Another side of Sondheim comes through in Barry Joseph’s delightful Matching Minds With Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend, a new compendium combining a “ludological biography” (i.e., a timeline of Sondheim’s elaborate games, treasure hunts, and puzzles) and an appendix-like guide to “how to play the Sondheim way.” While some of Joseph’s psychologizing is pat compared to Okrent’s—Sondheim’s love of games and puzzles, Joseph theorizes, springs from being “the child of a nasty divorce that left him always seeking order within the surrounding chaos”—the book functions as a diverting meta-biography, as Sondheim’s game-making career paralleled his musical-making one, and even outlasted it. (Did it occur to me, while learning about the time and effort Sondheim poured into these one-off diversions, that we could have had a few more musicals if folks hadn’t kept asking him to design a hunt for them? Reader, it did.)
The chapter on murder games and the film The Last of Sheila illuminates the influence Sondheim had on the way those games are played to this day, including in such online games as Among Us—a lineage acknowledged by his brief cameo in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Other chapters detail the treasure hunts he designed for friends and organizations, his dabbling in computer and video games (he was an early Myst adopter), his brief stint as a 1960s-era game show contestant, and various puzzles and board games he was involved in creating.
It’s all a bit nerdy and granular, even for me. What I cherished most were the book’s insights into Sondheim’s character that Joseph gleans throughout, which make a nice complement to Okrent’s more gimlet-eyed view. The saga of how a film researcher named Jane Klain managed, after decades of archive-diving, to track down a long-lost clip of Sondheim’s 1966 appearance on Password alongside his dear friend Lee Remick is deeply touching. Sondheim’s response: “OMG, as you young people say. I am gobsmacked.”
Similarly, it seems uncharitable to begrudge Sondheim his outsized games-and-puzzles predilection when you read about the salutary effect they had on his personality. Many of his game-playing friends, who included over the years everyone from actor Anthony Perkins to playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman, note both his avid competitiveness and his youthful jocularity when he’s playing games—or, as Joseph puts it, “when swept up in the ludic moment.” One game player says that even when playing with folks a fraction of his age, Sondheim “had the youngest energy in the room. He was like a 10-year-old.”
Joseph quotes Sherman as saying, of one of Sondheim’s murder games, “He’s as proud of inventing this game as any song he’d ever written.” Of course, it’s the songs that we remember and revere Sondheim for, and that make these books worth reading in the first place. Following the instructions in Matching Minds, and reading Okrent’s biography, may get us close to a sense of Sondheim the man. But Sondheim the musical dramatist, in all his unbiddable complexity and brilliance, is always as close as the next replay or revival. He holds us too close; he ruins our sleep; he knows us too well; he varies our days; he makes us alive.