Dive deep into how puzzles and games serve as leitmotifs throughout Stephen Sondheim’s musical works with host Barry Joseph and co-host Gail Leondar-Wright in this second of two parts. Joined by a panel of Sondheim scholars and enthusiasts, including Doug Reside, Julie Klausner, Ben Rimalower, and Natalie Gerber, they explore key productions such as ‘Into the Woods,’ ‘Putting It Together,’ ‘Road Show,’ and Sondheim’s final work, ‘Here We Are.’ The discussion highlights Sondheim’s intricate play with word puzzles, musical motifs, and the structure of his shows. From examining the metaphorical use of poker in ‘Road Show’ to the surreal, game-like elements of ‘Here We Are,’ this episode offers a fresh lens through which to appreciate the genius of Sondheim’s craft.
Make sure to get the book everywhere books are found, or click here.
00:00 Cold Open
00:47 Exploring Puzzles and Games in Sondheim’s Musicals
01:32 Introducing Co-Host Gail Leondar-Wright
01:57 Discussing the First Episode and Gail’s Insights
03:08 Guest Introduction: Doug Reside
04:05 Guest Introduction: Julie Klausner
06:34 Guest Introduction: Ben Rimalower
09:09 Guest Introduction: Natalie Gerber
10:04 Diving into ‘Into the Woods’
13:57 Sondheim’s Influence from Computer Games
21:54 The Puzzle of Sondheim’s Wordplay
29:22 Spinning the Sondheim-O-Matic
29:53 Exploring ‘Putting It Together’
32:32 Sondheim’s Self-Parody and Playfulness
33:36 The Intricacies of ‘Putting It Together’
36:50 Exploring ‘Road Show’ and Its Themes
38:07 The Game of Capitalism in ‘Road Show’
43:23 Sondheim’s Final Work: ‘Here We Are’
44:54 Surrealism and Puzzles in ‘Here We Are’
46:50 The Ambiguity of Sondheim’s Endings
59:37 Reflections on Sondheim’s Legacy
Thanks to everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, specifically transcription and text editing by Jenny Westfall, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy, and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Julie Klausner: In the grand scheme of Sondheim’s career, that this is his final work makes so much sense to me. It makes more sense than if I were trying to make sense of the show, because the show exists in the context of his life and his career. And he left us so much. And one of the things in this show that he left us was- it’s your job to figure stuff out,
Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. I’m your host, Barry Joseph. Today’s episode is the second in a series exploring how puzzles and games appear as leitmotifs throughout the musical work of Stephen Sondheim. Party games, board games, treasure hunts, word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and even an escape room.
Last episode, we explored shows from 1960 through 1984’s Sunday in the Park with George. And if you missed that episode, I recommend you check it out after this one. But for today, we’ll be looking at, well, everything after Sunday. Focusing on Into the Woods, Putting It Together, Road Show, and Here We Are.
Barry Joseph: Before we introduce our guests, I’m excited to bring back my co-host for this series, Gail Leondar-Wright. Hi, Gail.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Hey Barry, nice to see ya.
Barry Joseph: Welcome. Would you please introduce yourself again to our listeners?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Sure. So I am lucky in that I study about Stephen Sondheim full time. I’ve been doing that for a bunch of years, having been a lifelong lover of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. And I study and teach in lots of different venues.
Barry Joseph: What did you think of our first pass looking at games and puzzles in seven of Sondheim’s musicals?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Gosh, it was really fun. I mean, oh, Barry, it reminds me of what I love so much about your book. And it’s not just, for me, the deep dive into the many, many ways that puzzles and games were ever-present in Sondheim’s life. Although, you know, that’s cool to learn about. But for me, someone who spends most of her time trying to discover what makes Sondheim great. The book gives me just another lens through which to understand that genius. So now, I gotta tell you, whenever I approach a show, a song, or a set of lyrics, I am now asking myself, is it playful? Is it a puzzle? Is it a game? And that’s been eye opening and generative. So, participating in this special podcast series for me has been like another great way to engage with your wonderful book.
Barry Joseph: Oh, Gail, I love that. Thank you. Are you ready to dive back in together?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barry Joseph: Alright, so just like in the previous episode, rather than share clips from my interviews, I will read from my book and invite a wide range of guest hosts to discuss. Gail, would you please introduce the first one?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Doug.
I’ve never met Doug, but I know a lot about Doug Reside because he’s ever present in the Sondheim world. He is the curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Doug Reside: Yeah, So I think one thing to say first is we’ve been collecting theater since 1931, when David Belasco, the producer, gave us a bunch of his photographs, and the library realized at that time that they really needed a theater division, like Harvard had founded. We collect all kinds of popular entertainment from magic to television and film and also theater, as you would expect. We’re very strong in theater photography, and also we’re the home of the theater on film and tape archive, which since 1970 has been recording theater, mostly in New York, but really around the world as well, where we have sometimes the unique permission to go into Broadway theaters and record what happens in them. We were fortunate to be able to record Sondheim’s memorial service about a year after he died. And so anyone can come and watch that at the library now as well.
Barry Joseph: Up next, Julie Klausner. Julie is the creator and co-star of Difficult People, as well as an author, podcaster, and writer-performer. She writes for several TV shows including Schmigadoon! on Apple TV. She also grew up with parents who made sure she knew who Stephen Sondheim was before she could remember her own phone number. When it comes to puzzles, Julie enjoys crosswords from Sunday through Wednesday and loves the last 15 minutes of any murder mystery.
Welcome, Julie.
Julie Klausner: Thank you so much for having me.
Barry Joseph: I’m so excited. For those who don’t know, this is the first time we’re talking with each other, but we have a parasocial relationship. We connect on Instagram, I listen to your podcast, and of course I watch your TV shows.
Julie Klausner: Likewise. And I love a parasocial relationship. I’m so much thinner in those.
Barry Joseph: I’m so thrilled to get to talk to you live now.
Julie Klausner: Thank you for having me. I feel completely outmatched by all the minds in this room. I feel like the requisite clown at the party and I’m thrilled to have crashed it.
Barry Joseph: I know you love Stephen Sondheim. I know his work has impacted you and on your podcast, you often talk about that and often interview people connected with Sondheim. And so I deeply appreciate that you’ve helped to create spaces in social media to let others explore what they care about Sondheim and that you can share your passion and personal interest today as well.
Julie Klausner: Oh my, I can’t think of any more important artist to me, and I’m just so grateful for all the educators in the, virtual room right now. I have some followup questions for Doug specifically that you’ll probably be hearing from me over email. Specifically where the Here We Are recording is. I’m always privileged to share my passion for the great man, Steve, and hopefully make him accessible to people who, maybe think he’s a little lofty or highbrow. And I feel as though communicating passion for someone is always a way of spreading the joy that he’s given me.
So I’m so delighted to be here. And I really loved your book because it was just such a specific prism onto this incredible body of work that is a new way of looking at it and will hopefully draw more people to the Sondheim oeuvre.
Barry Joseph: Thank you, Julie.
Julie Klausner: Thank you.
Gail Leondar-Wright: So Ben Rimalower. Ben is the host and producer of the wonderful podcast, Giants in the Sky: How Sondheim and Lapine Went Into the Woods. He’s a writer, director, performer. He also has served as the assistant director to Lonny Price on the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Ravinia Festival production of Sweeney Todd, which starred, of course, Patti LuPone, George Hearn, and Neil Patrick Harris. He also served in that position for the Ravinia Festival of A Little Night Music, again with Patti LuPone, Hearn, this time with Zoe Caldwell and Sara Ramírez as well. Ben Rimalower, I hear, is an excellent loser. And a very sore winner.
Ben Rimalower: It’s true. I’m a longtime Sondheim fan and got to work with him a little bit early in my career. And it’s funny, Into the Woods is probably like number seven on my list of favorite Sondheim shows, maybe lower. It’s been kind of ubiquitous my whole life. It was definitely my gateway to Sondheim. But, I’ve always been fascinated by the genesis of Into the Woods. There’s little tidbits that, I picked up as a Sondheim fan over the years about the evolution of the show.
And James Lapine in 2021, I think it was published this incredible book called Putting It Together about the development of Sunday in the Park with George. And he really candidly shared his conversations with all these artists and collaborators of different sorts who he’d worked with on Sunday in the Park with George and they’re really fascinating conversations and Lapine is really humble and incisive in getting to parts of the story that he’s forgotten or blocked out and then there’s people included that maybe had a bad experience on the show or fired.
I mean, it’s really about telling the story in as holistic a way as possible, not just, You know, a PR fluff or whatever. And I, I devoured that book and was so hoping that he would do the same with Into the Woods. And when I found out that he wasn’t going to do that, I decided I had to do this podcast.
I wish I’d started it sooner when Steve was still alive. But I did get to talk to the entire living original cast and creative team and people that were involved or in different ways fired or were replacements or you know, auditioned and didn’t get the gig, stuff like that.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah, it’s amazing. Oh, thank you very much for that. I hope people will check it out because it’s really a treasure.
Ben Rimalower: Thank you.
Barry Joseph: And returning to the podcast, Natalie Gerber. Natalie is a professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, and has written about modern American poets like Frost and Stevens, who were on Sondheim’s bookshelf, and she is now turning her attention to Sondheim’s play with language. Natalie is also a dear friend from way back in our graduate school days at NYU. Welcome back, Natalie.
Natalie Gerber: Thanks, Barry. It’s such a joy to reconnect with you, 30 years later, I think. After we met in graduate school, you headed off to work on games and active learning throughout New York City. I was heading off to work on poetry festivals and such, and here, look at us coming back, circling back to play with Sondheim. I love it.
Barry Joseph: It’s beshert.
Natalie Gerber: Indeed.
Barry Joseph: Another powerhouse of a team today. Thank you all so much for joining us. Shall we all get started?
Julie Klausner: Yes.
Natalie Gerber: Woo!
Barry Joseph: All right.
So today, as I said, we’ll be looking at four shows from 1987 to 2023 Into the Woods, Putting It Together, Road Show, and Here We Are. For some of the shows, we’ll be looking at games and puzzles within the music and lyrics of the show.
For others, we’ll be looking at them within the structure. However, we’re not going to discuss them in chronological order to make it a little more playful. We’ll be picking them at random.
I would like now to present to you the Sondheim-O-Matic.
Can someone please describe, since this is an audio only podcast, what you’re seeing on the screen? Julie?
Julie Klausner: There’s a dial animated to spin and I’m going to say like West Side Story era Steve in the middle.
The sections are by show. So there’s four shows and and a little pointer to the right. So, Into the Woods, Putting It Together, Road Show, and Here We Are. It could stop at any show.
Barry Joseph: That’s right. I’m gonna hit the button, the wheel’s gonna spin, and the arrow’s gonna pick one of the shows that are left.
That’s the show we’re gonna talk about next. So before I spin our Wheel of Sondheim, are there any shows anyone is particularly rooting for for the spinner to land on?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Here We Are. Here We Are.
Natalie Gerber: Here We Are.
Gail Leondar-Wright: *laughs*,
Julie Klausner: Well, I’m excited for Into the Woods.
Barry Joseph: And Ben, what are you gonna pick?
Ben Rimalower: I’ve talked enough about Into the Woods. I want to do Putting It Together.
Barry Joseph: All right. Luckily, we’ll get to do all of them. I’m going to click on it now and we’ll see which one it’ll land on first. Here we go.
Into the Woods.
Julie Klausner: Alright.
Barry Joseph: In the musical Into the Woods, Cinderella sings in “On the Steps of the Palace” about how she cannot decide whether she wants to be caught by her prince. Instead, she decides to leave it up to fate. Quote, “You’ll just leave him a clue, for example a shoe, and then see what he’ll do”. The prince’s search for Cinderella has now turned into a puzzle quest- whose foot will fit the abandoned slipper?– that shapes one of the show’s subplots.
Meanwhile, the character of the Mystery Man also refers to puzzles. In the first act, in the lead into the song “First Midnight”, he tells the audience, quote, “No knot unties itself…”, end quote, suggesting a call for agency since puzzles do not solve themselves. Later, in the second act finale, the song “Children Will Listen” opens with him returning to say, quote, “Every knot was once straight rope,” end quote, suggesting that all puzzles can be solved- a note of hope.
That was an example of songs and puzzles in Into the Woods. Now we’ll talk about how the structure of Into the Woods is also inspired by games and puzzles. The entire structure of the first act of Into the Woods is a treasure hunt with clearly defined goals and constraints as defined by the Witch to the Baker and his wife.
Barry Joseph: “You wish to have the curse reversed? I’ll need a certain potion first. Go to the wood and bring me back: One: the cow as white as milk. Two: the cape as red as blood. Three: the hair as yellow as corn. Four: the Slipper as pure as gold”. While this format is not uncommon in fairy tales, it was also a standard convention in the style of the 1980s computer-based puzzle games enjoyed by Sondheim. Which led him to explore turning the musical later into a CD ROM game.
The Baker eventually turns against the show’s puzzle structure. Listing in the song, “No More”, all the things he wants to run from, including quote, “no more riddles… no more quests”, end quote.
Doug Reside: So I was interested.
I was a player of the 1980s computer games, the Infocom games, like Zork and Deadline, all the Enchanter games as well. So I always thought of Into the Woods as kind of in that genre or even maybe the Sierra Online King’s Quest games. And so I had written to Sondheim. I asked what games, if any, he had based it on, because Lapine has talked about how Sondheim he had gotten very interested in computer games, and that was sort of what inspired the Woods, and, so Sondheim wrote back, “Sorry to disappoint you, Doug, but you heard it wrong. I’ve never played any computer games except for Oxyd, now known as Enigma, and Cliff Johnson’s puzzle games The Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three. What James may have said is that I invented a video game based on Into the Woods.” And then I asked him, “How far did you get with that Into the Woods game?”, and he said, “Just a sheaf of notes and ideas with a structural scheme. Why are you interested? Are you very into video games? Do you invent them?” And I confess that I have not invented a computer game since I was a kid, but what’s interesting to me about his initial response, is that if you were to ask someone if they ever play computer games and they say, “oh, no, not really” the game that follows, that would probably be like Super Mario Brothers or Solitaire or, the New York Times Crossword puzzle. But he names these very kind of obscure 80s, 90s Mac games I’ve since hunted them down and played them in an emulator and they’re not really the kinds of games that you would think, if in fact they were the inspiration for Into the Woods, they’re not as tied to the structure of Into the Woods as like, King’s Quest.
They’re, essentially, just logic puzzles. Particularly the Cliff Johnson’s Fool’s Errand game is kind of a tarot card -themed game where you’re moving around, I guess in a quest. But you’re not trying to get objects, you’re not trying to do any of the sorts of things that you would do in an Infocom game or a text adventure. You’re basically putting puzzles together, solving word games or number games. It’s very much like the puzzle section of the New York Times more than a text adventure.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Well that’s interesting.
Doug Reside: I think he was given them by a friend of his who gave him the discs.
Barry Joseph: Well, I can share having had the unique privilege of looking through Stephen Sondheim’s personal collection of games magazines- which he started receiving from the time that they first published in 1977 until he passed away- because I assisted the person who won them at auction at the Doyle auction in June of 2024.
And then before they were shipped up to him, I got to flip through them all. And what I saw flipping through them, for example, is that whenever there was a year end, “the best games of the year” there were pencil marks over all sorts of things. Books on puzzles he wanted to read, mobile games in later years that he wanted to download, board games he wanted, and yes, computer games.
And Fool’s Errand was in there, with a pencil mark . He did write a letter to Cliff Johnson, a fan letter essentially saying how much he loved his games and how can he learn more.
And we do know that the second game you mentioned, Doug, 3 in Three, has a list in the credits which includes a certain person we’d recognize as a playtester: Stephen Sondheim.
Julie Klausner: That’s a good gig.
Playtesting.
Gail Leondar-Wright: That’s fantastic.
You know, there are puzzles inherent in this work that aren’t as obvious, though, as the quest itself. I think of the motific writing in the score as being a bit of a puzzle that he’s working out a mystery and he’s hinting at little clues.
So there is this five note bean theme, da da da da da, which some people know signals every time that something about the beans is sort of messing with people or is somehow moving the narrative along, and you hear that in the score either subtly or, you know, it’s sung by major characters, but it’s always have something to do with the beans. I think that’s a puzzle. I don’t know. What do people think?
Ben Rimalower: I don’t know the way I have taken that it’s almost like a puzzle in reverse. Like the way Sondheim crafts, honestly, all his scores, but certainly Into the Woods is, you know, taking those motifs and finding what they thematically represent to him. And then, Kind extrapolating that into all the different contexts and how it plays out. Like he always said, “content comes before style and form”. And this is a great example of how they’re really, you know part and parcel of each other in Sondheim’s work.
Gail Leondar-Wright: And when you say it’s a puzzle in reverse, I think what you mean, and I think if so, I agree with you, he’s actually giving you a solution. He’s Right, you don’t have to figure it out because I’m going to give it to you. Yeah.
Ben Rimalower: He’s figuring out the puzzle of what this, you know, David in the raw clay is going to be. Him figuring out the puzzle is him working out what the score is.
Gail Leondar-Wright: And what you mean by David in the raw clay is that Michelangelo said, “David’s in the clay, I just need to carve away everything that’s not David.” Is that what you mean
Ben Rimalower: Yes, thank you.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Yeah. sure.
Barry Joseph: Now Ben, I know often at Into the Woods you’ve went back to the topic we’ve now addressed a few times. This idea that Stephen Sondheim was thinking about doing a CD ROM game. You often asked a few people about it. Is there anything you can share with us from your experience trying to dig up what was going on with it and what work had actually gone into producing it?
Ben Rimalower: There were songs that had been in the development of Into the Woods that either were cut or didn’t make it to opening night. And there are recordings that were made years later sung by some people like Maureen Moore and some members of the original cast
Barry Joseph: George Lee Andrews.
Ben Rimalower: Excuse me? George Lee Andrews. Yeah. I thought you said Julie Andrews. I’m missing that one! But there was a re-release when Into the Woods was put on a different kind of CD. The original Broadway cast album, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, that included some of those tracks. And there was a Sondheim box set, “The Story So Far”, that included, different of them. And I was so curious about these because they were described in the packaging as demos. And so I thought, did Maureen Moore play the witch in a workshop?
What workshop was that? When does that fall into the timeline? And unfortunately, nobody that had any involvement in them from the performers, to the pianist, Paul Ford to James Lapine himself had any memory of what these were. Most of them didn’t even remember recording it at all. couldn’t believe that they were on it.
In the web page for the release that described them having been recorded for a CD ROM. Which- and it didn’t even explain what the purpose of the CD ROM was-, there was all kinds of quasi-misinformation out there.
Was it for some sort of an educational thing? Did it have something to do with that? And it’s the information I got from you, Barry was about the computer game that was going to be released that I guess didn’t come to fruition.
Barry Joseph: I’m going to quote to you, Ben, from Maureen Moore from your own podcast, because I learned it from there. She said, “Sondheim had someone call me and they called it a CD ROM. I didn’t know what that was back then. And he said it was for educational purposes.” So that connects CD ROM with education. And around that time on a CompuServe forum, it was like the AOL days.
He said, “I’m making an educational game to teach about music”. And he had in his home old board games that taught how music worked. The games magazine interview with him in 1983, which had photographs of his game shows one of these games. These 19th century European games that are really elaborate.
So he had objects around him in his home that were about using play to teach music. He talks about making a CD ROM game to teach music, and he’s recording people singing the songs that he could have access to because his other songs were controlled at the time by the movie studios.
It makes me think that all must’ve been one thing that was moving forward.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Wow.
Ben Rimalower: Fascinating.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Well, I have a general question, but it definitely relates to Into the Woods, which is wordplay a game? “No time to sit and dither while her withers wither with her”, you know, “While they lie there for years and you cry on their biers”. Is wordplay and puns… are those puzzles? Are those games?
Julie Klausner: I think Rhymes are solutions. Sometimes Sondheim presents us completed puzzles and he’s like, “look what I did!”. And sometimes I think he left a couple spaces open- for the
-for the audience to fill in, one of those like, on the way homers, right? So I think in an example like that, when he can do the showmanship of rhyming, it’s like watching, you know, like an incredible dancer and say like, “wow!”. But then in other examples, give you the space to solve it yourself later.
Doug Reside: But we know he was a big Anagram fan. Trying to rearrange the letters and words to make a new word, which seemed to be a kind of game for him.
Gail Leondar-Wright: My first letter to Sondheim is I had had a 60th birthday party, which was a Sondheim-themed birthday party, and we ate meat pies and drank vodka stingers, and we dressed in costumes, and we all sang through the music, and part of it was a game of Anagrams, and I sent it to him, and I didn’t know at that point that he answered every letter that came to him, and he sent back, “thanks a bunch, really appreciate it- blah blah blah- did you mean a random cuddle to be Audra McDonald? Because if you do, you have to get rid of an E and substitute in an A. If however, I am mistaken, please enlighten me.” So, okay. He was right. I misspelled, I spelled it like Audre Lorde, the great poet, but he was right. But what it means to me is that he did them. Now, what we know about Sondheim is that didn’t, that didn’t take as long as it would take to take a sip of coffee.
He looks at them, he does them, he sends back a critique, but it was really thrilling.
Natalie Gerber: I just want to jump in also on the wordplay. One of the things I love coming to his work with a little bit of linguistics background, is that he knows all of these things.
He doesn’t ever use the technical terms. When he talks about something like the sound patterns in the song “Next”, he doesn’t talk about phonemes, but he knows that Japanese would never have three hard sounds in a row because there’s always an open short vowel in there. And he’s doing this very sophisticated thing with clitics: “wither, with her”, is putting two small words together. He also, like, he finds play within the sequence of words, “better stop and take stock while you’re standing here stuck on the steps of the palace”, is both a chiasmus, and it’s using pararhyme: stop-stock, then stuck-steps. So, outer, inner envelope, and he’s just changing the vowels and he loves to do that. It’s a device he takes from Cole Porter and there are a ton. And she’s finding play. She’s stuck. She’s the one who has to make a decision. Then at the end, she’s reasoned her way out of it, but she’s reasoned her way out through play.
And she’s left him a clue, a shoe. You also have to think, hey, this is a Monopoly thing, because the original set of Monopoly pieces included a shoe.
Julie Klausner: Do they not still have the shoe? Did they replace it with a fidget spinner? What’s happening?
Natalie Gerber: Do people still wear shoes?
Julie Klausner: I wanted to mention what a great example that is, “On the Steps of the Palace” to have a character work through a game in front of your very eyes. And also how so much of what we’re talking about from this very modern era, relatively, all harkens back to what he learned from from Oscar Hammerstein. Which is to say that a song should start in one place and end in another, so that the story is moving forward. And even with the motif that we were talking about, I mean, that all builds up to “Rose’s Turn”, right?
Those “stuck on the steps”, I mean, that to me is play with the ear as opposed to anagrams, which to me are like, you’re not going to get them on the first list, the opposite of, you know, you’d always talk about how like tunes can’t be hummable if you haven’t heard them before, like the idea that you would expose an audience to something that they would have to be so cerebral to figure out is a form of torture. So it’s just interesting to me, like a differentiation of what an audience is prepared to receive, versus you know, ” I completed this, it’s gonna be fun”.
Barry Joseph: Do we have more that we want to say about Into the Woods?
Julie Klausner: Does anybody else think it’s a cop out that the corn silk is hair? Like, what’s that? That’s Is that hair? Do we count that as hair? Because that’s like, Barry, in your book you talk about things, like Sondheim’s “rules of play”, right? And that one is like, “hide it in plain sight”. Is it that?
Or is that just like, a total cop out because we’re reaching midnight and we just need to find something story wise? Like, that’s always bugged me. Am I the only one?
Doug Reside: I agree, but it is the thing that, to me, feels the most like an 80s computer game. That you would click on the hair of the corn, and you’d pick it up and turn that into the potion or something.
Julie Klausner: But, isn’t that frustrating that it’s not called the “hair of the corn”? Like if it were, that’d be one thing, like “hair of the dog” or whatever other like hair, but like, it’s literally called “corn silk”, right? There’s no- anyway, I just wanted to put that out there because it’s always frustrated me.
Ben Rimalower: Julie, it’s interesting that you bring that up because like my first response is like… but they created the problem. So if it’s a copout solution to a problem that, you know, what it’s like in baseball, an unforced error. She didn’t have to say, “wrong ingredients. I cannot have touched the hair”.
They could have just accepted any blonde hair. It didn’t matter that she touched it. It almost seems like they want that eighties game thing that it’s like, “Oh, this didn’t work, but you can do this work around of corn silk”.
Barry Joseph: Wherever you land on the question Julie posed to us, whether it was fair or not, the general frame is correct that Sondheim always spoke when he was training people about how to make puzzles, that you had to be fair, that you couldn’t cheat. And so when people like Richard Maltby Jr. learned from Stephen Sondheim how to create cryptic crossword puzzles, which led him to eventually take over Stephen Sondheim’s role creating these very puzzles for New York Magazine, he would show those puzzles to Stephen Sondheim, and together, they would look at what was fair and what was unfair.
And the goal was always to make sure that someone who was trying to solve it would feel like, whether it was hard or easy, if they got to the answer, it felt like, “ah, yeah, that’s right”.
Natalie Gerber: And for someone who has written about all the different ways of describing blonde hair in Sweeney Todd, it makes it even more unforgivable.
Julie Klausner: absolutely at no point does he tell Anthony, like, “or if it’s corn silk, that’s fine, too”.
Barry Joseph: Well, if we can’t get past this indiscretion in Into the Woods, maybe we can get past the show itself and get back to the Sondheim-O-Matic and see what our next show is going to be. You folks ready?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Yep.
Julie Klausner: Yes.
Barry Joseph: Here we go. Spin of the Sondheim-O-Matic. We have three shows left.
Is it going to be Here We Are? Oh, no, it’s going over into Putting It Together.
Gail Leondar-Wright: All right.
Barry Joseph: Putting It Together is a musical review showcasing Sondheim songs. It also contains a delightful Easter egg. It is the original London production of 92 and it’s off-Broadway adaption in 93- not the Broadway production in 99- that earned a place in my book and what a place!
The two new parody songs that Sondheim wrote for this review are sung versions of his 1960s parlor games. Sondheim did not include them in his collected book of lyrics. Some sources even removed them from the list of songs in the production. But, well, Sondheim did write them, they were in the show, and they deserve the right kind of attention.
Putting It Together places two couples at a dinner party in a New York City penthouse. At one point, the couples are bored and discuss what to do next. A list of games is suggested, and each is struck down in turn: charades. Monopoly. Scrabble. Clue. These negotiations are performed in a parody of the refrain, “What Would We Do Without You?” from Company, transformed into- “What Would You All Like To Do? Ooh!” Here Sondheim is making fun of both his own songs as well as his interesting games. He was just getting started. An additional character known as the Observer suggests, “how about “Whom in this room?” Everyone’s played, I assume.” If each character had a gun with just one bullet, whom in the room would they quote unquote “boom”, which leads into “The Gun Song” from Assassins.
When “The Gun Song” concludes, The new song to parody is “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd. The Observer explains, in song, they are now on to round two. Following a loose version of the parlor game, Hostilities, a game he played in the 1960s, the lyrics instruct the players to pick a person, write their initials on a piece of paper, and then, on the back of the paper, challenge them with an “unrepressed” quote unquote question.
At first, the couples are unsure if they want to play. The Observer sings, “that’s all there is to it”, to which the host- played at the time by Julie Andrews- resolves it with, “Oh, *eff* it, let’s do it”. And the game is on. What is one to make of these trivial song intros created as filler to connect songs in a musical review?
Throughout his career, Sondheim wrote many parody and novelty songs that demonstrate his wit and brilliance. These two are not those. What they are instead is a humorous glimpse into Sondheim presenting on the stage what he enjoyed for decades in his personal life, and by the early nineties, was missing.
I like to imagine these songs were a private joke, shared more with himself than the audience, to make himself chuckle. Now, at last, we can all be in on the joke.
Julie Klausner: So Carol Burnett has entered the chat
Doug Reside: And Julie Andrews.
Julie Klausner: Finally, those two are so great. They’re such great Sondheim -istas
Gail Leondar-Wright: So, is self parody a game? He could have written a new song. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he didn’t want to, but he chose to make fun of himself in song. It’s certainly playful. Is it a game?
Julie Klausner: I mean, it’s satire, right? It’s sort of a challenge of- how are we going to fit these songs from different shows together into a new narrative? I could see how that might be fun and challenging and maybe he did think of it as a satire of a cabaret review. That might have been tantalizing to him- if only because part of the challenge is- okay, there’s so many bad versions of this. What’s the good version of this challenge?
Doug Reside: You mentioned that he doesn’t include very much of it in his collected lyrics, he does include the rewrite of “Putting It Together” for Julie Andrews in there, but kind of gestured towards- it wasn’t very good, and I gave them a song- basically, but yeah.
And I wonder though, it does feel like even things that he wasn’t particularly invested in, he really didn’t want other people writing things that would be thought to be his. When we were doing this anniversary of the theater division at the New York Public Library André De Shields sang, “I’m Still Here”, and there were some bits that didn’t make as much sense for André De Shields to sing, and so he wanted to substitute in a couple of things.
I think maybe “I’ve been through MC Hammer and I’m still here”, whatever, and Sondheim really did not want those. He said, I’d be happy to write additional or new lyrics for you, but I don’t want someone else writing lyrics in my stead that might be attributed to me. So I get the sense that Putting It Together is in that thing that they needed something there. They were like, well, we can just write a couple of little additional things to connect the songs. And he didn’t want that to happen, I imagine.
Natalie Gerber: You posed this great question- ” What kind of play is it if he’s doing self parody?” I think it’s interesting to consider, he does very little rewriting here, at least in “Game Sequence Number One”. He was always happy to revise lyrics as Ben was saying, if someone asked him to, and he admired them, right? We think about Barbra Streisand and his rewriting for either “Putting It Together” or “Send in the Clowns”. Other times, if he’s rewriting something like rewriting Gilbert and Sullivan for “Please Hello”, it’s parodies like- “you know, that really annoys me. I’m going to do it better”. It feels like he’s trying to put the lightest touch here and just do the least bit necessary for sort of like a transition.
Doug Reside: So he is still wanting to make sure the lyric works for the context, even if it’s a small change here or there.
Julie Klausner: I just want to use this opportunity to say that “More”, the song from Dick Tracy that is featured in one of the productions of Putting It Together, was my most listened to song last year, according to Spotify and my memory. I think that song is outrageous. I think it’s so much more than the pastiche that was called for, for likeMadonna’s characters cabaret act, which you think, “Oh, What a trivial assignment”. That song to me is so- and I’m not well versed in music theory by any stretch of the imagination- but it seems like there’s like three different bridges and it keeps- it and I don’t know if it goes up octaves- but it seems to get faster and it constantly changes and the lyrics are so smart and it’s not a tongue twister but it sounds like one. I just think that is one of his most underrated songs. Say whatever you want about Madonna. The fact that she got herself into shape to sing that as well as she does lends her like legend status as far as I’m concerned, if, if that were all she were to have done, dayenu.
Barry Joseph: Do we have more we want to say about Putting It Together?
Julie Klausner: Kathie Lee was pretty good. And like, I mean, she goes for it. I give her a shout out too.
Barry Joseph: All right, We have two shows left. Is it going to be Road Show or Here We Are?
It looks like Road Show.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Road Show.
Ben Rimalower: Oh, Road Show.
Barry Joseph: I only have a short bit to share from Road Show. I almost didn’t include it in the book, but there’s actually a song called “The Game” and I couldn’t skip that. Here we go. Road Show has a song titled “The Game”. Two brothers, Addison and Wilson, are working a gold claim up in the Klondike when, to his brother’s horror, Wilson decides to gamble the claim in a round of poker.
Quote, “The only thing that matters is the game”. Wilson argues- it was more than just winning the money, it was about putting all you are into the pot. Sondheim and his collaborator, John Weidman, used poker as a metaphor for how to live life always on the edge. In the long term, gambling did not pay off for the brothers.
Nor did their next game, nor the one after that. In the song, “Get Out, Go”, Wilson tells his brother, after their latest calamity, that it was always bound to fall apart. That quote, “whatever the game, this was always our road”, end quote.
Games, in the context of the show, are about how to approach life. About taking the big risks- even if they come at the cost of others- and riding them as far as one can. And then when they eventually crash, picking yourself back up and looking for the next game to play.
Gail Leondar-Wright: I think the whole show is about the game of capitalism and the winners and the losers. What do you think?
Julie Klausner: Um, Isn’t Assassins that too?
Natalie Gerber: Yeah. that’s a show that starts with a game.
Julie Klausner: Yeah.
Natalie Gerber: Kill a prez, get a prize.
Julie Klausner: -and like kind of like an historically unwinnable carnival game, right? It’s like stacked against you.
Barry Joseph: Games that are rigged.
Julie Klausner: I would also add, Here We Are as sort of his meditation on class. But yeah, the game of capitalism specifically, I could definitely see a place for here.
Gail Leondar-Wright: At a particular point in our nation’s history where we were figuring out how we were going to exploit the natural and human resources Um, in order to have “winner and loser” society.
Natalie Gerber: And it begins with the song “Waste”, right? That if you don’t accumulate the wealth, if what you build doesn’t last, then it’s a waste. And I think it’s Willie who comes back to Addie, please correct me if I’m wrong. And says talking to them, that was the waste. It’s the spirit of the game and playing being all in that we get modeled to that generosity of play without worrying whether you’re up or you’re down. It also plays with roads, right? To me, it’s a callback in different ways while interrogating capitalism, American dreams of looking for your road. Right?
“How did you get so far off the track? Why don’t you turn around and come back?” Or so many roads in Into the Woods. The wolf who leads Little Red astray. Just one- “so many paths. Just one would be so boring”. And the play comes from choosing a road and failing over and over, maybe going back to square one, but you don’t have to stick to one path.
Ben Rimalower: I don’t know if this is inappropriate, but talking of winning and losing in capitalism. It seems like this is an example of a loser show. You know, Here We Are for comparison’s sake, was like, you know, a posthumous like blessing from God Sondheim. Whereas this show, starting off not that many years after Passion, it seemed like it would just be the next Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim.
And in fact, it was being directed by Sam Mendes, who was, you know, just such an exciting and really hot talent at that point. Starring Nathan Lane and Victor Garber and, you know, New York theater workshop where Rent had just come from. And, it just seemed like it had hit all over it, you know, and then that didn’t work out. It was going to be Hal Prince was going to direct. It was the reunion of the titans and it was going to be at the Kennedy Center and then come to Broadway. And, that didn’t happen it just sort of limped along and, you know, to be crass about it in a capitalist winner-loser, you know paradigm, it limped along and like, you know increasingly unexciting or, you know, decreasingly exciting incarnations and, and never made it all the way. My experience of the show was always, thatI would put on those different CDs, when they came out and not find my way into it, it was the Sondheim show that I couldn’t crack. Even Pacific Overtures that took me so long to finally get when I finally got it, it was, my favorite show for a couple of years.
Julie Klausner: Well, when you get Pacific Overtures, you get it.
Ben Rimalower: Yeah.
Julie Klausner: And I agree. I’ve never really been able to connect to this show. I think its legacy are the names of his poodles.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Wilson and Addie.
Doug Reside: Yeah. And also, I mean, the history goes, of course, even back before the first workshops. I think this is sort of his Take a Left from Merrily We Roll Along. This is the show that he’s been wanting to get to forever and ever, and Hal Prince keeps getting in his way, and finally, he’s like- okay, Merrily is done, I’m gonna write this show now.
Julie Klausner: But look, maybe there will be a director who comes along and- similarly to the revival of Merrily– can extrapolate exactly what’s brilliant about it by, in the case of Merrily, re-centering it so it’s not a, a two hander or a three hander, but it’s really about one character and his mistakes, and put it in an entirely different context. I mean, that took years to figure out. So who knows? Like there could be a telling of this with a new director or a new visionary who will be able to bring out what Steve’s intentions were in a way that will dazzle us all.
Whether there’s a visionary that comes and makes it work, time will tell, but it seems certain that some people will try.
Barry Joseph: And Ben, I’ll be in the audience for that production.
Ben Rimalower: Me too.
Barry Joseph: Up next, we don’t need the Sondheim-O-Matic, as we have one show left: Here We Are.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Excellent. Excited to talk about Here We Are.
Julie Klausner: Yay.
Barry Joseph: In Here We Are, Sondheim’s last musical, the character of Marianne introduces her quest within the first few minutes of the show. “Wait a minute, wait a minute”, she says, having a sudden realization. “There was something important I was supposed to do today. Something very important.” She reminds us through both acts that she can just not seem to recall what it is, which is perfectly in keeping with the surreal tone of the rest of the show: the idea of something important, but vaguely out of reach. then, towards the end of the story, she shares that she did remember it.
She also says that she decided not to tell anyone what it was, which, by default, also includes the audience. So what was it? The show never reveals. Marianne’s important thing becomes a puzzle embedded within the show, left for future generations of fans to debate. Also, in Here We Are, how could Sondheim create an endless party among wealthy urbanites without including a parlor game?
The second act features the characters seemingly trapped in a well-appointed room, unable to exit, terrified, turning on each other, starving, underslept- what can they do to prevent a final descent into chaos and madness? They play charades.
Now we’ll shift from games and puzzles in the show, to games and puzzles in the structure of the show.
Here We Are is full of the influence of puzzles and games. Act one is a board game as it follows the members of a failed breakfast party as they travel from restaurant to restaurant, unsuccessfully seeking a meal. One of the working titles for the production was Square One, which remains the most repeated phrase throughout the show, often in the context of “It’s back to…”.
Barry Joseph: This phrase refers to the first square in a board game, not the kind of board games one finds, say in eurogames like Catan, but in roll-and-move games within The Game of the Goose genre that Sondheim collected for decades and hung on his walls for decoration. The phrase refers to starting a game over, from scratch, after resetting the board.
It also refers to a Sisyphean task when one is caught in an endless loop. That, in fact, is the plot of the first act. Each trip to a restaurant is another reset of the board. Act two is an escape room. The party finally is fed. Exhausted after their long day, the guests try to leave, but for mysterious reasons, they are unable to exit.
Nothing is physically stopping them. There is no known threat keeping them inside. Their ability to act just dissipated. Their desire to leave remains, and they spend the act trying to puzzle their way through it. Eventually, the guests solve the puzzle by- spoiler- figuring out the right combinations of words and actions that allow them to finally break free.
Being stuck with a group of friends in a room through mutual consent and puzzling one’s way through the exit, that is an escape room- which can be a lot more fun than the horrors faced by the lost souls of Here We Are.
Doug Reside: Both Road Show and Here We Are in particular, is just quoting basically with every line, earlier Sondheim pieces.
Gail Leondar-Wright: So it’s really sort of like a meta puzzle, you know. I’m of the camp that, yeah, he was leaving us Easter eggs. There’s also a line of reasoning that he had run out of ideas and he was repeating himself, which I don’t think it was unintentional.
Julie Klausner: Well, I would, uh, pitch that he wasn’t running out of ideas, but he was less interested in answers and more in questions. And as we record this, it’s been less than a week since David Lynch died. And I think of the surrealism of this show as similar to David Lynch’s work, which is to say he’s really more interested in the questions than the answers. Obviously, like, Buñuel similarly with these two films that this show is based on. It’s funny that there’s a priest in it because it’s so rabbinical, right? You think about asking a rabbi a question and he asks you ten more. Um, But I think that in the grand scheme of Sondheim’s career, that this is his final work. makes so much sense to me. It makes more sense than if I were trying to make sense of the show, because the show exists in the context of his life and his career. And he left us so much. And one of the things in this show that he left us was- it’s your job to figure stuff out, which you never want to hear from a dying parent. I’ll put it that way. I think this is in a way more about parents dying than Into the Woods, which is really saying something, but daddy can’t be around forever, right? You have to make sense of that dancing bear yourself at some point. And if it doesn’t make sense, well, then maybe you just had a nice experience dancing with the bear.
Gail Leondar-Wright: I have a friend who’s, you may know, she’s a really terrific cabaret artist named Marty Millet. She also knew Sondheim, had a relationship with him since she was a teenager. And she says, “here’s a capsule recap of everything I ever said before. Life is meaningless. I had fun. Bye”.
Doug Reside: Sondheim talked about in interviews, his own frustrations with his sense of his creativity. I think he’s finding himself at the limits of that while he was trying to write this and suffering from really severe writer’s block. And so I do sort of feel like maybe he turned that into a solution that he was faced with this puzzle of- how do you write when you feel like you’re not able to write the way that you used to? And what his solution to that was to actually constantly repeat himself very intentionally, and kind of in interesting ways, in this final piece.
Julie Klausner: He also set out to solve something unsolvable. You shouldn’t make sense of surrealism. The ambition of this piece is also completely overwhelming to me. He chose to adapt not one, but two Buñuel films and connect them, will be no closure to this man’s life.
There is no closure to the show. There It is, you know, it is unfinished, but it is not diminished because that is the nature of what he is saying, and what he is doing, and what he did, and the lack of music in Act 2? I mean, how much more powerfully can you feel the loss of the creator? It’s one of these moments where, you know, as Ben referenced in one of his rules, the content dictated the form so loudly. That I was so moved by what I felt was the lack of completion, but in that it was complete.
Natalie Gerber: And that picks up on such a point that he makes. I mean, one of the most meaningful moments that just brings me to tears is where a bishop, is it a chess piece, right?- Moves forward and backwards. But this moment where the Bishop and Marianne, who seems to be the most superficial character, and yet she is the most deeply thinking one, the one who wants to talk about existence, who may even figure things out in some ways. They’re talking, and he talks about, we’re matter that matters, in snow. And they get to, “to be continued”, which is this sort of- off the cuff, idiomatic phrase from TV episodes, which of course Sondheim wrote. But Sondheim throughout his career has refused endings. People are angry at his shows because he says something more ambivalent.
He refuses a happy or a sad ending, or even an ending. He says, “we continue”. And the show gives us this continuity without necessarily any hard truth. But there’s also a little bit of some closure- or not closure, but we shift from rituals that don’t work anymore, schemas, if we take a cognitive science term, right?
You go into a restaurant, you order, you expect food, all of that breaks down. But then in the second act, the bishop finds his purpose through this exchange. Certain things get resolved that are under the surface. Like, no one is who they seem. Leo Brink, is he on the brink? Fritz, is she on the fritz?
So no one is actually who they are in many ways.
The ambassador from the fake nation of Miranda is a drug runner, right? And they have all of this game language about semolina and there are games within games and identities are revealed. It feels so much like a cross of a board game and a sort of Beckett version of End Game, as you said, Barry, the only way you spring free is by getting back to “square one”. And yet the consequences, which are death- Leo Brink is dead at one point. He comes back to life. So we also have this lift of a game world with rules where the real world consequences are undone.
Barry Joseph: I’d love to hear if anyone in our conversation has at least their own personal sense of what they think Marianne was trying to remember that day.
Or how do we even approach that he poses this to us through the show
Julie Klausner: That’s a great question.
I love that question. It’s a great question.
Natalie Gerber: Isn’t it that it’s her birthday, one of these days, which she shares with the bishop?
Julie Klausner: remember. Yeah.
Barry Joseph: She specifically tells the bishop that she didn’t tell anybody.
Julie Klausner: And it was phrased in the sense of “I had something to do”.
Barry Joseph: Okay, I have a sense. Throughout the first act, before everything goes mad- with them being locked in this room they can’t get out of, in their minds at least- she’s continually saying what an amazing day it is, and she’s asking her husband to buy it for her.
She wants that. She wants that day. What happens in the second act? She gets to have that day forever. She’s stuck in it. And then we discover that it’s her birthday. And then with the bishop, I think she gets to make a wish. With realism, we expect effect to happen after the cause. A duck opens their mouth and you hear a quack.
With surrealism, you might see a duck open their mouth and then hear a car horn. Right? Or the opposite. You might hear the quack and then you see a duck open the mouth. Things don’t happen in the same order. So taking the pieces: she wants the day. It’s her birthday. She’s forgotten it. She wants a present. She gets what she’s been asking for. I think if you re-sort it, what she forgets is that it’s her birthday and what she’s forgotten to do is make a wish. But it is that wish that she makes in the first act that causes everyone to be stuck in that day. And it is her realization of that with the bishop that begins the process of it all coming undone and them getting released because she can give it away now.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Wow, Barry. That’s really amazing.
Doug Reside: I like what you’re saying and I think it’s very compelling.
Barry Joseph: Thank you. And we don’t know how much is from him and how much is from the playwright. We just don’t know at the moment. But with Surrealism, it’s not going to be a one-to-one match. It has to work at this abstract level.
I saw it a few times, and I’m looking for that moment when she does the thing, but that’s the way it would be if it was Realism. In surrealism, there isn’t going to probably be that moment.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Well, I have a question. I really want to know from this group, who thinks so deeply about Sondheim and about Here We Are, about what the final blackout means and what happens at the end .
Barry Joseph: Gail, can you describe what happens at the end?
Gail Leondar-Wright: They get out of the room and they rush toward the audience. They rush downstage and blackout. I can’t see this musical about the end of the world- about the revolution- happening any other way than that’s the boom and they’re dead. I can’t see it any other way.
Julie Klausner: So in other words, they’re not running. They’re like debris, basically?
Gail Leondar-Wright: Well, I don’t know if they’re running or whatever, but I know that at the moment of the blackout, is the boom.
Barry Joseph: I see it differently. Dare I say-
Gail Leondar-Wright: No, I, no, no, no, because probably you’re right too.
Barry Joseph: So the experience of seeing it- you’re watching people in motion and then the lights go out, which means we keep seeing in our mind something moving forward. It’s the gutter in a comic strip between the boxes where our mind fills in the blank.
So when that moment happens, we are in charge then of what we see, and we all might see different things, but we’re all seeing the continuation of something because they’re coming toward us, and we don’t expect that. We’ve seen them in the first act continually in that position that signals when they stand in the back wall that they’re getting in a car and going to the next restaurant or leaving that restaurant and going to the next location. So when we see them go there, it is a callback to the first act, but always in those moments, there’s this big sound- like a crash or a bang- that signals something ominous and they all get scared. They tend to lean back towards the wall. And so we’ve learned to expect that. So for me, it’s the moment where they all make the decision to lean into what they’ve been leaning back from in their lives, the whole show, what Marianne is asking them to do.
Wake up, lean into your life, be present and embrace it. So for me, watching a second act, which for me is all about living during the pandemic and being stuck in a room with your loved ones and you can’t get out- is the, getting past the trauma of that experience and then recommitting to being alive again and being part of society.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Oh, I like your interpretation so much better, Barry. I wish I, I felt that way too. I prefer yours. I just don’t agree with it.
Barry Joseph: That is fair. Does anyone else want to share what the end means for them?
Julie Klausner: When you freeze something in motion, it represents to me like a continuum that the whole show to me is about lack of closure, whether it’s not having the answer to a question or not having a period to the end of the sentence to end something in the middle of- you know- when people are running, so, I mean, it’s just- whether or not he’s gone, his work will continue, right?
We will always have, “no one leaves for good”, right?
Doug Reside: Meta theatrically, they’re also running towards the front of the stage where they’ll then bow. So it’s essentially the curtain call.
Julie Klausner: And also maybe they’re trying to break the fourth wall to get out of this horrifying reality to our version of events, which, has slightly fewer explosions.
Doug Reside: So we have the script at the library that we used to tape the show that has the stage direction, which just for what it’s worth says, “they start to walk and the field begins to materialize behind them, perhaps more glorious than before. But now they are aware of gunshots again, explosions in the distance. They walk on, moving a little faster, looking over their shoulders. They walk faster and faster, almost- but not quite running now, going nowhere, as always, with brisk determination”. End. End
Julie Klausner: Wow. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. When can I see the recording at the library, Doug?
Doug Reside: Anytime you want, if you want to come by.
Julie Klausner: Oh!
Doug Reside: It’s a good recording, too, actually.
Barry Joseph: So these two episodes have been all about taking the lens that Gail talked about in the beginning of this episode of looking at the shows we know so well- the scores, the lyrics, the plots, the adaptations- and looking at them from a ludological lens, which is to say a playful lens, a gaming and a puzzling lens.
As you think back about the shows we just talked about, I’m curious what it’s been like for each of you to take that kind of lens, which some of you are more comfortable with and more familiar with than others, to the work of someone whose work you love so much.
Natalie Gerber: This brings out for me is how social games are for Sondheim, both the games of producing, collaborating in the theater, a found family through that. Because he spoke about the drudgery of writing lyrics. He called it a craft, but music was an art.
So why go through all of that? He said it satisfied his puzzle mind, right? To have to find the exact number of syllables, match the music line, have the rhyme pattern get better and better to build to that final great rhyme.
But why do it? Because Because, as Julie said, someone will get it, and you’ll find people through this.
Julie Klausner: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Sondheim is that he treats his audience like they’re on an equal playing field. He is smart enough to, as you mentioned, not keep things in that he’s convinced work, but that the audience is- not connecting to for whatever reason, whether they get it and don’t like it or they don’t get it- but the, the kindness of his sort of assuming that we’re as good as he is makes for the sportsmanship of keeping the ball in the air. There’s something so satisfying about, you know, every audience member is a collaborator with a creator in some way, because ultimately the meaning is going to be shared between the two of you. And one of the most flattering and generous things Sondheim ever did was to not talk down to us. And it was just like, my grandmother never let me win at cards. And that’s how I got to be better at cards. And then eventually how I learned to give up playing cards with my grandmother- but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not the best gamer. But what I am is someone who feels especially seen when somebody as brilliant as Steve puts something out there that I can connect with. So to me, that’s where the sportsmanship is in his work.
Barry Joseph: Before we go I’d love to see if any of our guests have any final words. And of course, if there’s anything you want to share with us about where we can learn more about your work.
Ben Rimalower: Well, this has just been a real joy, a treat. We’re the transitional generation because we were alive with Sondheim, and everyone in the future will appreciate his work the way we have done. come up appreciating so many great artists- Shakespeare comes to mind, obviously. And this is the beginning of that, being together.
And I don’t feel as sad about him being gone, getting to experience the beginning of what it’s like to be Sondheim fanatics in the future.
Speaking of celebrating Sondheim, eternally, you can check out my podcast, Giants in the Sky, How Sondheim and Lapine Went Into the Woods. And I can be found at Ben Rimalower on all social media.
Natalie Gerber: I just want to say thank you. I don’t have words for the extraordinary privilege it is to be in a space with people who know so much about Sondheim from so many different fields and areas.
Thank you, Barry and Gail so much and everyone. It’s a joy.
Doug Reside: You can find me at Doug Reside. I don’t know which socials I’ll be on tomorrow, but BlueSky, at least I’m currently on. We just opened the new Harvey Fierstein Theater Lab, which is a space where people can come and try out new work, learn about theater technology. So if anyone wants to be the next Stephen Sondheim and needs to find a collaborator, you can do that there.
Julie Klausner: Thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure and congratulations on your book, Barry. I really enjoyed it, even though I’m not really good at games or puzzles. Sometimes I do get the answer and it’s exhilarating. So maybe I’ll get better at games and puzzles and maybe I’ll just enjoy hearing smart people explain the answers from the sidelines.
But regardless, I really enjoyed revisiting this giant from a different perspective was really, really special and really helped me understand his work in a different way.
You can follow me on social media. It’s just my name, Julie Klausner. And I have a play that is, hopefully gonna happen this year, or at least work towards happening this year. So keep your ears and eyes peeled for that. And, yeah, I have a podcast called, How Is Your Week?
Julie Klausner: So you can find me there. And on BlueSky.
Gail Leondar-Wright: Mary, thank you so much for gathering us together. This was such great fun and so instructive. I want to thank our guests, Natalie Gerber, Julie Klausner, Ben Rimalower, and Doug Reside. I’m Gail Leondar-Wright. If people want to reach me and find out when I’m teaching and where I’m teaching, they can go to my website, which is TalkingSondheim. com.
Barry Joseph: And extending this love fest, thank you, Gail, for producing this episode with me. Thank you, Ben, Natalie, Doug, Julie, for sharing your time, your informed perspectives, and your hearts. I also would like to thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, specifically transcription and text editing by Jenny Westfall, K. Larson, online production, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy, and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along.
and thank you, dear listeners, for joining us today for Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. If you can’t wait for the next episode to drop, then, well, please pick up a copy of my book. Hit us up on the socials, Facebook and Instagram, and please comment and like the podcast on whatever platform you use.
It helps us out immensely. Until next time, remember, “someone is on your side”, especially when matching minds with Sondheim.