Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. This is your host, Barry Joseph, and I'm excited you chose to spend some time with me today. Oh my gosh, so much has been going on. I hope you enjoyed the last episode, my interview with Dan Okrent, author of the remarkable new biography, Sondheim Art Isn't Easy. That was such a special episode for me, and I hope it spoke to you as well. It was so exciting to get to speak with Dan after three and a half years of our parallel writing: him writing his book, me writing mine, and now both of our books are out in the world, and I'm so excited for all of the well-deserved attention he's getting, both within the world of Steven Sondheim and the world of press, and just ideas in general, like being on NPR and being interviewed on Fresh Air. So if you haven't checked out that episode, please do and please definitely check out his book. I am also excited for a number of upcoming episodes.

The next episode is gonna be another deep dive into not one, but two of Steven Sondheim's treasure hunts, one from 1973 and one from 2013. Spanning 40 years. It's gonna be quite an excellent episode and I hope you'll enjoy that one as well.

Before I tell you what I have in store for you today, lemme tell you about some other things going on. My book tour has been so much fun. I recently spoke at The Players, which if you don't know it, it's a private club in New York City. It's in a historically preserved building on Gramercy Park that was once occupied by John Wilkes Booth's brother, if you can believe it. That building became a private club where people in the theater world can go and, you know, casually connect with each other, go to the card room, get some drinks or some food downstairs, or go upstairs to the library and hear someone like me talking about Steven Sondheim in games.

I had such a fun time going in part because this was one of the first times where the audience just knew each other and had known each other. It looked like for decades and so, so sweet to be part of their community, but also because David Staller, the founding and artistic director of New York's Gingold theatrical group introduced me and as a result, I got to meet him and boy, does he have a lot to share. So much so I invited him to come back for a future episode where we're gonna talk about what it meant for him to be traveling the world, going to flea markets, picking up puzzle boxes to give to his friend Stephen Sondheim.

The stories were fascinating moving, and let me tell you, if I had met David before I finished the book, I would definitely have structured my section on puzzle boxes around David's experiences. It's really remarkable and I can't wait to do a deeper dive with him for all of you.

And when it comes to upcoming talks, I am looking forward to going to London. That's right. In April, I'm gonna be going to London, where I'll be speaking at New York University's London location. I'll be doing an event with the Sondheim Society and more.

You can go to the event section of my website, MatchingMindswithSondheim.com to learn more. And if you're in London or near there, please let me know if I can look forward to seeing you.

For today, we're gonna go back and listen to a recent interview that I did. These interview episodes in my podcast, I should be wrapping them up because you've heard everything so far. I tend to often address the same topics, but this one was special and unique because I was specifically talking with theater academics. This is for the Doctor Broadway podcast, which frames itself as a musical theater history podcast where a couple of doctors sit around and talk about Broadway. In this case, people with doctorates, people who study musical theater each week. Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum and Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley dig into the backstory of a different Broadway musical. Together, we explored what it meant for them as theater academics to look at my book, Matching Minds of Sondheim. Working with my line producer Dennis Caouki we removed most of the questions you've heard before and we tried to address some of the stuff that was unique to this episode, which is largely their interest and response in this as an academic book and looking at how one can research a topic like this and bring it out to the public in an accessible way.

I hope you enjoy it. See you on the other side.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: So welcome Barry Joseph, author of Matching Minds with Sondheim. The puzzles and games of the Broadway legend. I've already told you off mic. You approached this work very differently than Tracy and I would as theater historians, and we both, I think, came away with a very unique perspective on the life of a guy that we thought that we knew, but you introduced us to a whole other side of him.

Barry Joseph: Thank you for that wonderful and warm introduction, Tracy and Kristen. It's such a pleasure to be here. I am not a doctor, but I'm a son and a grandson.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: There you go.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Perfect. It counts. We'll count it. We'll count it. Well, thank you for joining us.

Barry Joseph: Absolutely. But first I wanna say I really enjoy your podcast. That the two you make. And so I need to ask, unless I missed one, is this the first Sondheim episode? And if so, what took so long?

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: That's a very fair question. Okay, so in response to that, we have been very specific in the order that we've gone into our deep dives. I can't think of another Sondheim show that we've done.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: We haven't done one. No, we, we haven't done one. 'cause none of them have been on tour.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: That's right. They're not on tour. We've only done deep dives into the shows that are currently on tour.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: They're in the next season.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: That's right.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: They're already programmed. So..

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: They're coming up. They're coming up. But Barry, you get the distinction of being our very first Stephen Sondheim guest.

Barry Joseph: Oh, that's thrilling. And that also means all Sondheim's on the table. 'Cause when we're talking about his puzzles and games, we're talking about something that he was engaged with his entire life from when he was a teenager until he passed away. And it's hard to go to a Sondheim production and listen to his music without noticing how his love of puzzles and games were intimately connected to how he constructed his music and how he wrote his lyrics. Nothing of which I knew about when I started. So I live in New York City. I'm in New York City right now. I grew up on Long Island. I grew up going to Broadway. My parents would take me, and as an adult, I would get my playbills. I have my closet in the other room full of my 12 books, full of all my shows. Love, love my Broadway. Did not like Sondheim. I mean, I didn't hate Sondheim. I didn't know who he was growing up. It was kind of dark and mature and adult. And then I saw Passion in preview. Which was kind of not working. I love it now. I love what they've done with it, but wasn't working yet. Yeah. But I started noticing this guy was doing some really interesting things. I saw Assassins and said, okay. I like where this is going. And so in the nineties and into the noughts, I started exploring all of his shows. I fell in love with Merrily We Roll Along. Just the soundtrack. And started watching different productions of it as people were constantly iterating it, trying to figure out how to make this show work right. And that became a really fun process to not just enjoy a show. But enjoy the process of people trying to bring a show to the place that it was waiting to get to, right? Which we, we saw just a few years ago, and now last December in the Proshot, from the recent Broadway production that was so successful. And so having that love of Sondheim as a fan kept me around his shows. I'd go to his shows. I listened to him talk about his shows and I had no idea that there was any connection with the rest of my life, which I do many things, but one of them is designing games. I'm a founder of Games for Change, which is an organization now 23 years old, maybe 24. That was one of the first ones to really bring people together to look at, in a contemporary way, how games can do more than just entertain. How could they teach? How could they create social change? How can they help improve people's health and so on. And so in that space, working with young people in afterschool settings, working at Girl Scouts of the United States of America, and working at museums like the American Museum in Natural history, I love creating games on all sorts of topics. And by doing that, I got to meet really incredible gaming academics, ludologists, people who study play. Right in Wisconsin and California and New York City, and it introduced me to how people can think really hard about play. And so having that orientation, when I saw what you mentioned, Kristen, in the oral history of Sunday in the Park with George, James Lapine is interviewing Stephen Sunheim and in it he says that only did he want to leave musical theater 'cause he was so hurt by the critical response to Merrily we Roll Along, but it specifically go into video game design.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: It's funny because, you know, doing the research that I do and I'm was in the same archives you were and a couple years ago, our mutual friend between all of us, Doug Reside, I was at the Billy Rose and we were-

Barry Joseph: New York City.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yep. I was in there looking at, , all of Hal Prince's papers. And all of this correspondence is coming in, like after the first two shows. You know, the first two previews of Merrily we Roll Along. And it was heartbreaking. The letters that are like, I love your work. I have been so amazed by your talent. And I would always buy it for the very first week. I have no idea what is going on in this show. And I need you to give me my money back. And it was like. Oh, oh! I mean, it was like this old man writing to them being like, please give me my money back. I was like, oh, ouch. That combined with like the critics being like, this is terrible. I was like, oh, I would cry too. I would go do video games. And I don't play video games. So.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: And speaking of the video game thing. What shocked me when I read your book was, well, it was just this mental image of Stephen Sondheim playing Atari. Yes. You talk about Sondheim and John Wiedman playing Atari together, and I, that was just a mental image that was... I always imagined puzzles and games. I'm thinking. The New York Times crossword puzzles, I'm thinking puzzle boxes, everything. You know, something very erudite. But video games, it blew me away that Stephen Sondheim was into those.

Barry Joseph: And for me to think about myself being 8, 9, 10 years old. Loving my Atari games in my living room. And now as an adult, looking back, thinking at exactly the same time, John Weidman is over at Stephen Sondheim's house with a box of Atari games.

Now, now when I interviewed John Weidman, he said two important things to help us understand how to think about what you just described. Kristin, it seems crazy that that not only who he playing these games, they're not great games. What John Weidman said was two things. He brought over a few games to Sondheim's House, and Sondheim essentially was like, don't worry about it. 'Cause he had a box with all the games of that were out. All right. So that's the first thing. Wow. He's being comprehensive. And a collector, which he often was around puzzles and games. And the second thing was that John Weidman said. Heim didn't wanna play them because they were good. They would pop it in, learn how it worked, and move on to the next one. Sondheim was just interested in the game design, like, oh, what are people doing in this new medium? I love games. Let me see what games look like in this new form. And they were playing them to explore them and it engaged that part of his mind. When he was a teenager and he first started getting into board games, he described once playing a different board game every day. He was playing them to understand the game mechanics. He was learning them and he was doing the same thing with the Atari. After he played those sessions with John Weidman, who knows if he ever played again.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Right?

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yeah.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Right. But you're absolutely right to see the parallels between the way that he understood those game mechanics and the way that he understood word-play. That is so evident not only in his lyrics, but also in his music.

Barry Joseph: That's right. And so you asked how this all started. I read that quote. Yeah. I read that he wanted to go into video game design momentarily. It passed, luckily for all of us who love Sunday in the Park with George. But the idea didn't pass for me. I thought, how did my two worlds of being a Sondheim fan and being a game designer crash and then pull apart. And I wanted to hold them together. I wanted to know what was it Stephen Sondheim would have done if he went into game design? And what I was shocked to find is that it wasn't a what if. He was designing games his whole life. Treasure hunts, parlor games, board games, his work on crosswords, specifically cryptic crosswords, changed puzzles in America. And then later he was an escape room evangelist and loved gifting elaborate jigsaw puzzles and loved collecting puzzle boxes. That's a pretty wide range of games and puzzles, and we have decades and decades of objects that he created and designed.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: I just was like blown away. 'Cause I was reading this and I was like, well, I always knew that he liked games. Mostly because people that, you know, acquaintances, friends that have I, that had been to his house were like. There's games everywhere. They're everywhere. And I was like, what do you mean they're everywhere? It just kind of went right over my head. And then you look at the book and he has, he's using them in his decorating. He has them on the walls. You know, he's got vintage games all over the walls, and it's like, yeah. At like everywhere. And then he's got an entire game room and then it's, and you're like, that's interesting. He's like, no, no, that's just, it's puzzles. It's all how his brain works. It makes perfect sense when you get there. And I was like, you know, it really does. But if you've not, like been to his house, if you didn't see those pictures, you know, I, I didn't have quite the conception of how, all encompassing this was for him. So..

Barry Joseph: So when Stephen Sondheim moved into the home that he had in Manhattan until he passed, I think it was around 1960, with the money he earned from Gypsy. An acquaintance of his, possibly a girlfriend, gifted him his first antique board. And when I say board, it's a board from a board game. He wasn't given it to play, it was given to him, framed to put on the wall.

And once he saw that, he said, oh, that's cool. I don't have a lot of stuff on my wall. I don't have a lot of money. I like the way they look. They look neat. And so he went back to the store where the first one had been acquired and that began his collecting. And as he often said, and they weren't very expensive.

Right. And even though they would sell for thousands of dollars at the Dole auction after he passed away.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yes.

Barry Joseph: And they are quite beautiful to look at. And so the press, whenever they came to visit his home, would always talk about how unusual it was to see these walls decorated and not only decorated with board games, they were floor to ceiling, one end to the other.

Yeah. You might see 20 of them in a room and you can see photos from his house over the decades, and you see certain ones moving around. I know one that's been at least four locations. And so it wasn't just that he was like, oh, in this room I'm gonna hang up a version of Monopoly. It's like, no, no. This is a like 1850s Game of the Goose style board game, which has maybe 50 spots with all these interesting things designed into it. And then it would be one of like 19, or 20 that would be all in a room covering the area. Friends would go in, like you're saying Tracy, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by just seeing those, and of course those were ones he didn't play. Not only 'cause they hung on the wall. They are boring to play. You roll the dye and you move a few spots and he'd be the first one to say that. And it was one of the many facets of his interest in games. And that was one that was easiest to see and got reported the most. And yet the most interesting stuff was what he created and that almost no one saw.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yeah.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Well, okay, so that brings me to my next question. You alluded to, I think you said 60 hours of interviews and email conversations with people who had been a part of Stephen Sondheim's orbit. This is a really unique take and it required some very niche research, and I wonder as a researcher myself, how did you go about finding this information? Because it's not necessarily stuff that would otherwise be held in an archive somewhere. Right?

Barry Joseph: That's right. There are things that I could find in an archive. And things that would never be in an archive.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Right. Right.

Barry Joseph: I mean, really when you take on a project, especially with someone as iconic as Stephen Sondheim.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: You have to find the thin slice and own it. . Now, I wasn't looking for that thin slice. I was just amazed by the fact that Stephen Sondheim, the composer, the lyricist, and Stephen Sondheim, the game designer, was somehow the same person and wanting to get to the bottom of that interested me. And the more I dug into it, the more I saw how niche it was, but also how deep it was. So the first part was easy. Like we said, Doug Reside New York Public Library for the performing arts. What do they have? What do they have at Indiana University? What do they have, at Yale? Where Meryle Secrest's audio files are from all of her interviews with Sondheim and his friends in the 1990s. What do they have in the files of other people at the Library of Congress? So that was a bit of work of getting access to those and seeing them, and this is the second year of the pandemic. Right. So its like..

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Oh gosh. I was gonna ask you, what's your timeframe? How long did this take?

Barry Joseph: So he died in November 2021.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: And I started working on it in April, 2022.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Okay.

Barry Joseph: To give you a sense of the timing. So I wouldn't say that was all easy, but that was kind of, you know, a logical next step. Just go to the next one and say who knows where something is. Right. The challenges, as you talked about, was getting to talk to people, because since we're talking about ephemera. Really what we're looking at is people's memories. Who was there, who played his murder game in the 1960s? Yeah. Who played the treasure hunt that he designed in 1973 for the cast of A Little Night Music. Right. Who went to the American Museum of Natural History in 2011 and did the dinosaur themed treasure hunt. On and on, and so every time I would talk with someone to jump to the end, I would say, who else should I talk to and what am I missing? .

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Smart.

Barry Joseph: And that then opened the door for me. So once I got a few people who were willing to talk to me and kind of build that trust and build that legitimacy, why should they talk to me? Then I could say, oh, so and so recommended I contact you. And they usually said the same thing. They said, I'm sorry, you're asking me what I did 60 years ago on a particular night.

I don't think I remember anything. Right. And then as soon as we started talking, it was like the floodgates had opened up. And I could, sometimes they couldn't they didn't wanna stop. They were enjoying their friend coming back to life. Not the friend who was just making music, but the friend they loved playing with and who they missed.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: I think it was Maltby that you mentioned that was so excited to talk about, right? Wasn't he the one or was it Weidman?

Barry Joseph: Oh, there were, so, there were so many. It wasn't one person.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: I thought they were just so excited to have a chance to have, you know, to, to recall this, to talk about it. And, , it just, it was an enormous amount of work I know for you, but it also had to be unbelievably gratifying to be able to do the work.

Barry Joseph: Well. It's an honor when people are telling you memories that are deeply emotional for them.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: Both exciting 'cause you can see how excited they are and sometimes sad 'cause they missed him, he'd passed away. It was under a year. And to be the repository of those stories creates a responsibility for me as a writer. And I experienced that with my first book 'cause I was also interviewing people around a topic of something that was passing, in this case, something much more esoteric. Old fashioned seltzer siphon bottling. But it was the same spot I was in. People were telling me these stories. I was gonna be the repository of them and what was I gonna do with them? So I had to not only write the book, I had to write the book. 'Cause I now had these stories and I had to figure out how to tell their story in a way that honor them, honored Stephen Sondheim and would honor the reader as someone who I was gonna be bringing into this space in many ways for the first time.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Where are you archiving all of this information For those of us who are scholars and may want to come back to that in the years to come, other than your book.

Barry Joseph: So I push really hard to make sure that everything in the book is documented.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: And you can look at an extensive index in the back.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yep.

Barry Joseph: That shows you where to find things in the book. And then, , citations that tell you where you can find those things yourself. I list all the research institutions that I go to and I thank everyone I spoke with. So a lot of things that I accessed have been available for years for anyone who wants to find. And now you can go to, for example. So there's that, and then there's the fact that I have. At least two drawers, let's just say it's full of stuff.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Now this is stuff that people would send me. They would say, oh, you're writing about this Here, I'll send this to you. I have this thing that I was at. Or from the Doyle auction many of his items were sold in large lots by people who weren't ready to take a large lot and were happy to share things with others, and they sent me things. So I have all these objects and I would love for them to be available publicly someday. Is there gonna be a Stephen Sunheim museum someday? If so, I'd love for it to go there. Until then, there's all sorts of other institutions where things can go. However. Even though that future date hasn't arrived, I have been giving items that other people gave me to some institutions. The New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Strong Museum all have items from the 2011,, A Little Jurassic Treasure Hunt that Stephen Sondheim Design at the American Museum of Natural History. Oh, wait, they have a copy too. So there's four locations where you can go and see all the clues, not the answers, but the clues that he designed for that night for 300 people. That was a fundraiser.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: That's amazing.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: It really is. And I wonder, as you're talking about all of the people that you interviewed who were so excited to talk about their friend and their experiences with him, particularly as he had just recently died, and so it was just cathartic for them to be able to talk about their experiences with him. But I wonder your publisher, Bloomsbury, I wonder when you sent this proposal to them, what was their response? I'm just curious about the publishing process.

Barry Joseph: So am I right that you published Kristen through Met. Met, I pronounce?

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Which Is Bloomsbury as well, right? . So you went through an imprint? I originally was with an imprint. It was Applause.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Ah, I was with Applause for my first book about Dorothy Fields.

Barry Joseph: Nice.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: So Applause is no more. It's now just Bloomsbury. So, your publisher was able to keep their name as an imprint. Mine was not. Yeah. So by the time, they accepted to the time it, it was, you know, finalized and , went to publication. My imprint disappeared. But originally Applause was an imprint that I thought was perfect. It was someone who was writing for people who knew musical theater, cared about thinking about it. And yet, as with most of the publishers we pitched it to, they said, is this a book for theater people or. Is it a book for puzzle people? And they couldn't figure out which one it was. And my editor, Chris Chappelle, who's the one who fought for it under applause. He understood it. It wasn't or it was "Yes and..."

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Right.

Barry Joseph: Where the, where the two overlap. Right. And it welcomes people in who don't know anything about puzzles or games and teaches them what they need to know to see Stephen Sondheim's work in a new way. And it brings in people who know nothing about Stephen Sondheim. Just this guy who is famous. But care about puzzles and games and can see how this brilliant mind who created some of the most important lyrics and music of the last century also applied that thinking in the space of puzzles and games. And if you care about neither. Come on in. It's a new way to look at someone's life, a ludological perspective. Looking at someone's life from how they played versus what they made in this case, musical theater. And so he was able to see what other people weren't able to see. But that's how often it is with it, a unique property, right? It was kind of an unusual beast. What is this thing? And it came out October 2nd of 2025, and by the end of January. 2026, we were entering our fourth printing.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Awesome. Oh my word. Well, when you told me that Bloomsbury stuck with it when you started with Applause, which I published my Dorothy Fields' book with applause in 2021. So I was with them prior to the transition to Bloomsbury. But when you told me that Bloomsbury still went with it instead of, you know, so often when these mergers happen, any projects that are coming down the trail kind of get left behind in the transition. But the fact that they continued on with the project tells me that they knew that it was a great project.

Barry Joseph: Well, I'm very grateful to them, especially Chris. I'm now gonna tell you something you won't expect, 'cause I'm gonna take your last two questions and combine them.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Oh, please go for it.

Barry Joseph: One of the first people I reached out to when I first started was Paul Salsini. I don't know if you know his name. He was the founder of the Sondheim Review in the 1990s. It was a regular magazine in America that you could get and learn all about Stephen Sondheim and they would would coordinate with him as well. Paul opened the door for me to many, many people, and Paul's book came out that fall. It's a book about his relationship with Stephen Sondheim, and I interviewed him I think in June of 2022, and he asked me if I would blurb the book. I was like, Paul, why do you want me to blurb the book? I am just beginning research on mine. But he was like, no, I really like what you're doing. And so when his book came out in October, on the back cover, it says a quote and it says from Barry Joseph, author of, I dunno if it said Matching minds with Sondheim, but something close to it. As a result that December, the New York Times wrote a piece on all the new books coming out about Stephen Sondheim.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Nice. And they put it on that, oh my gosh.

Barry Joseph: And they included it. Now, originally, the reporter said. Okay, well, who's your agent? I said, oh, I don't have an agent yet. Okay, but who's your publisher? When's it coming out? I said, I don't have a publisher yet. And they said, I'm sorry. We can't mention you the New York Times. I said, oh, that, that's fine. I get it. He called me back the next day and said, I'm sorry, we gotta put it in. This is crazy. I love what you're doing. And so within nine months of having the idea, I spoke with Paul, who has since passed away. But during his time, he connected me with so many people for whom I'm so grateful and because he asked me to blurb his book. It was at the New York Times within nine months of having the idea. Which is unheard of.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Unreal. And that's just not the way academic publishing works. So this is just hilarious to listen to. And I think that's one of the things that I really, really liked while I was reading the book is that it, it does do a beautiful job, Barry, of like moving, seamlessly between the Music Master and the puzzle master. And kind of going back and forth and back and forth, and so often I found myself being like, and my brain is starting to explode, and then the musical theater would come back and be like. I got it. Now I'm back with you, okay. I understand where I'm going. So it was a fun read and it was a good workout for my brain. So..

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: And I would say to you, Barry, you come at this like we've already said, you're not a theater historian like we are. But it holds up, it holds mustard with theater historians. Like the work feels very, you know. Very thorough. You can tell you did the work. It's really, really well done.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Very well researched.

Barry Joseph: Yes. Thank you both. I really appreciate that.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Yes.

Barry Joseph: I do not have a doctorate, but I do have a Master's. I got my Master's in cultural studies at NYU many years ago. And it is that training that taught me how to do the research. And value the research. And cite it for others to follow the trail. How the work you do is building on the work done before you and you're creating steps for the future. And especially when I dig into something that gets talked about and referenced so much so that now when I read it, before my book came out, I knew what anecdote they were getting it from and what they were changing over time. To get to come in and like say, okay, this is now the foundation for all conversations about this moving forward. If you wanna talk about his movie The Last of Sheila you can't do that without reading what I wrote in the book. If you wanna talk about his murder game for the 1960s, you can't do that without reading my book. Not because I'm so great, but because I'm the first one to have taken the time to do that research, to talk to the people, look at the material which other people could have done, I only did it because that's my interest. It brings the two together, and now that I've done it, it's there moving for others to pull from. And I'm so appreciative of you, for giving me such nice compliments. Thank you.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Oh, and I mean it truly. Just as we wrap up our time together, I have two other questions for you, Tracy. You may have more, but I just have two. One is, what was the most interesting thing that you learned about Stephen Sondheim through your study, like the one that just knocked your socks off?

Barry Joseph: I never understood just from his music how brilliant he was. I knew he was brilliant, but if you pushed me a few years ago, I probably would've said yes... But if someone else was in that same situation, maybe they would've learned those skills and done those things as well. I came to completely reevaluate how I understand how human beings develop and what their minds are capable of. I do not think the way he thinks and there's nothing that could have ever happened in my life to let me think that way. And I also think differently from him and I value that. And so I'm valuing his brilliance, not only being superior in some ways 'cause he could do things I couldn't do, but just the fact that we all have different ways of thinking. And I appreciate that very much. And when I look at how he constructed something like his cryptic crosswords and I watch other people today solving them, and it's so inaccessible to me, that's a beautiful thing to me about how humans work and how diverse we are.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: Yes. I look at those things and run. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, Uhuh, okay, that'll just, and it'll bug me because I can't figure it out. So I just stay away. That's my problem.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: And then the one final question that I would ask.. I know from writing a biography of Dorothy Fields that you often, you wish that you could. Talk to the person themselves. And so I wonder if you could have a conversation with Stephen Sondheim, what would you most want to ask him? And it doesn't have to be one question. Maybe there's a couple of questions that you would put at the top of your list of questions to ask Stephen Sondheim.

Barry Joseph: What I would most want to know from him is how he understood his identity. As someone who designed puzzles and games. There's all sorts of things that people do in their lives. It doesn't mean they identify as one who does that. It might be a thing they see as outside themselves that they go to every once in a while. So were games and puzzles a distraction from him that let him procrastinate from doing what he was supposed to be doing. Writing his songs and lyrics. Were they his mental exercise to prepare him to write those songs and write those lyrics? Or were they allowing him to express something he could not express in the songs? And letting him have a different vehicle for them. And if the economics were reversed, if musical theater didn't pay, or at least pay as much as he got, he was successful. And instead it was puzzles and games. Would he have not only done that? Would he have preferred to have done that? And so you hear him talk in his interviews about minimizing in some ways what he did in puzzles and games. Yeah. When it's about puzzles and games. 'cause it's Games magazine, for example, which he did in the eighties and in the 2020s. Then he's proudly talking about what he did and he's almost bragging and in fact, he even said in the last appearance in Games Magazine, " I virtually introduced Cryptic Crossroads to America" and he's proud of that. But that pride is not what you see most of the time. He's usually talking with people who want to talk about the music and lyrics and he's gonna kind of beat them to the punch and downplay what he did. Or the opposite. He does wanna talk about his puzzles and games and the interviewer doesn't. And that was some of the best stuff I found. 'cause there were stuff left on the cutting room floor that wasn't published, which includes in Meryle Secrest's work. So that to me is what I'd most wanna know. 'cause all I'm left to do is kind of guess. What was his relationship with his puzzles and games? What did they mean to him?

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: I just thought it was really interesting. That seems to be kind of a theme. It's like, oh, and again, he says to a reporter... "that's been overstated. Like my relationship to games overstated, overstated." And you're like, no it wasn't. Like, you can already tell, as you're reading, you're like, no, it wasn't. What are you saying that for? But then he knows who he's talking to, you know?

Barry Joseph: That's right. And he is shaping that. He's shaping his image. Yeah, but what he thinks people wanna see about him.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: I have done so much stuff on Stephen Sondheim. You'd think that I would, no, it doesn't come up anywhere. But yet he becomes such a part of this different kind of cultural zeitgeist that most of the time as theater historians, we would never, ever have access to other otherwise. So..

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: That's what I think is such a strength of this book, is that we think we know it all about this great legend of musical theater, and yet you have just spent several hundred pages telling us something that we didn't know. And that when you can find a project like that is a gift from straight above.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Kristen. It's definitely felt like a gift to me to get to work on it, and now the book is out. It's a gift that keeps on giving. I have my Instagram channel, Matching Minds with Sondheim. And I'm constantly posting things that blow my mind that people are still sending me. A month ago we had the first photo that I've ever seen of Stephen Sondheim playing a video game, which he did with a friend, and the friend sent me the photo, but had never spoken about his relationship with Sondheim before. He used to fly over from LA to play Myst, for example. I give my speaking tour for my book, which is sometimes a workshop on how to design games. The way Stephen Sondheim designed games. Maybe it's about making treasure hunts. Maybe I'm going deep into how do you look at Stephen Sondheim's songs in a new way? I have always different ways of presenting it and engaging people in person, and I love wherever people are coming from. They're excited by the project. I even did a popup museum expo that was at the drama bookshop in New York City that ran for just over a month. That was super fun. I had two cases and I had a blast putting that together and who knows what's gonna be next, but I can tell that this was a gift for me to work on it and I keep looking for new opportunities to put it out into the world.

Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley: Well, Barry, this has been absolutely fantastic. I have thoroughly enjoyed hearing about your project and your process, and I'm so grateful that you joined us for this episode today. I do wanna let our listeners know that the book is available wherever you buy books. The podcast is available at any respectable place that you listen to podcasts? Yes. And, uh, if you wanna read the book, you can find out things for yourself, like how to host your own Sondheimian Treasure Hunt, and how to understand Sondheim's parameters for creating clues in a game. And what are Sondheim's three principles of play. If you wanna know those things or if you just wanna know more about the man himself, you need to pick this book up. Barry, thanks for joining us. We're so glad to have you.

Barry Joseph: Such a pleasure being here. Thank you both so much.

Dr. Tracey Brent-Chessum: I found myself being like: and my brain is starting to explode.