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Books
Matching Minds With Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Master (2024)
By near-universal consensus, Stephen Sondheim was the greatest musical theater composer of his generation—celebrated, among other things, for the wit, sophistication, and intricacy of shows from West Side Story to Sunday in the Park with George. A less well-known avenue for his brilliant creativity was his lifelong fascination with designing and constructing intricate puzzles and games: from treasure hunts and crossword puzzles to parlor and board games.
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If you subscribe to David Benkof’s Broadway Maven newsletter (and if you don’t, then you should) then today you saw that he worked with two crossword constructors to build a fun Broadway-themed puzzle (link in bio).
As he wrote: “Crossword puzzles have long been a popular pastime among musical theater people, and several prominent Broadwayniks are published cruciverbalists (puzzle constructors), including Hugh Wheeler, Richard Maltby, Jr. (who is a MARQUEE subscriber!) and The Master himself. Barry Joseph, author of the forthcoming Matching Minds with Sondheim, even told me that had Sondheim "not had any achievements in musical theater, his passing in 2021 would still have noted mention in The New York Times obituaries" for his role in promoting cryptic crosswords in America.”
And I stand by my comment!
sondheim crosswords
I had an amazing time today at the @museumofbroadway checking out all of the Sondheim goodness sprinkled throughout. The highlight of course was the Sondheim Anagram Puzzle, designed by @davidkwong, to taut Sondheim passion for word puzzles. I write about it in my book. (I greatly appreciated being reminded by the docent to not leave before finding the bonus puzzle.) #wordpuzzles #anagrams #museums
A lot in one photo! This is me right now with Richard Maltby, Jr. I had just given him from @lego_nerd_puzzles (Andrew Parr) one of Stephen Sondheim’s issues of Games magazines from 2021 (that Andrew acquired at auction last June, and includes Andrew’s interview with Sondheim). In the photo we are holding the CURRENT issue of Games, open to the page showing Andrew’s current article about that auction, featuring photos from me, including one of me with Richard, together at the auction last June… which just happens to be a half block from the auction house itself!
The near final draft of the cover just came in. Loving it! Thank you all for your fantastic feedback, pushing it along towards a state of awesome.
The dice are back, as is a new blackwing pencil (in tribute to Sondheim`s preferred implement) and a cover dissolving into jigsaw pieces.
This puzzle completed by Stephen Sondheim (from Games World of Puzzles, May of 2021, just a few months before he passed) is called Family Reunions, by Raymond Simon.
It is actually four puzzles, all following the same set of rules:
There are ten words in a set. Each word can have one letter removed and be remixed to make another word. Can you figure out the theme connecting those ten new words?
For example, you can see below how the first family’s words (GOJI, LAUGH, etc.) become dance-related words (JIG, HULA, etc.):
Goji: Remove “o” -> Jig (an energetic folk dance)
Laugh: Remove “g” -> Hula (a Hawaiian dance)
Balsam: Remove “l” -> Samba (a Brazilian dance)
Cosmid: Remove “m” -> Misco -> Disco (a popular dance style from the `70s)
Nougat: Remove “u” -> Tango (an Argentine dance)
Twosit: Remove “o” -> Twist (a popular dance from the `60s)
Vassal: Remove “v” -> Salsa (a Latin dance)
Energumen: Remove “n” -> Merengue (a Dominican dance)
Falconmen: Remove "n" -> Flamenco (a Spanish dance)
Chlorinates: Remove “o” -> Charleston (a dance popular in the 1920s)
Again, the trick here is to figure out how Sondheim’s mind worked by imagining his path through each puzzle.
As we can see across the four families of word-sets, Sondheim figured out the shared theme and penciled in that answer. However, what we do not see is him working through the remixing of each word. Most likely, with each set, he dropped letters, remixed the letters, and successfully sought out their common theme - all in his 91-year old mind!
As I have said before (and will continue to for this series of posts) these pencil markings are now precious artifacts of Sondheim’s mind at work. (As always, big thanks to Andrew Parr @lego_nerd_puzzles for supplying access to the issue. And thanks to ChatGPT for solving the first family of words for me.)
#Sondheim #gamesmagazine #wordpuzzle #wordpuzzles
Andrew Parr (@lego_nerd_puzzles) is writing not one but TWO articles about the Sondheim auction, for Games WORLD OF PUZZLES magazine. The first one is out NOW (and on the newsstands mid October with the date of December on the cover).
It features photos by yours truly and covers Andrew’s experience of the exhibition and auction combined with those of both Grace O’Keefe and myself (grace_o_keefe).
NOT TO BE MISSED. Check out an excerpt below:
Another person keenly interested in the Sondheim auction was Barry Joseph, a consultant and author in New York City who’s written several books on a variety of topics. He describes his current project, Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend, as “a journey into the rich but largely uncharted realms of the great Broadway songwriter’s prodigious output of word puzzles, board games, parlor games, and treasure hunts… based on scores of original interviews with the friends and colleagues who played them.”
…Despite having just a few hours to enjoy the items on display, Barry still took a moment to gauge the mood of the room. “People seemed in awe,” he remembered. “It was like going to historic Williamsburg—it was a recreation of his house. The walls were covered with the same stuff his walls were covered with—his French rebuses, his board games, his puzzles. And there were bookshelves with his books. It felt like being in a simulation, going through his home and touching his things. It felt weird, but also incredibly exciting. You could sit in the furniture. You could stretch out on his lounge chair! If it was a museum, you’d never think of doing that! People were there to see the things they wanted to see. Others were there just to be there. They were taking in the Bellinis and singing the songs.”
#Sondheim
This is a puzzle from a copy of Games Magazines (February 2008) owned by Stephen Sondheim. PuzzleCraft 39: Caesar Shifts (written by Mike Selinker and Thomas Snyder) is quite a doozy!
It’s quite fun and a marvel to follow Sondheim’s path through his pencil marks.
This multi-step puzzle encodes a trivia question.
The first step is two columns of 25 clues. Each answer in the first column is matched with an identical one in the second column. The answers are identical but ONLY after a caeser shift (a move forward in the alphabet). So OUI in the left column is matched with YES in the right, after each letter in OUI is advanced 10 spaces. No two pairs shares the same caesar shift so, with each found pair, one of 25 caeser shift options is eliminated.
Phew.
The second step is developing a seven letter keyword. Seven pairings are now suggested from the clues found in the first step. Within each pair there is one letter in common. These seven letters should be formed into a word (Sondheim landed on ABJURER) and then THAT word then needs to be caesar shifted into the keyword (Sondheim shifted it into NOWHERE).
Final step: use the keyword to solve a 70 letter code broken into 10 groups of 7 letters using a Vigenere cipher (in which a ceasar shift is used to solve it, but the shift is based on each letter’s order and how it corresponds to the keyword). NOWHERE, counting each letter’s order in the alphabet, equals: 14, 15, 23, 8, 5, 18, 5. So shift each letter in each of the ten blocks of seven letters to come up with the trivia question.
At this point either Sondheim gave up (unlikely) or no longer required his pencil and solved it in his head (as he so often did.)
As I have said before (and will continue to for this series of posts) these pencil markings are now precious artifacts of Sondheim’s mind at work. (As always, big thanks to Andrew Parr @lego_nerd_puzzles for supplying access to the issue)
#Sondheim #caesershiftcode #Vigenerecipher #gamesmagazine
Thank you for joining me in this week`s countdown to this exciting news: Matching Minds with Sondheim has a release date (May 20, 2025) AND is available now for pre-order.
Go to the link in my bio to pre-order your copy today.
And if you DO, the first twenty people who confirm their purchase in the comments below will be eligible to receive in the mail a personalized book-related gift from me.
Pre-orders are one way a fan can show support for a book before its release. The more pre-orders on Amazon the more the company will buy from my publisher and the higher the book will appear upon launch in their algorithm. So your pre-order today increases the chance that others will also buy it next spring.
Thank you for all of your support on this crazy journey and joining me as we round the track to make our last lap towards book release!
#Sondheim #StephenSondheim @sondheimphotos @sondheimletters @sondheimsociety #preorderusa #preorderparty
Matching Minds with Sondheim is a journey into this rich but largely unmapped aspect of the composer’s creative life, illuminating how Sondheim’s playful designs delivered moments of clarity and connection for his friends and colleagues. For the first time, this book offers an enthralling tour of what Sondheim described as his “puzzler’s mind,” helping readers to better understand the man, his work, and—if they accept the challenge—themselves.
Gaming expert and theater fan Barry Joseph draws from over eighty years of Sondheim’s activities, collecting his extremely rare and never-publicly-seen puzzles and game designs, scores of original interviews with the celebrity friends who played them, deep dives into Sondheim-related archives from around the country, and analysis from both puzzle designers and theater professionals from around the world.
Matching Minds will do more than describe Sondheim’s work: It will allow readers to match minds with the maestro by attempting to solve Sondheimian puzzles and bring Sondheimian games into their own homes.
Reactions from early readers:
“Matching Minds does justice to a man who was good at having fun. Readers will have an absolute blast with this book.”
“An essential read for anyone who wants to understand what made this creative genius tick.”
Follow the latest on the book at MatchingMindswithSondheim.com and on Instagram.
Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums (2023)
“A wonderful guide to the kind of agile, experimental, responsive operational strategies needed in the museum of the future.” — Elizabeth Merritt, Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums
Making Dinosaurs Dance takes the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on my six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital Design – user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up – then applies them through case studies across a range of topics.
Read more here.
Friday is Tomorrow, or The Dayenu Year (2022)
Chronicles from the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive
“Stories like Joseph’s suggest we are a lot better than we think we are.” —Micki McElya, author of The Politics of Mourning
“Compulsively readable” —James Loney, columnist
Friday is Tomorrow, or The Dayenu Year is a true story of learning to grieve and thrive during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Within the first month of the lock-down, the author loses his father to the disease and then, soon after, his job. Through the support of his family, friends, and community, Friday is Tomorrow tells the uplifting story of how one man learns to maintain traditions in a time of uncertainty while reaching for his dreams.
At times moving, at times humorous, the ups and downs of this New Yorker were originally penned (quite literally, with a physical pen) for Columbia University’s NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive. Edited together for the first time, Friday is Tomorrow is more than just an opportunity to read one person’s struggle with the world wrought by the recent pandemic.
It is an invitation to take the time and space you need to consider and better understand your own story.
Learn how to get your own copy, download a free sample, and more at FridayisTomorrow.com.
Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink (2018)
“Of the thousands of books written about seltzer water, this is by far my favorite–especially the part that’s about me.” –Mel Brooks
Based on more than fourteen years of original research and interviews, the extraordinary story of this ordinary drink can finally be told.
Learn where to get your own copy, watch videos of presentations, follow the book tour and more at Seltzertopia.com.
© Copyright 2023 – Barry Joseph