Barry is joined by Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, to explore the lesser-known aspects of Sondheim’s gaming legacy that can be found in their collections. The conversation spans the new Sondheim archives recently acquired by the Library, including his music and lyric sketches, manuscripts, and rare items like personal scrapbooks. Mark shares anecdotes about Sondheim’s unique board games created for friends, like The Great Conductor Hunt and Stardom, and his involvement in digital games, emphasizing his lifelong passion for puzzles and games. The episode includes an analysis of an extremely rare recording from 1968 created by Sondheim for his friend and colleague Leonard Bernstein. The episode also includes an analysis of a mysterious, unsolved manuscript from the collection, urging listeners to explore it further. This engaging dialogue offers new insights into Sondheim’s creative genius, showcasing his meticulous work ethic and multifaceted interests, and the importance of publicly-accessible research collections.

Make sure to get the book everywhere books are found,⁠ ⁠⁠or click here⁠⁠⁠.

00:00 A Moving Experience with Sondheim

00:46 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest

01:45 The State of Sondheim Archives

03:47 Exploring the Library of Congress

06:15 The Leonard Bernstein Collection

09:26 Mark’s First Meeting with Sondheim

13:08 Creating ‘Sondheim on Music’

16:57 Sondheim’s Board Game Designs

27:07 Sondheim’s Fascination with The Fool’s Errand

28:53 Sondheim’s Potential Career Shift to Game Design

30:23 Sondheim’s Love for Video Games

33:30 Sondheim’s Board Game Design for Leonard Bernstein

43:12 Exploring Sondheim’s Unsolved Mysteries

45:12 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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:

absolutely essential for quite a few areas of my book that I look forward to exploring today. But first, Mark, welcome.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Thank you, Barry. It’s nice to be here.

Barry Joseph: Let’s talk about where we are in time. Right now it is August, 2025. How would you describe the current state of Sondheim archives, the place of the Library of Congress within it, and specifically your role?

Mark Eden Horowitz: The collection finally arrived to us about three months ago, and we’d been busily processing it. We announced it to the world about three weeks ago because we felt we’d processed enough of it that we could start serving it to researchers. And there’s been, I won’t say an avalanche of people, but a lot of researchers are coming to the music division of the Library of Congress to look at the Sondheim collection.

It’s been beyond gratifying and I just anticipate more and more over time.

Barry Joseph: How would you describe the type of material that came to the Library of Congress from Sondheim’s archive versus materials that might have gone somewhere else?

Mark Eden Horowitz: The heart of the collection is his music and lyric sketches and manuscripts, and they’re vast and voluminous and fascinating. It’s not unusual for a song for there to be 20 pages or more of lyric sketches, a dozen pages or more of music sketches, a final fair copy. And then there’ll be type scripts that are with notes on them and constant changes and edits.

Collection also came with a number of scrapbooks. There’s not much correspondence in the collection itself. There are a few letters with his collaborators within, sort of, the sketch material in the notes as he’s writing the shows themselves. But in the scrapbooks, for instance, there are opening night telegrams and notes from- the West Side Story scrapbook has two notes from Lenny. The Company scrapbook has, I think, five telegrams from Mike Nichols, which was a surprise to me and a delight to find. There are some non-commercial recordings that came with the collection. We are anticipating some additional things over time, but really it’s the manuscripts that are at the heart of the collection, and they’re more than anyone could want.

Barry Joseph: That’s amazing. For those who are not familiar with the Library of Congress, beyond the words “library” and “congress”, can you help my listeners understand the importance of the institution where you work?

Mark Eden Horowitz: It’s remarkable. The music division at the Library of Congress is the largest music library in the world, except calling it a music library is something of a misnomer because we collect not only in music, but virtually all the performing arts. So theater and dance and things like that. Just our division’s holdings, we numbered about 28 million items.

And certainly a large part of that is published materials, whether it’s music or books or biographies or things like that. But then there are several hundred what we call “special collections”, which are the papers of composers, lyricists, directors, performers, musicians, designers, directors. And that’s my primary universe is dealing with these special collections.

And the great thing about Sondheim is so many of the special collections we have relate to him either directly or indirectly. I think there are probably over 20 collections that have correspondence from Steve in them. Some of them you would expect like Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Hal Prince.

But I just discovered our Ned Rorem collection has about 25 letters from Steve in it. So it’s quite wonderful.

Barry Joseph: And who does someone have to be to access these marvels that you’re describing?

Mark Eden Horowitz: You have to have a photo ID. So either a driver’s license or a password or something like that. There’s a minimum age. But other than that, there are no restrictions on accessing the collections.

Our collections are beyond what anybody could imagine. So for instance, we also have manuscripts by Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Bach. So some things we don’t automatically just serve to researchers. If we’ve microfilmed them or scanned them, that’s the first place to go.

And- but then if we’re convinced that they’re looking at watermarks or something and absolutely need to view the originals, then we can arrange for them to actually look at the originals. But 99.9% of the materials we’re happy to serve immediately to researchers in the reading room.

Barry Joseph: So, as you mentioned, you only recently got access to the Sondheim collection, but over the years you’ve had access to materials from Sondheim in other collections. And of course it is those resources that I was able to learn about from you as I was developing my book. So I wanted to start by asking you about the Leonard Bernstein collection.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Okay. Lenny started giving us his manuscripts in the 1950s when he could take a tax write off. So, the end of every year, he would give a handful of manuscripts to the Library of Congress and we would add them to our collections, and he would take his lovely tax write off.

Around 1969, 70, Congress changed the law and people could no longer get the tax credit that they could for self-graded works. So that sort of froze up. After he passed away, his estate began determining where the rest of his materials should go. And the ultimate decision was that the Library of Congress was the ideal home for the Bernstein collection. It is the largest collection I’ve worked on at the library. It’s about 400,000 items. It seems to be almost every piece of paper Lenny touched.

It’s full of correspondence, writings, music, manuscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, the suit he was married in, and the suit he wore when he conducted the New York Philharmonic premiere, the license plate on his car, batons. I mean it’s just, sort of, an extraordinary rich collection.

Barry Joseph: Within this Bernstein haystack, there are many Sondheim needles. And the first one I wanna ask you to share with us is the acrostic poem written by Leonard Bernstein for Stephen Sondheim around 1968. And calling it “acrostic” means that you can read the first letter of every line to make a word. In this case, two words. Stephen Sondheim.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Sure.

Barry Joseph: Right now we’re looking at the website for the Library of Congress because many of the items from your collection are available, digitized online. And right here is “Image of Acrostic poem for Stephen Sondheim, 1958 circa”.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Okay. Ready? You want me to read it now?

Barry Joseph: If you’re game for it, I’d love to hear you read the first few lines.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Stephen Sondheim is a maker and solver of puzzles:

The jigsaw of his mind, the crosswords of creation, and

Especially the cryptologies of the heart.

Puzzler-poet of word and note, puzzled by some puzzling to others.

He will, parentheses “may” like his work-puzzles inch apart, just

Enough to reveal the delicate cracks between:

Next moment the pieces magnetize and spring together with jolting rightness.

So S-T-E-P-H-E-N, “Stephen”, “the”, “especially”, “puzzler”, “he”, “enough”, “next”.

Barry Joseph: I love that the words themselves are so thoughtful and beautiful about summarizing his friend and the things that they have in common. It’s not talking about music here at all. It’s talking about puzzles, cryptics, and of course in an acrostic, things that they shared in common that they loved doing together in this ode to his friend and their relationship.

Mark Eden Horowitz: People should know. Lenny did these acrostic puzzles all the time for people. This was not limited to Stephen Sondheim. He regularly would write acrostics for various friends and family members.

Barry Joseph: I’d love to ask you now, Mark, about your relationship with Stephen Sondheim. When did you first get connected with him?

Mark Eden Horowitz: The the first meeting was, fortunately, forgotten by him. I sent him a letter when I was a senior in college, and he agreed to meet me when I was going up to New York to audition for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop in January of 1980. And we met for about an hour at his home. And I was ill-prepared.

My favorite portion of our conversation was, I asked him, other than his own works, what of recent vintage had impressed him? And you’d be surprised at his answer. It was The Wiz. And he saw the shocked look on my face. And he said-

“And I’ll tell you why. There are three primary reasons. One I thought the staging of the tornado was brilliantly done. Two, the song “Ease on Down the Road”. Do you know what the word “prosody” means?” And I shook my head no. And he said, “it’s the way a lyric sits on a piece of music. And that lyric was born to sit on that piece of music, and you have no idea how rare it is that that happens.

And third is the song “Home””. He said, “we tend to envy most that, which we can’t do ourselves. I could never write a song that sentimental and in a good way. And it made me cry every time I heard it”. So that’s what I took away from that first meeting. And it was then, in December ’89, I was working at Arena Stage and we were mounting a production of Merrily and we began rehearsals that December.

And that’s when I met him again. There was a meeting at his home with the various collaborators, then we began rehearsals.

Steve was not around that much, but he did come like the last week of rehearsals and run-throughs and opening. And actually he borrowed my rhyming dictionary and when he was writing some new lyrics for a couple of numbers in the show. And when he returned it to me, he said, “just so you know, I’ve written in some missing words”, which he had, in fact, done.

That was when he knew who I was. It was about a year later that I began working at the library. And then I saw in The Post that he was gonna be getting a lifetime achievement award from Helen Hayes. And so he would be coming back to DC.

And so, I sent him a letter saying, you know, “Steve, I’m now at the Library of Congress and I see you’re coming to town. I’d love to do a show-and-tell for you at the library. I think I can guarantee you a moving experience”.

And he agreed and he came. And we spent most of the day together. And I covered a room with manuscripts that I thought would be meaningful to him, and they were. It was quite an eclectic bunch, things that directly related to him, like manuscripts for West Side Story and Do I Hear a Waltz?

We also have the Rodgers collection and stuff from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein from our Hammerstein collection, but then favorite works of his by other composers including Bartók and Stravinsky and Ravel and Rachmaninoff.

And then the pièce de résistance, I brought out the Gershwin manuscript for Porgy and Bess and that’s when he started to cry.

And I think that’s what sort of convinced him that his papers would ideally belong in that august company.

Barry Joseph: Wow, Mark, that’s beautiful.

Your relationship with him continued. And in 2002, you published Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, which is a collection of in-depth interviews that you conducted with Sondheim, focusing on his compositional process and musical thinking. What was it like to create something with him about him?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well, the funny thing was, I got a grant through the Library to do these videotaped interviews with him, and there was no notion that it would be a book or anything. The whole point of it was that it- by that point he’d even sent me the language from his will- that he was gonna be leaving his manuscripts to us.

And I had the idea that, “wow, why don’t I try, if he would agree, to look at his manuscripts and then try and assume what questions researchers in the future looking at them might want to ask. And then ask him and record what his answers are. So that at some point in the future, when we have the collection and when researchers start coming to look at it, hopefully some of their questions will be answered by these interviews”.

I went up to New York for three days in advance to go through his manuscripts, make notes, photocopy things, brought them back, studied them for a while, went back and did the interviews again over three days. And then when I got back, just for my own self, I decided I wanted to transcribe the interviews. Just so I would be able to know exactly where things were on the different reels and things.

And when I was done, I shared it with somebody and they said, “you know, I think this would be a great book.” And it hadn’t even occurred to me. But they put me in touch with a publisher and they were interested. So I contacted Steve and said, “would you, what do you think?” And he basically gave me his blessing.

I remember, I think a sample chapter- and I sent him with how I would edit it, to get rid of ums and ahs and false starts and things like that. And, he agreed. I would send him things as I finished them and he would come back with, there were only two or three things that he asked me to cut, but mostly there were a handful of things he improved.

You know, he hadn’t expressed himself as clearly as he thought he could. So he would, you know, interpolate something in addition to make clear what he had meant when he was speaking to me was, and the book got published and, it’s now been in three different editions with additional interviews added.

And, it’s been very gratifying. And, I guess in many ways it actually changed my life. So, yes.

Barry Joseph: Changed your life. In what way?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I, I think it convinced people that I- gave me sort of the Sondheim seal-of-approval in people’s eyes and it’s just helped in many ways dealing with other potential collections and composers and lyricists, and they realize that nothing was about gossip.

Nothing was really personal. It was just about the work. And I think the respect that I feel for him and the work is clear, and serious. So it has been a blessing.

Barry Joseph: I am curious if after working with him, to help you establish for the record his take on how he wants his work to be viewed, what that taught you about how he related to his work and the idea of it being something that would live beyond him and impacting people.

Mark Eden Horowitz: You know, funny, one of the things I’d heard him say on more than one occasion was that, you know, when he’s dead, he’s dead. And he really doesn’t care what happens or what’s done. I don’t know how true that was or if he really meant it. But I think, seeing the collection, it’s clear how well he kept it and how he thought about things as he did them.

And so it feels like everything is deserving of a certain care and to be honored and, I guess in my mind, cherished.

Barry Joseph: Mark, not everything you wrote about Sondheim has been published.

For example, you worked on a piece with Sondheim when you were a contributing editor for The Sondheim Review about his history with board games, ones that he designed. This piece was tremendously valuable for me. Do you recall how that piece ever came about?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well I did several things as a contributing editor for The Sondheim Review. I did 10 biography-of-a-song, articles. I got many, many other songwriters to write following Sondheim pieces. I got transcriptions of other interviews he had done. And I kept trying to come up with things to add to the magazine. And, you know, for instance, he was a huge cinephile, so I was able to do an article with him on his favorite films and things like that. There were enough hints of his interest in games and the creation of games, and I was curious about it.

So I wanted to pursue the possibility of an article about that with him. I don’t remember what happened. Either The Sondheim Review had gone under by that time, or at one point he felt like people were- not getting too personal, but not leaving him, sort of, a certain level of privacy about aspects of his life. And so I sort of backed away on some things and just gave him breathing room . So it’s one of those two reasons I think why the article was never completed.

Barry Joseph: I have here, Mark, six different bullets from your notes that were transcriptions of your conversations. Each one is about a different game that he worked on at some time during his life. Shall I share with you what I have in front of me?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Sure.

Barry Joseph: Alright. The first one here says, “devised a few board games over the years. The first was probably for his friends, the Hollerhans in Michigan”. This game- this is now my voice speaking, not yours- this game was thought lost, and when the Doyle auction, in 2024, initially listed all of the items from his home that would be for sale, that game Stardom, otherwise known as Camp, surprised everyone by being in the listings. We were able to see the board, the pieces, the rules for about a week and then it was pulled offline and no one’s seen it since, at least no one publicly.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I’m just fascinated.

I didn’t know that that was the Hollerhans’ game.

Barry Joseph: He had visited them when he was going out to live in LA when he went to go write for the TV show Topper and he wanted to send them a present. So he grabbed one of those, you know, maps you could get on a street corner to where all Hollywood Stars’ homes were. And I think he said on the map, ” let’s see who can find Joan Crawford first.” And that gave him the idea to make a whole game where you were traveling around Hollywood and visiting the homes of the different stars.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I thought he had done this game with his mother. Am I crazy about that?

Barry Joseph: You are both correct and not crazy. Although it is crazy to imagine that he worked with his mom, Foxy, who he had such a historically challenging relationship with to design the physical board. So he would always say that Foxy designed the board.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Hmm.

Barry Joseph: Um, meaning that he came up with the concept, but she created, I think, the materiality of it. Here’s the second bullet. ” Did one for Hal who always won – based on producing a play”. Mark that Hal would be-

Mark Eden Horowitz: Hal Prince.

Barry Joseph: And this was called The Game of Hal Prince, otherwise known as Producer. This is a game in which the players are in an economic model of Broadway over one season. And all of the assets in the game are made up shows with real stars and directors, and you have to put them together with the backers and manage New York City audiences and New York City theater critics to develop a successful season. This game also appeared in the Doyle Auction for only a few days. And while it didn’t have the rules nor the board, we were able to see the cards in the game and the funny jives and jokes that he was making about celebrities in Broadway.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Do we know to what degree the game was actually played?

Barry Joseph: We understand from Hal Prince that they played it. Sometimes Stephen said they played it a few times. Hal Prince liked to joke about it, saying that “it took as long to play a game as it did to run an entire season on Broadway”. He was, I think, teasing his friend Sondheim when he said that. Sondheim said that Prince usually won, which made him feel good.

Not just that his friend won, but it meant that it showed how much the game was able to represent the economic model that, of course, Hal Prince was a master at.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Fascinating.

Barry Joseph: The third bullet is about a game Stephen Sondheim worked on when he was a teenager. I’m now gonna read what you wrote. You wrote, “He sent one to Parker Brothers and got a form rejection, then about a year-and-a-half later they came out with his game. SS- Stephen Sondheim- talked to his father’s lawyer about suing, but he said that most games made so little money it wasn’t worth it. Monopoly was a rare fluke. It would probably cost more in lawyers’ fees than he would stand to benefit. The game they came out with was Park and Shop.”

Mark Eden Horowitz: Do you know that game?

Barry Joseph: Yes. And I’m now gonna read to you from my book about what Park and Shop is, really was, and Sondheim’s potential connection with it. I’ve got about a paragraph here. Are you ready?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Yes.

Barry Joseph: Park and Shop was a roll-and-move game in which players traveled around an abstracted version of Allentown, Pennsylvania. The “Park & Shop” concept was developed after World War II to bring shoppers back into Allentown’s Business District. The new idea: parking validation. Put stores next to large parking lots and cover the parking costs for the customers. The idea would soon spread around the nation. But first a board game was designed by a local Allentown artist to promote the concepts. Milton Bradley, not Parker Brothers, bought the rights to the game in 1954, made some modifications and sold the game into the seventies. Sondheim’s game mechanics- the constraints and goals that shape a player’s actions- and game theme- the narrative subject that a game explores- may have been similar to those found in the Milton Bradley game, but appears most likely to be a coincidence. Nonetheless, the anecdote to me demonstrates that Sondheim, for a time, considered the path of a professional board game designer, at least on the side.

So Park and Shop came out when Sondheim was 24 years old. He wasn’t a teenager, and it came up by Milton Bradley, not Parker Brothers. So I don’t know exactly what happened. I imagine when he was in his teens, he sent something to Parker Brothers, and then few years later, he saw it come out. Except it had a different history and you couldn’t go to Google back then to find out where it was actually coming from. So I am not accusing Sondheim of making up that he thought it was his. I can see why he did, but we now have enough information to look back to see that it’s highly unlikely.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Do we have any actual evidence of what his game looked like or how it worked?

Barry Joseph: I’ve never heard from anybody what the game mechanic was, what it looked like, nor its design, nor if that material even exists. But what does still exist is the Park and Shop game. Not that it’s available in the store, but you can find it on eBay and in antique stores. And in fact Nina Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s youngest, has a copy of it and she has it up on her wall to remind her of Stephen Sondheim and his assertions that he designed that game.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Good for Nina.

Barry Joseph: I’m really excited about the next one because I wouldn’t have known to look for it if it wasn’t for you. Now, that’s true for many of these bullets, but this one was super rare. I’m now gonna read what you wrote. “Invented a “rummy” game based on movies called Stardom- you would meld casts instead of hearts.

So I’m kind of amazed at some of the things I found through putting the pieces together in the research. This is one of them. I’ll now read you from my book. Details of the game can be found in a 1961 article about John Springer, the famed New York City press agent… Springer detailed the game mechanics to Newsweek in 1961, saying, “instead of kings and aces, you had actors”. The goal was to combine- in the terminology of rummy “meld”- the stars in your hand into casts of known movies. I’ll stop reading from there. So essentially what Sondheim did with John Springer was put together a deck of cards that had the names of all sorts of movie stars at the time, Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, Fred MacMurray. And given the fact that they each had this remarkable knowledge of movies at the time, they would know that, for example, they could meld the first three together. Henry Fonda,  Sylvia Sidney, and Fred MacMurray into the movie Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which was a 1936 drama western. And then they would include people like Fay Bainters and Thomas Mitchells, who were people who were in more than a hundred films.

So you can always add them to something. How they met is not exactly clear, but John Springer would put out trivia challenges based on his knowledge of movies. Sondheim must have learned about it. They must have then gone and connected and decided to put this together. I have no idea if it ever went beyond a prototype that the two of them made.

I don’t know. But for me, it’s a nice insight into Sondheim when he was just in his first decade of making musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, he was still playing around with what might he do in the game design space and pursue his interests and passions. I’m gonna read one here that I’ve learned nothing about. You simply wrote, “Another game merged charades and double-acrostics – it was lost in the fire.” The fire in 1995. I can’t imagine what kind of game would be charades and double acrostics.

Have you ever seen anything else about it since then?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Nothing. Not at all.

Barry Joseph: Mysteries to be solved someday in the future. Finally, the last bullet. The last bullet in your remarkable list of Stephen Sondheim’s explorations in game design is about a game called The Fool’s Errand. Not one that he designed, but one that he became enamored of. It was a digital game from the late eighties by Cliff Johnson, and what you have here is “credited at the end of the game”. Credited at the end of the game? I was like, what? What does that mean? Why is Stephen Sondheim at the end of the credits of a digital game from the late eighties? And what you wrote here is wrote Johnson a letter about how much he liked it, got a letter back. Johnson had been a designer of rollercoasters when he saw the movie The Last of Sheila, and it changed his life and he quit his job to become a game designer. then wrote said “Small World”. You then said-

Mark Eden Horowitz: I’ve known people who’ve changed their life because of “Move On”, but not Last of Sheila.

Barry Joseph: And Sondheim then said-

Mark Eden Horowitz: That’s the point. And he was probably the only person who saw it.

Barry Joseph: ba-dum-bum-tsh. Then you wrote, became friends. Correspondences met in California. Sondheim offered to be a beta tester, has Beta tested two of his games, 3 in Three, and a sequel to The Fool’s Errand, The Fool and His Money, which just came out. I was able to find a copy of the game, The Fool’s Errand, and see in the credits at the end. It says, “thanks to Stephen Sondheim”.

It’s one thing to hear that Stephen Sondheim played digital games, at least sometimes in the eighties. It’s another thing to see that he was so involved in one, that he became a play tester and he was thanked in the credits.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well, I mean, there was also the stuff when Merrily We Roll Along was such a failure in the original production where he said he was considering quitting musical theater altogether and going into game design, do we know anything more about that and that period?

Barry Joseph: Well, I’m so thankful for that because it was my learning that that led me to write the book in the first place. James Lapine references that in his oral history of Sunday in the Park with George, where he starts the book by talking about how Stephen Sondheim was so down in the dumps after the critics savaged Merrily We Roll Along, leaving Sondheim to feel like he wasn’t appreciated. Maybe he wouldn’t stay in musical theater and that what he should do instead is leave and design games, video games. And when I read that in James  Lapine’s book, I thought, “I’m sorry, what did he just say?” It turns out that that’s something Stephen Sondheim said often throughout his life. People quoted it in the sixties, in the seventies, he would say, oh, I’m frustrated with what’s happening in musical theater. I’m gonna design games, or I’m gonna design puzzles, or in this case, video games.

He always was involved with games and puzzles. So it’s surprising when we hear him saying, “oh, I’m gonna go into video game design” ’cause it seems like it comes outta nowhere. But actually, he was always involved in enjoying, playing, thinking about, creating, reading about, exploring games and puzzles. So it’s not so much a surprise that if he thought, “gosh, what could I do if I just got to do what I loved?” that it would be making games and puzzles.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I can picture him playing games. I just can’t picture him playing video games, and I don’t know the degree to which he did or didn’t.

Barry Joseph: I speak in my book with John Weidman about when the Atari console came out, he would go over to Sondheim’s house for dinner and bring a few new cartridges over. And that it was kind of unnecessary ’cause Sondheim would have every cartridge for every game available at the time.

Mark Eden Horowitz: You’re kidding.

Barry Joseph: And they would sit around and play them, not because they were good, not because they were fun, but it was clearly a new cultural moment with games. And Sondheim was interested in seeing what it was all about. And the eighties, those games became games like Cliff Johnson’s, which are puzzle based, click-and-hunt games on a Macintosh. And in the nineties, the big crossover digital game in homes was Myst.

Mark Eden Horowitz: My wife had that. Do we know if Steve played that?

Barry Joseph: Yep. And John  Weidman tried playing it, but then stopped. But Sondheim kept wanting to talk to him about it. Alright, so we see from your work, Mark, documenting with  Sondheim, his involvement with games from when he was a teenager to when he was older in life. And I’m curious. Some people find Sondheim to be dismissive of his work in puzzles and games, almost embarrassed. Others find him effusive, proud of his accomplishments, and delighted to speak about them. You mentioned one of the reasons you didn’t move forward with the piece is that, in general, Sondheim felt that maybe people were looking too much into his personal life and you wanted to give him some space. But I’m wondering if you have any perspective on how he felt in general about his involvement with games and puzzles.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I never got the sense that he was ever embarrassed about anything. And he had famously written the crossword puzzles for New York Magazine early in his career. And I think he knew it was broadly known that he had a great interest in puzzles and games and collected them.

I, I certainly don’t think he was embarrassed by them at all. I don’t know that “proud” is the word I would use, I don’t know that he cared that much about what other people thought. Come to think of it. You just reminded me of one thing though. I remember one of the first times I got went to the house when I was preparing for the interviews.

He had a huge reference library there, there was a wall covered with reference books and there was a big section of books for writing crossword puzzles, there was like a volume, words of four letters, words of five letters, words of six. I didn’t know things like that even existed.

Barry Joseph: And many of those books were sold last year at the Doyle Auction.

mark_1_08-01-2025_152852: You’ve just reminded me of two other things. In the collection, it’s not just his music and literary manuscripts, but other writings of his that are in the collection, including several draft scripts for The Last of Sheila. And another murder mystery that he was working on with Anthony Perkins.

But with  The Last of Sheila materials, there were several pages of him doing a crossword version of a title sequence with the actors’ names.

Barry Joseph: Wow.

Mark Eden Horowitz: It was very cool to see. And I don’t think they used that format, but if they did, he designed it.

Barry Joseph: Very nice. Alright, let’s pivot to the part of the conversation that I am most interested in, that I learned about most from you. Sondheim’s greatest work in board game design. The Great Conductor Hunt. Ta-da! To do that, let’s turn to the Library of Congress shelf item named RGA 3 2 5 0 track two. Now I have in front of me- cover of the album.

So let me ask you, Mark, do you remember what this item looks like?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I remember a pair of lips or something sort of reminiscent to Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Barry Joseph: Ooh, nice reference. Yes, it’s red lips in an empty space. And coming out of the red lips are lines like a kid might do in junior high, where you write the letters of words, then you write the lines from the letters. And do you remember what the lines say? What the words-

Mark Eden Horowitz: No.

Barry Joseph: ” Helen Coates says.” “Helen Coates says”, and the note that goes with it says, “hand drawn graphic on record jacket mouth saying the words, “Helen Coates says””. Mark, who is Helen Coates and why did Sondheim produce this bespoke album featuring her?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Coates started as- well she didn’t start as, but for our purposes- she was Lenny’s piano teacher when he was a teenager. Then when he became sort of an overnight success after the Carnegie Hall concert debut, he brought her in to be his assistant and for basically the rest of both of their lives. She was his personal assistant and was quite a character by all accounts. She’s the one who created and maintained all his scrapbooks. And actually much of the Bernstein collection is due to her, not only keeping and saving things, but annotating them. Apparently her affections for Lenny were a little too ardent. And I think people felt a little uncomfortable by her, but Lenny stuck by her. And, there you go. And, for this game that Steve did for Lenny’s birthday, he got Helen to record the clues.

Barry Joseph: So, Stephen Sondheim took this relationship you just described and incorporated it into the gameplay not one, but three board games that are interconnected, that were given to Leonard Bernstein on his 50th birthday in August, 1968. We’ll have a separate episode to go into the games. But for our context here, the games are three parts, Diploma, Itinerary, and Podium. Three separate board games with completely different mechanics. In Diploma, you are moving around the board to try and graduate from a musical conservatory.

And to do that you have to collect letters. And every once in a while you have an option to listen to the Helen Coates album. And it’s kind of like a chance card in Monopoly where maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. And instead of just having cards on the table, ’cause that would be too easy,  Stephen Sondheim decided to put the information on an album. What you heard was two parts on the album. The first part was something cute and jokey. That was a way of recreating what he loved about his friend through a way he would tease him. And the second part would tell you if it was good or bad. If it was good, the Leonard Bernstein character in the game would give you a letter, and if it was bad, she would make you give away a letter.

The album is available to listen to anyone who goes to the Library of Congress, who’s a researcher. But right now, Mark, should we listen to a few of them?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Sure, let’s do it.

Barry Joseph: Alright, so let’s go on to the first track.

Helen Coates: Lenny was entranced last weekend during the Anagrams tournament when you took “harmonicas” from him and made “anachronism”. He needs another letter to take it back. Give him this one.

Mark Eden Horowitz: That’s great.

There’s a little southern drawl in there, I think. I don’t, I don’t know enough about Helen, but I hear something in her voice.

Barry Joseph: And what I love is that she’s talking about anagrams, cutthroat anagrams, which was this very competitive way that Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and others would play the game, in ways that the people who survived it would talk about it for decades afterwards. And so here’s  Stephen Sondheim , teasing him about it.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Did you ever talk to Jamie or Nina about playing anagrams with Steve?

I just have a vague memory of one of them telling me of one brilliant anagram that one of them came up with, and I wish I could remember what it was, and I hope she told you whatever it was.

Barry Joseph: I will tell you what I think you’re gonna tell me.

Nina turning ” saturated” into “masturbated”.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I don’t know if that was it or not, but maybe.

Barry Joseph: That was her great moment of glory of grabbing “saturated” from Sondheim and turning it into “masturbated”.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Where’s the “m” ?

Barry Joseph: There was two letters that she needed, so she had to watch for two letters to appear to add to saturated, and one of them was M and the other one was B.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I don’t think I knew that one.

Barry Joseph: She says, “it’s kind of surprising that I have an abiding affection for the game because those early experiences were so mortifying, but it was either love it or leave it. If I wanted to be a member of this family, I had to learn to love that game. So love it I do, and that’s a fact”. Alright, let’s move on to number 10.

Helen Coates: Lenny was terribly pleased to read your two volume treatise on the surprising use of the tritone in “I Feel Pretty” and would like to discuss it with you. Please come at the end of his rehearsal on Thursday. He’s always rested and eager to have an interview or a discussion after a rehearsal. Take an extra turn.

Mark Eden Horowitz: You know, she’s very good. She reads these quite well, I think. It’s not easy to do, and I’m, I’m sort of impressed.

Barry Joseph: This to me speaks to the role that she played as gatekeeper-

Mark Eden Horowitz: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: -to Leonard Bernstein. And maybe that’s what you were referencing earlier, that made some people bristle, but he stood by her side. And so this is positioning her in that role of gatekeeper as players trying to get to the fictional version as represented within the game.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well said. Yes.

Barry Joseph: Let’s listen to number- track, number 11.

Helen Coates: You called him Mr. “Bernsteen”. Really makes him sick to have his name pronounced that way. You don’t say “Einsteen”, do you? Your rivals call him Maestro. Give this letter to the one on your left.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I can’t tell you how many people still mispronounce Lenny’s name to me.

Barry Joseph: If only you could have sent them to Helen.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well, it’s funny, it’s because of Sondheim that I’ve got it firmly in my mind. “I’ll have Bernstein play next on the Beckstein piano.” So that whenever I am not sure I remember that lyric.

Helen Coates: Mr. Bernstein is really very interested in young talent, but he can’t give any auditions this week as he’s decided to devote all his time to his hair. Oh, there’s Rita at the door now. Send him a letter, a vowel.

Barry Joseph: When you listen to that, what does that make you think about?

Mark Eden Horowitz: It reminds me there are a series of photographs in the Bernstein collection of Felicia cutting Lenny’s hair.

I don’t know how much his hair meant to him. I guess I’m not surprised at the intimation that perhaps it was a big deal.

Barry Joseph: This seems to be suggesting from Sondheim that he was a little bit vain.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I, yes, I, I, I would read it that same way as well.

Barry Joseph: Nina said- who of course grew up with Helen- that she finds the recordings brilliant. She said ” it’s bliss”. She also described them as sublime. She said, “I don’t know what she thought she was doing, but she took it very, very seriously as she did most things. She was not really a fun-loving lady.”

Mark Eden Horowitz: That’s great.

They are adorable.

Helen Coates: Then he thought you were terribly perceptive when you complained that no important musicals had been written since West Side Story. He wants to do whatever he can to help your musical career. To start with, he’d like to have you take over his next Young People’s Concert, take a vowel from him .

Mark Eden Horowitz: Take a vowel from him.

Barry Joseph: Let’s listen to 23.

Helen Coates: Lenny feels it’s a serious defect that you can’t do the puzzles in The Nation. Zubin Mehta can, but of course he can do anything. Lenny insists upon another letter. Give him this one.

Barry Joseph: I think those puzzles in  The Nation were cryptic crosswords at the time, which Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim loved to do. So he’s again bringing into the game this biographical aspect of their relationship together and commemorating it.

Mark Eden Horowitz: A nd tweaking Lenny at the same time.

Barry Joseph: So it speaks a lot to the way they battled with each other. And that’s part of what Nina was describing to me, that when the two of them were playing, it was like watching a sporting event.

Mark Eden Horowitz: I can just picture Lenny the first time he played this, just bursting out laughing. When he got to some of these clues or some of these recordings from Helen, he must have just busted a gut.

Barry Joseph: And lastly, let’s listen to number 27.

Helen Coates: Lenny was fascinated to hear that your hobbies included chiropractic and belly dancing, but he’d like to find out whether you can practice them simultaneously. To elucidate, send him a letter.

Mark Eden Horowitz: She cracks herself up there.

Barry Joseph: Yeah, so this is just a few samples from this album that was created just to be played within this game that he made just for his friend.

Mark Eden Horowitz: How many are there in total?

Barry Joseph: There’s a total of 27, and the idea was not that you would get a card and go to, say, track number eight. The idea was just go to the next one. So the idea was you would just pick up the needle and if it’s time to go to Helen, you just go to the next one. So we don’t even know if they made it to the end, but we did today.

And they’re quite marvelous, aren’t they?

Mark Eden Horowitz: They really are. Yes.

Barry Joseph: Thank you Mark, for helping us to be able to understand this really fascinating aspect of this board game that Stephen Sondheim had designed for Leonard Bernstein. However, there are items in the Library of Congress collection about Sondheim, which are mysteries that are not yet solved. And one of them you told me about is the song “Bright Star” from Climb High. Can you describe to me the type of document that you shared?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I think it was a piano/vocal score, as I recall.

Barry Joseph: Climb High was a show he did. Was that in college?

Mark Eden Horowitz: It was the last of his musicals that he was writing under Oscar Hammerstein’s tutelage, and the last one was to be an original. So this was not based on any previous work. And so Sondheim wrote both the script and the songs for it. It’s never been produced.

Barry Joseph: So I’m gonna read the lyrics for the first few lines, and I’ll explain why in a moment. Above the musical line, it says, “no star born of night shines half so bright as my love will shine for you.” This is all in a dark, I presume, pencil. Beneath the notes for the piano, in a lighter pencil- and I’m just gonna read them in order, it’s gonna be nonsense, so get ready for it.

” If”, ” film”, “prop”, ” four”, ” gimpy”, “polemic”, “wise”, ” goy”, “flop”, and it continues like that. It’s random words, and in some of the words, one of the letters is underlined twice. So, the word “four” has two letters under F. Under “gimpy”, the Y also has two lines underneath it. What is this?

Mark Eden Horowitz: You are the expert. You tell me!

Barry Joseph: We tried! I brought in so many people who helped me with Sondheim puzzles for the book and said, “have at it, can you figure out what this is?” And people wrote pages trying to analyze it. Nobody can figure out what it was. Maybe one of the listeners today will go down to Washington DC, bring out their ID, ask to see it, and they’ll help us all understand.

Mark Eden Horowitz: And if they do, you’re the first one I’ll tell.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Mark.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Sure.

Barry Joseph: So Mark, we’ve mostly been talking about the things from Stephen Sondheim in other people’s collections. You’ve also talked a bit about Stephen Sondheim’s new collections at the Library of Congress at the beginning of our time together. Is there anything else you want people to know about the marvels in this new collection?

Mark Eden Horowitz: It’s just so magnificent watching that brilliant mind at work and seeing not only the intellect and the genius, but just the amount of effort he put into things. That’s what I find staggering. There’s all the inspiration, but then seeing how much more perspiration there was behind it is, um, staggering is the word that comes to mind.

Barry Joseph: Are there any Sondheim white whales still out there that you hope to bring to the Library of Congress someday or simply wanna see surface at another publicly accessible collection?

Mark Eden Horowitz: Anything related to his games!

Barry Joseph: I’m with you on that. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Thank you, Barry

Barry Joseph: Where can we send people who wanna learn more?

Mark Eden Horowitz: To the Performing Arts Reading Room of the Library of Congress. You can go to our website, loc.gov and search for “performing arts”. And there are all kinds of links there and, please come in person.

Barry Joseph: 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 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. 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 from Cole Malloy 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.

George Lee Andrews: We were there.

Marty Morris Lee: Oh, it’s so much fun.

Etai Benson: There’s no better way to represent his brilliance than through puzzles.

Colm Molloy: I feel like he was probably more obsessed with puzzles than musicals. Maybe that’s heresy.

Will Shortz: He was a brilliant puzzle solver. and a great mind.

George Lee Andrews: It was quite amazing when you walked Into his apartment because it was full of games and puzzles.

Michael Mitnick: When Sondheim started to build the cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine,

Stephen Rodosh: his treasure hunts were legendary.

George Lee Andrews: Everybody was just running around screaming and laughing and having

Erin Ortman: it’s almost ridiculous to be like, yeah, I went on a. Scavenger Hunt created by Stephen Sondheim.

Michael Counts: You know, in some ways you could almost consider him like the sort of inventor of the, very form of escape rooms because he

Taylor Myers: Stephen Sondheim blurted out when the final exit door opened, but I wanna stay.

Marty Morris Lee: How cool that we’re sitting here trying to figure this game out.

Richard Maltby, Jr.: Again, I, have to say, I’m so grateful to be invited to, participate in this. I can’t tell you. It’s just such a gift. You know, and he’s here, you know, he’s here.

Ann Morrison: Matching minds with Sondheim. Tell a friend and quiz him. Test him on his anagram. He’s pure hedonism. His songs and his shows. Mary Flynn, Mama Rose. Everybody already knows they’re superbly designed. But where would we be without a puzzle to bring us glee. Even someone in a tree would believe we need Steve and his mind.

Mark Eden Horowitz: It’s just so magnificent watching that brilliant mind at work and seeing not only the intellect and the genius, but just the amount of effort he put into things. That’s what I find staggering.