Dive into Stephen Sondheim’s love for escape rooms, examining the cultural intersections between theater and interactive games. Featuring immersive theater creator Kellian Adams Pletcher, escape room enthusiasts Lisa and David Spira, and game studies expert Nicholas Fortugno, the discussion centers on Sondheim’s love for this new medium. The episode includes anecdotes from escape room designers (Michael Counts, Taylor Myers) and players who experienced games with Sondheim (Jonathan Marc Sherman), illuminating his passion and commitment to the craft. The conversation also explores the broader cultural acceptance of escape rooms as legitimate art forms and their evolutionary journey from traditional puzzles to intricate immersive experiences. This episode will also ask: Do you know what time it is?
Make sure to get the book everywhere books are found, or click here.
TIME-CODES:
00:00 Introduction to Matching Minds with Sondheim
01:11 Guest Introductions
07:19 The Evolution of Escape Rooms
13:29 Taylor Myers on Paradiso and Immersive Theater
23:53 Michael Counts: The Intersection of Theater and Escape Rooms
29:46 Sondheim’s Hidden Treasure Hunt
31:39 The Art of Game Design
36:56 Sondheim’s Escape Room Adventures
43:09 Reflections on Escape Rooms and Art
47:44 Sondheim’s Thoughts on Escape Rooms
54:12 Final Thoughts and Farewell
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:
Lisa Spira: I would say that, while these games strive to elicit emotion for everybody, you have to be a player who’s willing to give something to be able to feel that emotion
That goes back to Stephen Sondheim at the end of that game, and how he didn’t want to leave because he was a player who had committed to playing just as David and I were, just as our very good friend who reached into a dead guy on the floor was very committed to playing.
Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. I’m your host, Barry Joseph. Today’s episode will focus on Stephen Sondheim and escape rooms. As usual, we will be joined by some amazing people and some of my old friends to respond to audio clips from over 60 hours of my original interviews for the book. First, I’m thrilled to introduce to Matching Minds, Kellian. Kellian Adams Pletcher is a game designer and immersive theater creator, who loves board games and escape rooms. When it comes to puzzles and games, she works full time at FableVision Studios and is also the creator and producer of Club Drosselmeyer. Welcome, Kellian.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Hi, thanks for having me.
Barry Joseph: Club Drosselmeyer. Can you say a little bit about what that is?
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Sure. Club Drosselmeyer is an immersive interactive Nutcracker in swing time. And we rewrote The Nutcracker for 1939 to 1942. And we have a full eight piece swing band that plays The Nutcracker for us. And it also is a full puzzle hunt for up to 180 people. 2025 will be year 10 of Club Drosselmeyer for us.
Barry Joseph: Our first email, Kellian, dates back 14 years to April 8, 2011.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Oh, God. Are you serious?
Barry Joseph: It’s when I was producing a project with Bronx high school students at the New York Public Library designing a geolocative game about Edgar Allen Poe.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Unbelievable. Oh my God. How did we get so old, Barry? What happened?
Barry Joseph: And back then you were working at-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I think it was at Scavenger, 11 years ago?
Oh man. Amazing.
Barry Joseph: And do I understand you once covertly and awkwardly followed Sondheim as he created a game at the American Museum of Natural History?
Kellian Adams Pletcher: That is true. That is true. I awkwardly followed Sondheim, who very deliberately tried to ignore me. And he was building, his famous scavenger hunt. And I don’t know what happened. I think somebody had talked to somebody and they said, hey, Sondheim might use this platform that we had back in the day, Scavenger.
And they were like, “Okay, so, if you guys go to New York and you show him the platform, then you might be able to have him use it.” So, we show up and we’re there and it’s like, you know, the appointed time when, the mighty Sondheim is about to show up. And he’s not interested at all in any technology. And so my fellow game designer and I were like, “do you want to just, see what he’s going to build?”. So we just hid behind displays and watched him build this game. I don’t typically do that, but I don’t know. It was Sondheim. It was a big deal.
Barry Joseph: Next, I’d like to welcome both Lisa and David Spira. Lisa and David are the co-creators of roomescapeartist.com and the Reality Escape Pod, which is co-hosted by David. I personally have been a dedicated fan of room escape artists for a long time. And when it comes to puzzles and games, Lisa and David are some of the most experienced and knowledgeable escape room players and industry observers in the world. Lisa, David, welcome.
David Spira: Thank you.
Lisa Spira: Thanks. It’s great to be here.
Barry Joseph: Would you please introduce Room Escape Artist, for those who don’t know about it?
Lisa Spira: Room Escape Artist is our website that covers escape rooms and immersive games. We’ve been covering the industry for over 10 years. We publish daily content, a lot of reviews of escape rooms and related products, also industry commentary, and we have a map of locations where you can play escape rooms in the United States. From there, we’ve branched out to a podcast, Reality Escape Pod, that David co-hosts with Peih-Gee Law, known from her days on Survivor. And, we have the Reality Escape Convention. And we run escape room tours, where we take escape room players to some of the best destinations in the world to play escape rooms with teammates who will love this as much as they do.
Barry Joseph: Personally, I never bring my family to an escape room if I can’t read a review first in Room Escape Artists.
Lisa Spira: We’re honored.
Barry Joseph: You’ve told me you’ve been dying to learn about Sondheim’s relationship with puzzles and escape rooms. Why is that?
David Spira: So back before Room Escape Artist was a bigger entity, we were just the New York, New Jersey area reviewers. That was what we were known for. And in those early days, Sondheim was this kind of, like, mythical creature that there were alleged sightings of moving through the escape rooms of New York. So we would hear stories about him and people would ask, “Oh, have you ever played a game with Sondheim?”
And the answer was, “we never had the chance”. And I have had on my to do list for years, this idea of researching that. And when I heard that you just did all of that, I was so, so happy . And it’s been a pleasure to read your book and I’m so excited to talk about it all today.
Barry Joseph: Thank you, David. I’m looking forward to us all jumping into it together. But before we do, please welcome my friend Nicholas Fortugno, the Director of the Digital Game Development Program at City College of New York. Nick is a scholar and a creator of games and interactive narrative. He has designed and produced dozens of digital and analog games, that are both award winning and genre defining. He is fascinated by the creative intersecting of Sondheim’s life. Personally, Nick and I have been developing games together for over two decades, and we’re currently working on a board game about the role museums play in shaping their narrative of our lives. Welcome, Nick.
Nick Fortugno: Thanks, Barry, glad to be here.
Barry Joseph: Nick, is there anything you want to share about your connection with Sondheim’s work?
Nick Fortugno: I don’t really have a deep connection with Sondheim’s work other than I think the standard cultural connection of knowing Sondheim is a major figure in American theater and knowing that Sondheim reshaped our understanding of a whole art form. I had no awareness that Sondheim had any connection to games at all until you introduced it to me when you started working on this project.
And so, that’s been interesting to me just because, I feel like games and things like games always get shoved into the low end side of arts. And I think there’s something really remarkable about finding someone who’s so respected in a much higher end side of the arts who showed interest in this form, because I think it opens a door to respectability for the form that it deserves, but often doesn’t get.
And I just think the project is a really interesting way of seeing someone who has genius in one field have interest in another field, and then validate the interest that other people have in that field. I think there’s just more and more of that needs to happen for games and puzzles and things of that nature.
Barry Joseph: Thank you, Nick. Now that you’ve joined us, and you’re all here, I feel like I’ve joined the coolest party.
David Spira: I promise you, not that cool, but we’re definitely a good game group.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: The nerdiest party. I don’t know.
David Spira: Yeah.
Barry Joseph: We will let our listeners decide. So, before we get into the Sondheim component, can some of you introduce to our listeners what is an escape room? Where do they come from? And specifically their role in New York City and perhaps even a little bit about the type of people who play them.
David Spira: Absolutely. Few things bring me more joy than sharing what escape rooms are and can be. So escape rooms at a really basic level, it’s a medium of games where a group of participants collaboratively discovers and solves puzzles, tasks, and challenges that require no outside knowledge at a physical venue in order to accomplish a goal within a set amount of time. What that means in practice is that you can have some escape rooms that are mostly just a whole bunch of puzzles stuffed into a room. You might have incredible, expensive productions where the puzzles are helping to tell a story and you are going on an adventure. The high end of escape rooms is absolutely stunning.
Lisa Spira: For those who are unfamiliar with escape rooms, the term is “escape room”, but you are not locked into a room. You are trying to escape it, perhaps because that’s your goal, or you’re trying to accomplish some other quest, like, stopping the bomb, or saving the princess, or finding the cure, but you are not trapped in a room. These are safe adventures that you can play with your friends or family.
Barry Joseph: And when did we first begin to see them in America?
David Spira: The first company to call themselves an escape room to show up in the United States opened up in San Francisco out of Japan in 2012, and the proliferation of escape rooms began in 2013, 2014.
Barry Joseph: So just to put this into Sondheim’s context, 2015, Stephen Sondheim was 85 years old.
David Spira: That’s incredible. I don’t think I put that quite together. The New York escape room scene was one of the early boom markets. And we had a lot of really interesting things going on in New York in those years. One of the things that really stood out about it is that escape rooms have a lot of regional styles, and that started out immediately. And there is a Russian style, and a Hungarian style, a Chinese style, and a Japanese style. Some of these cultures have multiple styles within, but especially back in 2015, there were really pronounced styles that came from there. New York was one of the only places you could go play where you had owners from all of these different parts of the world. And so you could walk from neighborhood to neighborhood in New York and travel the world in an escape room context.
Lisa Spira: And the escape rooms in New York in the early days were all over the city. They were in Chinatown, they were in Midtown, they were in Tribeca, and then you could also go to Brooklyn and find more. So you really could traverse New York playing the different styles of escape rooms.
Barry Joseph: And who were these people who were discovering escape rooms in New York City?
David Spira: Oh, nerds. It was nerds. The early days, it was gaming nerds. It was people who wanted to go and solve hard problems and do hard things because these games were very hard. We not so affectionately would refer to some of them as inescapable rooms with a margin for error.
Lisa Spira: Also, in the early days in New York, folks were playing these in pretty big teams. New York started as generally public booking, which meant that you would book one or two tickets into a room that might hold a lot more people than that, and you might get paired with strangers in that game. So in the early days, a lot of the people playing were trying to get big groups of friends together so they wouldn’t end up playing with strangers. And it was just definitely a different culture of booking.
Barry Joseph: That’s a great segue, all of the photos I’ve seen from Sondheim’s inner circle who posted the photos of them together solving an escape room. All the people I interviewed who went on escape rooms with Stephen Sondheim or ran escape rooms and had him come were large groups of his friends and colleagues.
Lisa Spira: Yeah, everybody brought everybody with them to do this. And in part you needed to because the puzzles were hard in a lot of these games and there was a lot going on. And as David said, the game design wasn’t necessarily that great. So there were a lot of reasons to be a big group, which was really fun for collaboration in the early days too.
Nick Fortugno: I think it’s just important when you think about the early audience of escape rooms to remember that puzzles certainly didn’t come into existence with escape rooms. And there was a very, very large niche culture of puzzle consumption that had been going on for a very long time that fed into this.
And then, of course, that fed into digital games that create- that were puzzle specific games. And people don’t often make this connection because they seem so separate. But Myst, a CD ROM game from the early 90s, essentially, was an escape room, right? This was A very, very, very old form of game. And this was enormously popular. It’s hard to put into context what this game did in terms of penetrating audiences that hadn’t really played games before.
And that I think is also in the mindset of what we were coming into in the 2010s when we started to see physical manifestations of it.
Barry Joseph: Myst was one of the first games accessioned by the Museum of Modern Art into their collections, and many, many early escape room designers cite Myst as their inspiration, wanting to make a physical version of that.
David Spira: Yeah, Myst, King’s Quest, there is a whole run of Flash games from the early 2000s that are literally “escape the room” games that the physical games are interpreting, especially in the 2012, 2013, 2014 era.
Barry Joseph: So speaking of that, let’s go back to that era, which was really only eight, nine, ten years ago. And in that context, Sondheim went to many rooms. So let’s move to our next section now, where we’re going to hear from people who had Sondheim in their escape room. To do that, I’ll share excerpts from a number of my original interviews with permission of the people I spoke with. All of the pieces we’ll hear have been edited for both clarity and length. The first person we’ll hear from is Taylor Myers. Taylor is the Artistic Director of Roll The Bones Theatre and was the co director of Paradiso, an escape room that incorporated elements from interactive theatre. He’s going to mention Sleep No More. Can someone briefly explain what Sleep No More is, or was, and the history of immersive theater in New York City?
Nick Fortugno: Sure. Sleep No More, is, because it continues to exist, a immersive theater piece, based, partially on Macbeth and partially on Hitchcock Noir and partially on its own, kind of, built mythology. In which audience members in like around 100 to 200 are given masks and moved through a very large multi-story space. As they see dance performances and light interactive performances in very, very staged sets of a story that’s like Macbeth. It’s a form that, was created by a group called Punchdrunk, when they innovated on what immersive dance, like, dance in a space that was surrounding you could do. They innovated this in London and they brought it to first Cambridge and then down to New York City where it was housed in a building called the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea for many years. It had just recently closed, after that time, but it is reopening in other parts of the world, I can’t say which parts of the world because I have intelligence on that that I can’t share. But there are other parts of the world where Sleep No More is going and translating and like most people from the previous generation of people doing immersive, the first thing they saw was Sleep No More. And that’s what kicked them off on that, immersive, journey of expertise.
Barry Joseph: Thank you, Nick.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: However, as your local New Englander, I do have to tell you that it was never in Cambridge, it was in Brookline.
Nick Fortugno: It was in Brookline, okay. So-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah.
They took over a closed school in Brookline. Probably Cambridge was too expensive.
Nick Fortugno: But it was an old school.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Did you see it? Were you there?
Nick Fortugno: Yeah, I did, I saw it.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Oh, God, that’s one of the great regrets of my life. I cannot believe I didn’t see that.
Nick Fortugno: It was fascinating because it repurposed the environment.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Right.
Nick Fortugno: And, Sleep No More was one of the first pieces where you saw this kind of handshake between this environment already existed and we’re using it sort of for what it was used for, but we’re going to totally transform it into something else.
And so that handshake in immersion is something that I think spills over into a lot of escape room play, but it’s actually more a broader feature of the immersive field.
Barry Joseph: And so while we’re talking here about escape rooms and Stephen Sondheim, we, of course, are keeping in mind that Stephen Sondheim’s greatest work and what he’s most known for is in the theater space.
So here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Myers about what it was like to design an escape room, coming from a background in immersive theater and what it was like to experience Stephen Sondheim as a participant.
So as we start, can you just tell me your name?
Taylor Myers: My name is Taylor Myers. I’m the artistic director of Roll the Bones Theater.
Barry Joseph: So we’re talking because of Paradiso. For people who wouldn’t even know what interactive theater is in escape rooms, what was Paradiso? How did you get involved and what was your role?
Taylor Myers: Sure. So an escape room differs from immersive or interactive theater in that traditionally escape rooms do not have performers and also that there is a goal, that goal being to leave, whereas the goal of an immersive theater show, or an interactive theater show is to experience the story and the art that is in it.
Paradiso was a little bit of a blend that had four or five performers who were all built into the experience that either helped you along or hindered your progress and these characters thereby became their own puzzles, whether or not you chose to trust them or distrust them. So it had some more theatrical context in that way. It was a show that was built by some friends and once it was open, they realized that it just needed a little more theatrical help, so they asked me to come on and try and assess what was working and what wasn’t working and try and fix some things up and make it tighter and tidier and more enjoyable.
And yeah. Michael Counts was the creator and once it opened, he asked me to come on as co director.
Barry Joseph: And it sounds like from what you told me, you came from a theater background, perhaps an interactive theater background, not from an escape room background.
Taylor Myers: That’s exactly right. My journey in immersive theater started as a cast member at Sleep No More in 2012.
I was there for two years, fell in love with the form. I had never experienced anything like it.
Barry Joseph: What had your experience been with escape rooms before you started working on Paradiso?
Taylor Myers: None whatsoever. Yeah, I had heard of them. I knew of them. I had been to one or two, mostly as research in advance of Paradiso. And yeah, my experience with them was that it falls into a kind of its own category. There are definitely folks who would categorize this entire broad scope of what they would call maybe in-person interactive art and Paradiso is one of the ones that I think really dove headlong into that crossover between escape room and interactive theater.
Barry Joseph: How would you describe what the story is in Paradiso? The narrative.
Taylor Myers: The meta narrative was essentially that there is this corporation who is interviewing people for positions within the corporation. So when you buy a ticket for Paradiso, you get an email from the corporation, as opposed to, “we’re so excited to have you at Paradiso, the show”, instead it’s “thank you for your application”.
And then when you get there, it’s a little bit of a bait and switch. You’re in this office space that doesn’t feel like an escape room. And then strange things start to happen. The performance kind of shifts.
Barry Joseph: So as a participant, you come in, it doesn’t look like an escape room. It doesn’t look like a theater.
You’re in an office setting and you’re all participating in an illusion that you’re applying for this job. Okay. So please talk to me from the beginning of when you knew that Sondheim was expected.
Taylor Myers: Yeah, we had gotten a heads up a few days in advance. Somebody bought a ticket and said, Hey, Mr. Stephen Sondheim was going to be here.
He loves puzzles and games and this kind of stuff. And I was very excited. And so obviously we were excited. This man is a freaking legend. It’s hard to overstate the impact he’s had on modern American, contemporary American theater. And I was already planning to be there. I was there a lot in those days. Really the only way to direct that kind of interactive work is to witness it as it’s happening and give notes on a regular basis and keep tweaking so everybody keeps learning at the same time. And I’d usually watch maybe half the shows in the evening, give some notes, head out, and send emails. And I happened to be there when he was there, and I remember watching it from the security cameras, just making sure that the performers would be kept safe and everything was going on.
I was backstage with our stage manager, Mackenzie, at the time, and Mackenzie and I were watching. We were just nudging each other, cracking up, and so he went through and we were tickled. Honestly, his behavior was not unlike the behavior of anybody else. He’s going through and having a great time and was a wonderful audience member in that he responded in a totally delighted, but also very much “in world” way.
So when something scary happened, some audience members approached that with a sense of “I’m not scared”. And he just was impressed in a way. It was just like, yes, that’s exactly the response that we’re trying to create here. And, you know, it all seemed very genuine from him.
David Spira: That whole conversation there just brought me back to a very particular time and place. And Paradiso, I think, was central to it. As, at the time, we were really trying to figure out how to write about escape rooms, and were one of the companies that was trying to elevate the medium.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Paradiso was like a game changer back in the day. It was so good.
David Spira: I remember sitting down and having dinner with a couple of the folks from Paradiso after we reviewed it, and we reviewed it pretty lukewarmly because they were demanding a very high price.
I’ve always had this complicated relationship with Paradiso. But the stuff that they did, the way that they really innovated on pipelining gameplay, they had the ability to get lots of players through. I believe they could get, like, 40 players through per hour. And they did that really cleverly, using their actors and their set design.
The sets were beautiful.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah, they were.
David Spira: They were telling a story. I don’t think it was as clear as they like to say it was. And-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: It was one of those fuzzy Sleep No More stories, right? Where they’re like, we kind of have a story, good luck figuring out what it is, but-
Nick Fortugno: But that’s to me the moment, right?
Kellian Adams Pletcher: mm hmm.
Nick Fortugno: And I think, like, we’re not totally outside of this moment. And I think it’s what’s really interesting about that work and talking about that work in this conversation is that these are not strict boundaries, right? Like I-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: True, true.
Nick Fortugno: -mean, the, the difference between I’m in an immersive set because someone’s gonna dance and I’m in an immersive set where I have to figure out where I plug the chords in to hear the right audio is not very far from each other and they overlap.
I mean, see Club Drosselmeyer a lot, right? Like you can actually make them overlap a ton. And so it’s not weird that theater people would be interested in it, right? It’s not strange to jump to that in a lot of ways.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Mm hmm.
Nick Fortugno: And so it’s not surprising to me that theater people would find access to these kinds of things.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Think that if Stephen Sondheim were around today, I think he would be building the next Club Drosselmeyer. I think if he’d lived another ten years, he would have been in it to win it.
Like, he would have built this stuff.
Nick Fortugno: There’s so much that would be familiar, right? I’m in a setting, I’m around actors. So much of the thought is about physical space, right? It’s just very, it seems very natural to me that you would make that jump. And so, like, kind of when I hear that audio, I’m like, that’s what comes back to me is- oh yeah, Sondheim was in that space.
That’s not crazy.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah, that makes sense.
Nick Fortugno: And like this conversation about what the story should be is like certainly not outside of theater.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I was just thinking the thing that I really liked, about Paradiso back in the day is that I feel like they were one of the first immersive theater pieces that were really clear about who I was as a participant, right? I had a role. I was applying for a job. Maybe I was joining a cult.
Maybe I was becoming a part of an evil corporation. But I was clearly a character that had agency in that story. And that was something that I feel like early immersive theater was really missing. It was the sense of, like, “you’re going to listen to me while you hold a maraca or you’re going to listen to me while we together make noodle arms, but God damn it, you’re going to sit here and listen to me”, right?
They did really innovate on that front by defining their audience and putting the power in their hands .
Barry Joseph: And with that, let’s talk about one of the innovations in Paradiso, which was incorporating the work of a little known puzzle designer named Stephen Sondheim.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Oh, no kidding!
Barry Joseph: That takes us to Michael Counts. Counts as an American stage director and designer of theater, opera, and immersive performance events, and a creator and producer of large scale public art installations. The New York Times once described him as a mad genius and a master of immersive theater. Counts was the director and designer of Paradiso. And here in this next clip, he explains how he brought together escape rooms with immersive theater, and how both Sondheim’s puzzles and the musician himself intersected with his escape room.
Tell me a little bit about who you are.
Michael Counts: I’ve always struggled describe what I do, but I was a visual artist who then moved towards more variables. So installation, architectural design, environmental design, like just large scale experiences, really. My main sort of formative experience was going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I’d lived near and I’d skipped school and I’d go out for lunch from my elementary school, which was a block away and I’d wander the Met and just, I don’t know.
I think somehow like that shaped my desired experience of art. I also think that there’s a huge sort of cultural sea change that happened. There’s this emerging theory that contemplates what they call the “game generation”. Any exploration of this type of work in immersive theater needs to contemplate this.
People who grew up with the defining media experience of their life being not television and movies, but video games where they had participation, they had agency, right? They could cause outcomes to happen. They could take risks. They could receive rewards. All of that defined a desire and necessitated a desire to participate in one’s media.
And I think I was the product of that, but also a student of that. And as I looked at my interest in theater, art, entertainment, like I wanted to participate in it and I loved the things that allowed me to enter a world. And so I just started creating projects along those lines and did so for many years and I’d never really been interested in escape rooms per se.
Someone approached me and said, “hey, would you be interested in making an escape room?” The idea was to model it off of The Divine Comedy, which was a project that I had been really passionate about in years before. And so I thought that was compelling and I shall, I’ll loop it back to Sondheim. A guy who I’d worked with in the opera productions I had done is George Steel, who had ran New York City Opera for a time, he had also created the Miller Theater, Columbia. He was a very, just, wonderfully brilliant producer and impresario. Who’s interested in way beyond classical music and the avant garde and opera. He had seen some of my like avant garde stuff in 2000, 2001. And when he took over City Opera, he said, “hey, you should direct opera”. And I said, “I don’t read music. I don’t know opera, but he said, “that doesn’t matter, do what you do”. In this context, I said, “cool”. And that’s always been my way. I’m like interested in just reinventing forms. And so I always tell them about what I’m doing. I was like, “hey, I’m doing this escape room”. And he said, “oh, let me tell you.”
He’s friends with Sondheim and he’s known Sondheim for years. And he said Sondheim was doing these crazy experiences for like just friends. And after he’d been really successful and he created these like theatrical experiences where people would like zip around the city in a limo and have these bizarre theatrical experiences happen.
And like mine, like people step out of the world and you end up in a hotel and part of the bit with the reference to that Frank Sinatra thing, we cribbed it. Pretty much exactly as Sondheim had done it. Which is, in the lobby, there was this record skipping and it was skipping on the line quarter to, I forget what it was like, quarter to three. And what that meant is the room number that you were looking for, 245 and 245, and that was like, just a clue.
And in some ways you could almost consider him like this sort of inventor of the very form of escape rooms because he loved puzzles. He loved theater, so he created these theatrical experiences. And that was this sort of homage that we made to Sondheim.
David Spira: Escape rooms are a thing you can define when they started, but the influences and the things that underpin what they are, you can keep going back and back and back. You know, you can go back to video games, you can go back to reality TV, you can go back to game shows, you can go back to puzzle hunts, which have, 50 year history. You can just keep going back. People have always made artificial problems and artificial worlds to solve those problems in, even if it’s just in their mind.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: So hard to pin down. And also there was this sense in, you know, 2011, 2012, that escape rooms were just like an idea that was ready to happen. Right? And I felt like when those kinds of things happen, that they sort of happen in a bunch of places at the same time. Right? Where it’s like, Oh, she’s doing it and she’s doing it.
He’s doing it. And all in different ways. So many people can claim to have invented a corner of it, but it’s the, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.
David Spira: I very much believe that the lift off moment of escape rooms was really driven more by technology. This could have happened at any point in time. People could have gone and thrown padlocks onto some boxes and made puzzles at any time they could have done that in the 60s. It was the accessibility of Arduinos or, affordable microcontrollers, which previously were just the technology of large corporations because everything was so expensive and getting the people who could program this stuff was really complicated and hard. That got democratized in the 2000s, and made the fertile soil for this. I love that they incorporated a Sondheim puzzle in the game.
I didn’t know that at the time. That was really cool to hear.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I remember that puzzle. Because of course, Frank Sinatra, right? Like, so, you know, that was a cool one.
Barry Joseph: And are you familiar with the treasure hunt that Stephen Sondheim designed that he was pulling it from, the one that Michael’s referencing? He got some of the details right, some wrong. Most people don’t have the details. I was lucky enough to speak to people who were there and try and research what actually happened. So this was in 1968. He designed it with Anthony Perkins, the actor from Psycho, who he was friends with, and they did it for a Halloween event. They called it the Eleanor Clark French Memorial Treasure Hunt. If you haven’t heard of Eleanor Clark French, you’re not alone. She was someone who ran for office but wasn’t elected. And Anthony Perkins happened to have a whole bunch of her posters in his basement, or maybe his mom’s basement. And they used them as markers throughout the game, so people would know they’re in the right place, and so they named the game after her. And this game uses lines from a song that Frank Sinatra had sung at the time.
it. It was called “One For My Baby”. And these are the four lines at the beginning of the song.
Barry Joseph: “It’s quarter to three. There’s no one in the place except you and me. So set ’em up, Joe. I got a little story I think you should know. We’re drinking, my friend, to the end of a brief episode. Make it one for my baby and one more for the road.”
And that beginning part, it’s a quarter to three, was the piece that was being used
Lisa Spira: I didn’t know about this when we played the room at all. I only learned about this by reading your book. But I love when Easter eggs are hidden inside escape rooms. I think in the design of Paradiso, if I remember correctly, this was a well-clued puzzle that everybody would solve, that our team solved, and continued on with the game. And it worked in the context of the game without ever knowing that there was a deeper Easter egg there for the right person or the right people should they ever stumble upon it. And I really love stuff like that.
We tried to do it in our writing and so I think that that was a really, really wonderful, clever thing that they did.
David Spira: Yeah, I also, just hearing about that treasure hunt, the commitment to craft of game design that Sondheim had is the thing that really stands out to me. Anybody can jump into a medium that they have no experience in. You can do it. But doing it in a way where you have respect for the people who are consuming it, where you are working to really deliver on the fantasy of whatever that medium is, I feel like that’s what I got out of that.
Nick Fortugno: I also just think it’s a good reminder to everybody. And I think if you’re not- if you don’t work in creative fields or you don’t, aren’t kind of constantly surrounded by artists, you don’t quite realize this- is that, it’s not like a mode you shut off, you know? Like you’re just going to have a party and then you’re just like, oh, we should just make something out of it.
Oh, let’s just make theater in the street. I make theater. Let’s just make theater in the street. Like, oh, we can rent a limo. That’d be cool. Right? Like, that’s like how people like that think. And I think if you’re unfamiliar with that world, that’s like, it just kind of happens all the time. You never hear about it because like if someone, especially if someone has a successful artistic career, they don’t talk about things like this because they’re not known for them and people get siloed right? And so, you wouldn’t know this because like, “how would you commercialize it?” and, “don’t you make musicals? What are you doing?”. But then on the other side of it too, I think there’s this idea that we think about these creators, like, as only doing the thing they do. That, like, this genius is so isolated and crystalline and it points to this like tiny, tiny little apex that they hit and that’s, I think, almost never true of anyone of that caliber.
Like they, they are necessarily multilingual in the arts and they get curious about things. And they get curious about things, and that’s what drives them to be that interesting at the form that they’re good at. And when you see that interest manifest in other forms, it becomes like that, right? It becomes obsessive about game design.
It becomes, like, experimental with weird, immersive citywide experiences. It pushes against the boundaries of what it is because that’s the personality that got you to be Sondheim in the first place.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: But at the same time, it’s like, it’s so frustrating to me that he built all this stuff and he built it just for his buddies, right? And I was there when he was building this thing at the Museum of Natural History, but it was like, hush, hush, right? Nobody’s supposed to know about this. This is a very insider thing. But if he had shared that part of his talent with other people, that could have given credibility to the entire industry that we live in right now. Even now, after ten successful years of Club Drosselmeyer, it’s one of the longest immersive interactive pieces, like literally in the world.
And still I have to tell people, I’m like, “no, this is a thing. It’s a real thing”. And they’re like, “oh, and it’s just a game”. Because we don’t really, we don’t have the Stephen Sondheim of immersive interactive escape rooms. I wish he had made that leap to share it with us. We would have been in a different place than we are right now if he had.
David Spira: I feel like there’s kind of a beauty to not commercializing this, to having this just be a thing that he loved to do, that he was doing for people he cared about. Like, I think that there is beauty in that. I really do wish that more people more broadly accepted game design and immersive games as the art forms that they are. But also it will come with time. Being on the leading edge of anything is hard. It’s in some ways, I think, more valuable because of it. And also, it definitely wasn’t an 85 year-old playwright’s responsibility to go and make games into more of a thing than they were.
Nick Fortugno: It also gets into this kind of Lichtenstein-y stuff, right? That I think is this really interesting question about the cultural appreciation of an art form at a given time, right? So Lichtenstein is copying, in his paintings, these comic strips. And almost wholesale copying them with small changes. And there’s a lot of really interesting aesthetic questions about how much you have to change it, and if you blow it up to, from like a tiny little comic strip to a giant painting, did you make it art? But one of the cultural things that I think is just so critical to understand is the artists who made those strips did not think of it as art and did not think they had ownership of that art at the time, right? Like they thought it was just a job where they were just like penciling out little sketches.
So it’d be hard for me to imagine even in the 60s that you would even think that what you were doing was a commercial thing, right? You couldn’t even occur to you that this was like a cultural object. It’s a dopey thing you’re doing for your friends and you just made a fun dopey thing for your friends. And now we look at it and we’re like, “wow, do you have any idea what you made? First of all, you could probably charge 300 bucks for it. And second of all, it’s a really kind of amazing thing that you thought to use a song that way and like build a whole experience around it.” But if the culture isn’t there to meet you and say, “oh yeah, that’s a valuable object, you might not even know.
As the creator you did something.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I just want to clarify that I’m not necessarily saying that Sondheim should have made this a commercial product, right? So Drosselmeyer is a commercial product because It has to be, right? It’s an expensive show. It has to support itself. But most of the stuff that I build are for museums, and people play these games for free.
And Sondheim was building things in museums as well. They weren’t accessible to people for free. And so that’s just kind of what I’m thinking. If he had opened that door and said, “hey, I built a game. You guys can play it”. I think that would have changed a lot of things for all of us.
Barry Joseph: Let’s now transition to what it was like being in an escape room with Stephen Sondheim.
Now, I spoke with a number of people who did Paradiso with Sondheim, along with other escape rooms. Unfortunately, I can’t share that audio, but let me read you two paragraphs from my book. A little about what it was like to be in an escape room with the maestro. With first, Jonathan Marc Sherman, a playwright and Sondheim playmate, and his frequent collaborator John Weidman, with whom he worked on Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and Road Show. Jonathan Marc Sherman recalled one time, after an escape room visit, Sondheim wrote the room’s management a letter. This Victorian-themed escape room provided a misleading instruction, causing no lack of frustration after an unnecessary loss of time. Sondheim, ever the mentor, provided them with a critique. “Did you hear back?, Sherm asked him at the time. Sondheim had not, which made Sherm laugh at the memory. “You’re someone that escaped the room, and then an email comes in from Sondheim, and they ask, who wants to respond to this? Followed by a chorus of, “not it, not it.””
After the room, a meal would follow, which Sherm always treasured. “Mary Pat Walsh”, he explained, “Steve’s amazing chef for many, many years, and also a dear friend, would always choose some fantastic restaurant for us to go to, post escape room, to break down the experience and compare notes”. Yet, not all in Sondheim’s cotier shared his delight with the challenges found in the pre-meal escape room. “I’m an impatient person”, John Weidman said in an interview, “and so those kinds of games always drove me a little crazy”. Weidman would be delighted to be there with Sondheim and his friends. “But once I got in the room, and once the game started, basically I just wanted to get out.” It was not as if he was feeling claustrophobic. He was just less interested in escaping the room than escaping to dinner and the socializing that would follow. Sondheim felt the opposite. He never wanted it to end.
So much of what you just read I relate to, except for the guy who just didn’t want to be there.
Lisa Spira: No, I can relate to that too, because we had a very similar ethos for how we played with our teams. We would go and we would play a room in an evening together, and then we would go out for a meal. Probably not at quite as well researched a restaurant, and we would talk about the game together. And we tried very hard to invite people who we thought would really enjoy the games and the conversation, but sometimes we invited the person who really just was waiting for dinner.
David Spira: It definitely happened. And the other thing that like, really just jumped out at me is, more than 10 years later, if you want to get a bad review from us, go and have your rules not agree with your gameplay. We will beat you up for that 10 times out of 10. And Escape the Room, I believe that the game in question would be The Home.
That would be the Victorian game at Escape the Room.
Lisa Spira: I remember that one.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: That was the first game I ever played.
Lisa Spira: Was it? Oh, man.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: If you’re somebody like Stephen Sondheim and imagine, like, you’re, Stephen Sondheim or you’re like a Kennedy or you’re just like- I bet you it’s just really hard to get people to respond to you like a normal person. And having a third space, like an escape room where you can all focus on a task together without having people ask you questions you’ve probably heard a million times or, just stare at you agape. It’s sort of a third space where you can all be on the same level and interact with each other like people.
David Spira: We play escape rooms because we like the games, but we continue to go back because we love the people. And it’s the people you bring, and it’s the experiences you have along the way, and it’s the fact that you’re getting out with people and doing something with them.
You’re not sitting in front of a screen and watching something. You’re not taking things in passively. It’s a thing you all get to experience. And when you go to have that dinner together after the fact, you get to share the moments with each other that the other people didn’t see, because you don’t see everything that happens. If you’re participating, you’re going to have a hero moment. And you’re going to have that opportunity to go and share that with the other people at the table. And I imagine Sondheim would probably be a lot like I would be in, at the meal, where I want to know what you did. I want to hear about that thing that I didn’t get to see that was so cool for you.
Barry Joseph: I ended the section I read to you with a sentence, “He never wanted it to end”. And that connecting you’re talking about, David, is why I think he wanted to be in that space. As you described, Kellian, getting to be in an environment where he got to connect with the people he loved in this way. Which is a good segue to us going a little deeper into both the inclusion of Sondheim’s 245 puzzle into Paradiso and his experience of it. This audio now is a little more from Taylor Myers.
Taylor Myers: I remember he was very tickled by a particular clue that came from a Frank Sinatra song that played on loop, kind of like stuttered and repeated, and it pointed folks to the clock, which then guided them to the next piece that opened a trap door. And and he was particularly tickled by that, once they figured it out, it was, It’s all things considered a pretty smooth show.
Barry Joseph: So I think he’s probably around 86 or 87. And if I recall, there was a tunnel I think he had to crawl through. Did he crawl through the tunnel?
Taylor Myers: Let me see. I do have, thank God, show notes. So let me see. Yes, he did decide to go through the tunnel and he did alright. This literally is a quote from the show notes.
“The 6pm group had a difficult time making the connection between the cards and the video to solve the name puzzle. Stephen Sondheim decided to go through the tunnel and he did alright. They noticed the quarter to three bit. Stephen chuckled to himself and recognized it. They opened the bomb right before Nigel came in, solved the crossword very quickly.
And with one minute left, Stephen Sondheim blurted out when the final exit door opened. “But I want to stay!””
David Spira: I had that same exact reaction. I was like, “wait, no, this can’t be over right now. Where is the rest of the damn game? I need more of this.”
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah, it was a cliffhanger. I remember that.
Barry Joseph: I wanted to share with you that quote about Sondheim not wanting to leave the space. Because to me, it speaks to more than the specific experience of Paradiso, but Sondheim’s state of mind when he’s in an escape room, and how special it is for him, and him not wanting that special experience to end.
David Spira: I get it, I relate, but also, I also feel like I very much understand not wanting that game to end. I had a very intense experience with my best friend in Paradiso chapter one. As we’ve talked about, it was a theatrical game.
It had really beautiful sets. And there were these kind of dueling characters and organizations going on. And the last space in the game has a few different big set pieces. I’m going to paint a picture for everyone in your minds. There is a big honking bomb that has a puzzle interaction in it. There is a man who is dying in the floor. They use some prostheses and had his legs hidden.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: That was so well done.
David Spira: And there’s a big gaping hole in this guy’s guts. Then there is a big vertical pane of glass, and behind it is an actor who looked like Draco Malfoy.
And these two characters wanted different things. The guy who was dying on the floor is begging you to not start the bomb. And Malfoy behind the glass is commanding that you have to. And one of the things you’re supposed to do in the game is someone has to reach into the guts of the dying man and pull out a key.
And, Paradiso pushed on a whole bunch of narrative boundaries. Some of them more effectively than others. Why that key was there, who knows. But my best friend reached into this man’s guts, pulls out a key that we use, and I guess, I don’t know, maybe because he had been inside of him, my friend was siding with the guy who was dying on the floor. We had exhausted the puzzles in this room. We had looked around, we could not find any more puzzles. So I said, “I’m gonna start this bomb because there’s nothing else to do”. And my friend starts Screaming at me and this is someone I’ve known since we were like little kids he is screaming at me “don’t start the bomb” and all sorts of expletives. I go up and I do it. Then the game ends when you start the bomb. And we left, we went off to that dinner together.
My friend was furious at me. He was furious at me for weeks. He still, almost ten years later, still brings it up. And this is after I spoke to Michael Counts and asked him, ” what would happen if you didn’t arm the bomb?” And Counts was really confused at the question and said, “Well, you have to. If you don’t, you lose the game. The time will run out eventually”. So, all of that is to say the end of that game was startling in how abrupt it was. It kinda came out of nowhere, but it also was emotionally impactful.
So much so, that it is one of the most memorable moments I’ve had with a friend that I have had my whole life.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: If the purpose of art is to elicit emotion, this one did it, right? And a lot of these games do.
Lisa Spira: To tie it back together, I would say that, while these games strive to elicit emotion for everybody, You have to be a player who’s willing to give something to be able to feel that emotion. that-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah, that’s true.
Lisa Spira: -that goes back to Stephen Sondheim at the end of that game, and how he didn’t want to leave because he was a player who had committed to playing just as David and I were, just as our very good friend who reached into a dead guy on the floor was very committed to playing. But for players who aren’t in it who aren’t there to appreciate the world, then it’s not going to land the same way.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Right.
Lisa Spira: But for Sondheim, he was a player who was there for it.
Nick Fortugno: He walked into that at what, 85?
Barry Joseph: He was 86, it was 2016.
Nick Fortugno: When you hang out like really deep and immersive, right? There’s always this conversation about well, what was the show you saw that got you into immersive, right? Because that’s how it happened.
You saw a show and it hit you and you were like, “Oh, this is a thing. I didn’t know what it was” because it’s not like immersive was a
Kellian Adams Pletcher: thing-
Right.
Nick Fortugno: -like when people started, they didn’t know. And you have those stories and I’m trying to imagine what that would be like in your 80s. That you’re in your 80s you walk into this thing that you sort of been doing your whole life. And then it’s there, right? Like it’s realized in this way that you didn’t do it. And you’re suddenly like, “Wow, there’s this whole thing that now exists that I’ve been kind of reaching for”. It’s almost inconceivable to me to imagine what that experience would be.
Barry Joseph: So we’ve been talking about what we think about escape rooms. Would you like to hear what Stephen Sondheim had to say about escape rooms?
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah!
Barry Joseph: So to find out, we get to turn to our last set of clips. First, we’ll hear directly from my interview with Andrew Parr, a Canadian puzzle designer who writes for Games Magazine.
In spring of 2021, just a few months before Sondheim passed away, Parr published the last major interview with Sondheim about his lifelong relationship with puzzles and games. In this next clip, Andrew is introducing himself to me and then describing what it felt like to interview Sondheim on the topic of puzzles.
Andrew Parr: From 2015 to 2019, I had a business called New Escape Room Designs. I would design escape room packages and sell them to escape room owners, because I figured business people running a business aren’t necessarily puzzle people. So they need someone to provide them with puzzles and yeah, that did very well for four years.
And by the end of it, I sold the business and then the pandemic hit. So when we spoke, I felt very intimidated because I’m speaking with Stephen Sondheim, but as our conversation progressed, I felt it was somewhat level because I think he saw what I did and respected that I could write puzzles. And so I think he felt like he was talking with someone who knew the subject matter.
And so he was very enthusiastic.
Barry Joseph: Then, Andrew asks the following.
I wanted to ask if you had any interest in escape rooms.
Barry Joseph: What I’d like to do now is read you the transcript of what Sondheim said in response to that question.
“Oh yeah. The first escape room I went to was in New York. I was one of the first people to do it, among people I know. I got a group of people together, about six people, and we did three separate escape rooms. Whoever’s notion it was, was a smart person. That’s just a great notion. Really swell.”
Then Andrew says, ” it’s the kind of thing I’ve tried to capture, that experience in Games Magazine by writing an escape room that is creating an escape room that can be played within the pages of the magazine” and Sondheim replied-
Rather than reading it do you want to hear it yourself? The sound is not perfect but I think it’s worth it to hear the excitement in his voice.
Stephen Sondheim: The fun of the escape room, frankly, is being with a group of people and say, “well, how about trying that one over there? No, don’t. Push on the wall. No, push on the wall.” You know. That kind of thing.
David Spira: I wish I got to play with him. And more than that, I wish he got to see where escape rooms are now. I wish that he could see what the top games in the world are doing because I think that, I think he would love them deeply. And I think that his presence in them would also, like, we have the kinds of creators in the escape room world now who could look at a Sondheim and realize that someone like this appreciates the work and maybe try to play up to that level.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Okay. So who’s building the first Sondheim immersive theater piece? He would have done it. I wish that this had all happened earlier in his career.
It’s like, you hear that and you’re like, oh man, like, “one of us, one of us!”,
right? He would have built it if he’d had time.
David Spira: I feel like there’s like a Into the Woods where instead of all of the characters of Into the Woods, it’s like Sondheim and a couple of other people who would really love this stuff as your characters.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I love that.
Nick Fortugno: Yeah, watch that space. Cause I know somebody’s working on that right now.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Oh, fantastic. Oh, Nick’s got secrets.
Nick Fortugno: I’m not going to out them because they would crucify me for saying that they were going to definitely do it. But hopefully hearing it referred to obliquely will make them definitely do it.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: I hope so.
Nick Fortugno: It makes me super, it’s a super existential way of thinking about it.
But it’s like, it reminds you that artists live in their time period,
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Right.
Nick Fortugno: In with what they have access to because of the context of their lives. And, it wouldn’t be possible to have seen it later. Sondheim wouldn’t have been the artist Sondheim was if Sondheim came now for a hundred thousand reasons, but that’s one of them, right? That-
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Right.
Nick Fortugno: -one of them is probably Sondheim would have gone to an escape room when he was 15. And that would have reshaped his entire creative trajectory because suddenly the puzzle thing that was just his fascination may have absorbed more of his attention. And I think it’s just such an interesting reminder, to me at least, that kind of creative spirit and passion and drive, all of those things, manifests within the context of what you are and where you are. And if that happens differently, it’s going to manifest, but it’ll just manifest in a completely different way. And I don’t know. It just, like, I just feel like in a weird way, I’m very happy that you spend your whole life doing puzzles and you live long enough to see escape rooms.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah.
Nick Fortugno: It’s like, that’s cool. Whole bunch of people love puzzles their whole life and didn’t live long enough to see escape rooms.
So you got lucky.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah, it’s true.
Lisa Spira: Yeah, and I also think there’s something to be said for somebody who in their 80s is like, yeah, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna try the new thing.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Yeah.
Lisa Spira: This fits my interests, and I’m going to get my friends together and go to it. I don’t think that there are that many people who are that open to new experiences and new takes on their art form and their interests all the way up into their 80s and are like, “yeah, let’s go”.
David Spira: There’s a bunch of things about this that are hitting me really hard in the feels. One is just this notion that- I’m happy he got to see, I’m sad he didn’t get to see more. But also escape room world is really multi generational, we have really young people in it, and we have really elderly people in it. And they get together, and age- aside from sometimes physical ability, sometimes getting in the way- age really starts to fall away. But one of the things that I have really learned to respect in the older members of the community is they have, the thing that so many of them have in common is this curiosity and this openness to new things and people’s experiences. And is the thing that like, I’m happy for Sondheim that he was, able to reach that point in his life and still have room in his heart for new things.
And I think that’s a beautiful thing that I personally aspire to.
Barry Joseph: I love that he described escape rooms as “really swell”.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Oh yeah, that was such a great comment.
Barry Joseph: That speaks to the era he comes from. And because I’ve had a really swell time being with all of you today, before we go, I’d like 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 how we can learn more about your work, please add that as well.
David Spira: Barry, thank you so much for having us. This has been just, a joyous and strange trip down memory lane and also filling in all sorts of interesting gaps that I had. If you want to learn more about our work, RoomEscapeArtist.com. We have recommendations, guides for locations all over the world. If you want to find a good escape room, look it up there.
And also if you like this kind of conversation about puzzles and games and the design of all of it, check out Reality Escape Pod. We have so many conversations with so many brilliant creators.
Lisa Spira: And I echo everything that David said. Thanks for having us both as a part of this conversation. It’s been wonderful to just chat with everybody and react to these stories.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: Barry, it was really swell. Really swell. It was really great hanging out with you. Thank you so much for doing all of this wonderful research on this iconic American and all the incredible work that he’s done and how that dovetails with all the work that we’re doing right now. It’s sort of inspiring, as you forge forward to this new art form.
So, if you’re interested in trying to figure out how to build these kinds of things and how to build them in public spaces, I have a book that’s coming out this year called Building Games in Museums. I would love to encourage you to throw your hat in the ring, get into the fray, build things, share things, and support your local artists because a lot of this work is happening right in your community and if you just look it up, you’ll find all sorts of immersive, interactive, puzzle-based escape rooms right where you are.
Nick Fortugno: The one thing I just want people to walk away with here is that, like, we went deep on escape rooms and stuff like that, right?
Like we went very, very deep on it. But this is very new. It’s all very new and very experimental and so the kinds of things you’re talking about and the kind of craziness of it, there’s like lots and lots and more kinds of crazy and it’s small and it’s everywhere. I encourage people to check it out, because who knows? There may be a whole new genre you’ve never seen before that will blow your mind, and you will be telling your friends how swell it was too.
Barry Joseph: Nick, Kellian, Lisa, David, thank you all so much. And thank you listeners for joining Matching Minds with Sondheim. Please hit us up on the socials, Facebook and Instagram at Matching Minds with Sondheim, and please comment and like the podcast on whatever platform you use.
I also would like to thank 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. Until next time, remember, someone is on your side, especially when matching minds with Sondheim.
Kellian Adams Pletcher: you know, it’s like you hear that and you’re like, oh man, like, “One of us, one of us!”