: Well, all right, well, if you ever want to go back to West Side Story, it'll be there for you. And if you do, and if any of you do, keep in mind that Thursday mornings, that will be the date during the week when the British publication would arrive in New York City that Stephen Sondheim waited for. ' Cause that would be when the cryptic crossroad would come from overseas. His preferred collaborative style was to go off at home by himself and work while Leonard Bernstein, who he was working with on the lyrics and music would wanna work together. And the compromise would be Thursday morning. When they would get together to do the cryptic production of West Side Story would ground to a halt until the two of them after they finished completing the cryptic, could then together work together on the show. So the cryptics would bring them together to do the collaboration. Thank you for asking that question. I've gotta, now anyone of any age is open, the floor is open for them. And again, don't forget to share your name.

Eric: Hi, I'm Eric. And, I was just wondering because a lot of these like, uh, treasure hunts were so personal to his friends and family and like only a small number of people. How did you go about like researching and finding the details about these treasure hunts?

Barry Joseph: So, that's a great question, question's about the research. How did I research these things? So when I began looking into this, I on one hand couldn't know how much there was out there to find, ' cause there wasn't enough documentation to even tell me what was out there. And second, I had no expectation that I would ever see any of it, in part because so much of it is just ephemeral. The thing I showed you from 1973, that was from a cast member from "A Little Night Music". The sheet she had that she kept for 50 years in a drawer. It meant something to her. Maybe 'cause she was in the show, maybe 'cause she won. But she chose 50 years later to post it on Facebook where I could see it and then contact her. And then she was generous enough to share it with me. So I spent years through this Instagram account and on Facebook just hanging a lantern saying, "hi folks, I'm looking at this. If you know someone connect me."

Audience: I enjoyed your talk.

Barry Joseph: Thank you. Thank you. What's your name?

Audience: Michelle.

Barry Joseph: Thanks Michelle.

Audience: Sorry. So why do you think that he, I don't know if it was by choice or circumstance, that he didn't really popularize his puzzle making lifestyle and he just really chose, I guess to popularize his Broadway side of him.

Barry Joseph: So it's a fair question. The question in general is why didn't we see more of Stephen Sondheim games and puzzles, which sometimes is part of a broader question I'm asked, which is, why didn't we know about this already? Right? But when you look at some of what I shared with you, it was not like it was hidden. New York Magazine. It's not a small unknown periodical. Everyone went when huh? mentioned it, right? We know about New York magazine he was creating. He created four. Not only did he, not only did he create 42 crosswords, those were published as a collected book in the early eighties, which went outta print. And if you look for them now on eBay, it cost thousands of dollars to get a copy of them. But if you try to find 'em digitally online, you might find them. They're out there. And that's just one piece. Does anyone know the name of the only Hollywood movie he ever wrote The Last of Sheila, which is based on all of his games and puzzles. The entire plot of it is based on them. He wrote it with Anthony Perkins and they adapted his "Murder Game" and his treasure hunts and a number of other things. And it also showed you in Games Magazine where he did the puzzle. So it's not like he didn't do them. I just think that largely all of that work was overshown by his remarkable work in musical theater. And if he hadn't had such a bright light shining on his musical theater work, then maybe his games and puzzles would've gotten more attention. So I just think that it was out there, but the spotlight was usually on, perhaps where it should have been his musical theater work, but it was out there for anyone to find and why it took this long for someone to write the book. I don't know. But Games magazine wrote about it in 83. Games Magazine wrote about it again in 2021. And even in his obituary it talked about his time at, New York Magazine, writing crypto crosswords. So I think we're now in a point as well where we appreciate game design more. We have a language for it. We didn't before. We understand art, the art of puzzles and the art of games in a way maybe we didn't before. And so I feel lucky to be at a time where we can be talking about this aspect of his life.

Fred: Uh, Fred.

Barry Joseph: Hi Fred.

Fred: Do you have any idea of the frequency of the treasure hunts or the quantity that he did? And do you know anything about when this, um, affection for puzzles arose and was he doing it as a kid or where this arose from?

Barry Joseph: So two questions Fred asked first, how often were the treasure hunts? I believe his first one was 1968, the one I showed you on Halloween. I believe that because he was inspired by having learned about it being done in Chicago. And he talked about that in interview with Meryl Secrest in 1995. I think that's when it started, and that means we know when it began. The last one, 2013 was at city center, which I also showed. And I was able to document five others in between.

So I know about seven. I have materials about them in the book. I know there were more, 'cause I've heard allusions to them. And so I'm hoping over time we'll learn about more of them. But starting in 1968, all the way through 2013, it was something he, would often go to sometimes for big events, like 300 people at the American Museum of Natural History. 80, 80 plus people for a birthday party at City Center. Sometimes just, you know, a handful of people at his house. The second question was, when did this all start? So he started, growing up in New York City, I think on Central Park West. Enjoying board games, um, doing scavenger hunts with his like Saturday group that he'd get together with other kids his age. That was a facilitated program and before he even went to college, he had tried to design a word puzzle for the New York Times. He had created a board game that he'd sent into, I wanna say Parker Brothers, but I might have gotten that wrong, but one of the major manufacturers, and he was already playing with that. Now, whether he was thinking about it professionally or just as a fun thing to do, we don't know. But definitely by the time he was in his twenties when he did the board game, I showed you the Game of Hell, prince, that was his second fully produced board game. His first one which was called Stardom, which he did when he was out in LA in the early 1950s. He actually wrote a letter describing how he intended to commercialize it or hoping that he might one day, that's the last time I ever saw him talking about taking his games and commercializing them. I think after that he recognized that he had to focus on one thing or the other. It was either gonna be games and puzzles or musical theater. And when he had breaks, like before he did Company, that's when he was at New York Magazine and he left New York Magazine to go do Company, the games and puzzles were always on the side. He enjoyed them. They would engage his mind. There were sometimes a distraction, but he would always have to go back to musical theater in the end. So I think of it as not like the path not followed, but a secondary path that he ran alongside his musical life.

Steve: Hi, my name's Steve. I had a question about the game of Hal Prince in particular. So many of the, the. Games that you showed us today were very much about decoding and solving puzzles, but that seemed the most board game-like. Did you find game, any information in your research about his approach to design? How did he play test? How did he iterate? What was his approach to that more traditional board game design?

Barry Joseph: Are you asking about the puzzles and games in general or specifically about board games? So his board game designs I mentioned, started when he was in teenager and thank you for coming. And, ended, I believe in 1968 when he did a trilogy of board games for Leonard Bernstein's 50th birthday. I don't believe he did any after that. And in between, I mentioned the game, "Stardom" and "the game of Hal Prince". Because those are earlier in his life. We have very little documentation about them I thought. None of them even existed anymore based on his own reporting. And we were shocked, dismayed, and delighted a year and a half ago when the collection from his house went up for auction at Doyle's in June of 2024. And both the images I showed you from the game of Hal Prince and ones I did not show you from the other game of "Stardom", suddenly showed up on their website. They came down almost as quickly. They were not auctioned that day. I was there for the 10 plus hours for the auction. And the moment when the slides come up, 'cause there's a screen showing you which lot we're on, when those games came up and they went, whoops, they went to the next one, everyone booed. Boo! We wanted to see them.

So we dunno what happened to them. We didn't even know if they even existed anymore until they found in a box in the basement. So how they were made, we don't know. So when it comes to the design process that we know more from people like Brigid who got to work with him later in his life about his treasure hunts. And then we got to see that he understood what it meant to test the design, as you heard from her, trying something out, sometimes bringing people together who are completely fresh to the content, trying it with them and then modifying until they could get it. Um, and he really understood that iterative process. But what did with the board games, I don't know if he did that at all, Brigid?

Brigid Walsh: I was just gonna say that, um, the clue packets themselves. He was pretty quick with it. We just talked about it really quickly that like, it has to have this old map feeling to it. So we got like this old brown parchment paper that we printed on. And then they all went into this big clue packet and then they were stamped with a red wax and it had the names on it. But, that was as important to him because that was like a a visual thing that started the journey for people the moment they got their packet.

Barry Joseph: And you know what, no one's asked yet about why I have a T-Rex up here. Do you recognize this T-Rex, brigid?

Brigid Walsh: Was that part of the pack?

Barry Joseph: This is a copy of what was found.

Brigid Walsh: Oh, that was on the-

Barry Joseph: This was the treasure in the treasure chest at the end. But a misdirection. misdirection. So people were like, I'm sorry, I just spent an hour searching and we won and there's a box of these plastic toys. But then it turned out underneath them. Was the real box, which had maybe champagne and cell phones and tickets to a weekend in the Sardi's and stuff. So I always bring this, this, this little T-Rex with me when I go around. Thanks for adding that.

Audience: I just wanted to get back to the very beginning of your talk where you mentioned, uh, some, uh, New York songs. My favorite is from Saturday Night. His very, very first, uh, musical that wasn't produced until decades after he wrote it. " What More Do I Need?" Mm-hmm. It's a really an ode to New York. Everybody should look it up.

Barry Joseph: Thank you. I appreciate that. So in a moment we'll wrap up the q and a. So, as I mentioned, the book is published, but the research never ends. I, I end presentations when there's time by showing this video, I have no idea what this is from. So I show it in the hopes that one of these days someone in the audience will say, oh, I know what that is. This was posted on Facebook, someone downloaded it, sent it to me, and then promptly forgot where they found it on Facebook. So I have no idea how to get to the origin of it. Maybe one of you do.

Stephen Sondheim: we had a common interest in games. And Ed, as a matter of fact, had the patience to try to play a game of "Go" with me. That lasted for about, uh, two hours during which. Tom, I think we made maybe a total of 15 moves. And, uh, I've often thought that, uh, we both ended up in the wrong business. I think maybe we should have had a partnership and gone into games because we'd be the, the heads of Atari by now.

Barry Joseph: The heads of Atari. I, I was told by the person who gave it to me, they think whoever took this photo is the ad that he's talking about. Anyone have any clue? Alright, the mystery continues. Sondheim leads us with more to explore. Thank you all so much for joining me this afternoon, and I'll be in the back in about two minutes. Thank you, Nick. What about West Side Story?

Benjamin: Uh, I have like a drama class at school and they kind like did something with it.

Barry Joseph: Do you like West Side Story?

Benjamin: I, I haven't really seen it, but I do remember doing something with it at school.