Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021)

The great master of the musical theatre passed away this past week, and it had me returning to his works for the first time in several years. Works that sharpened my critical faculties and my creative abilities, and that played a significant role in shaping my approach to work and life.

I'm so lucky to own a copy of Sondheim's famous but rarely-seen crossword puzzles. This is my "one book to save in a house fire". I don't have an interest in rare books or first editions. Nor, in all but a few special cases, do I particularly care which edition or cover of a particular work I possess. This is the exception - and that's because, as far as I can tell, there are literally no copies available for sale (new or used) anywhere in the world! I discovered an unused copy online for about $200 in my early 20s - an eye-watering sum of money for a youthful student, and still the most I've paid for a single book. In 2017, a copy did the rounds for about $3,000; someone eventually snapped that up. Pristine copies of this thing must be very thin on the ground.

Between April 1968 and July 1969, legendary Broadway composer and lyricist [a:Stephen Sondheim|85858|Stephen Sondheim|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] contributed 42 cryptic crosswords to New York magazine. Sondheim's reputation at this stage rested on his Tony-winning musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the lyrics for two big hits - West Side Story and Gypsy. He was already a notable among the theatre world, but his apotheosis as an artist in the public eye was just around the corner. Sondheim had a lifelong love of games and puzzles, and - with his good friend, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins - was well-known for organising complex treasure hunts across New York City for their society friends. He would later go on to write the screenplay for a clever Hollywood murder mystery, The Last of Sheila, and a short-lived Broadway murder mystery, Getting Away with Murder

Dense crosswords, then, were right up Mr. Sondheim's alley. From April to July 1968, the puzzles were published weekly. This subsequently became fortnightly through to January 1969, and then increasingly intermittent until the schedule fell away completely. And with good reason: the composer was consumed with writing not one but two groundbreaking works. 1970's Company and 1971's Follies, which would define him as a master of the artform, and pave the way for the many masterpieces to follow.

These puzzles are not your typical crosswords. First, the clues are cryptic, and in a modified style from those who are more familiar with those found in the London or New York Times. Second, the puzzle itself is often a mental torture chamber that requires several logical leaps. For instance, one may have to solve the clue (e.g. "Do you want to hear? Sing, then see 'The Sound of Music'.") and then encode one's answer using a code found elsewhere in the puzzle and then, once you have found the decoded word, follow instructions in the puzzle to convert that word into the 'light' (the word to be entered into the diagram). Sometimes, even once the diagram is complete, there may be a further task, such as rearranging sections of the grid or picking out a hidden message therein.

It all sounds daunting...and it is. But at heart, these are just twists on standard cryptic crosswords, and Mr. Sondheim has a lovely introduction to help you on your way. It should be noted that, as Sondheim was an "early adopter" among Americans of these sorts of puzzles, many of the concepts were borrowed - one assumes with permission - from The Listener, the most famous British cryptic of its day. Acknowledgements are listed throughout the text.

This book is as much a time capsule as anything else. For those of us who didn't live in the US in the 1960s (or who didn't exist at all!), plenty of the material is nearly impossible, assuming as it does knowledge of politicians or media figures, geography or pop culture. And even at his best, the clues are darned obscure. Still, as Sondheim says in his introduction, there is nothing like the pleasure of holding a clue in your mind for minutes, or even hours or days, while the cogs start to turn in your mind. More to the point, as we enter a world that is painfully bereft of Sondheim's physical being, it is a pleasure to wallow in his mind. To grasp at how the cogs turned, and understand the way that his brain would construct a problem. It's no doubt similar to the way he was able to hammer out complex, apt lyrics and musical notes. This is the real legacy of these riddles.

This 1980 first edition is also the only edition, and it came spiral-bound, which was no doubt helpful for New York magazine's profit margin, but perhaps not great for the volume's longevity. Mine is in remarkably good shape - and of course I will only ever complete the puzzles on photocopied sheets! The smart introduction helped introduce the idea of cryptics to Americans who were largely unfamiliar with them, but they now provide helpful tools to get us started on puzzles that are historically out of our reach. 41 of the 42 original puzzles are included here, along with the answer key. The provision of the answers is truly a blessing; sometimes just quickly flipping over to squint at one single answer can bust through fifty years of dust and shadow. Some of the answers include notes as to how to arrive at the solutions. One single puzzle, entitled Un-American, is missing. This is apparently because its specific (baseball-related) theme became outdated between 1969 magazine publication and this volume in 1980. In the pre-computer age, of course, 'gremlins' were tougher to catch, whether because the compiler was transmitting them by fax or some other technology, or just because of the vagaries of printing. Either way, there were unfortunate misprints in a small number of the original puzzles which made it difficult for solvers; these all appear to have been corrected for this collection.

The complete list of puzzles and dates is included below. If you're interested, the wonderful Galen Fott has provided this neat blog post which links to online versions of some of the puzzles on Google Books. (Several are unavailable outside of owning the volume itself.)

1968

April 8: Puzzle #1
April 15: Dedicated Dodecahedron
April 22: 3 Downs
April 29: One Shy
May 6: Diametricode
May 13: Woodbabes
May 20: Misprints
June 3: Vicious Circles
June 17: Chop Logic
June 24: News Clippings
July 1: Code Format
July 8: Sixes and Sevens
July 15: A (K)night at the Philharmonic
July 29: Clicks…
August 5: Assemblage Line
August 19: Printer’s Devilry
September 9: Playfair Square
September 16: Word Games
September 23: 1 Across
September 30: Alphabetical Inserts
October 7: New Directions
October 14: Winners First
October 21: Intermediaries
October 28: Head-Hunting
November 4: Safe-Cracking
November 11: Murder Mystery
November 18: That Is To Say…
November 25: Interlocks
December 2: Bookworm
December 9: Treasure Hunt
December 16: Perspectives
December 23: Christmas Competition

1969

January 6: Un-American (not included in this volume, and sadly not available online
January 27: Vicious Circles II
February 17: Faces
March 10: Battleships
March 31: Alphabet Soup
April 21: Chessman
May 12: Code I
June 2: Poker Game
June 23: Critical Birds
July 14: Sixes and Sevens II… (altro)

In this remarkable volume, Stephen Sondheim collects the lyrics (used, unused and reused) from his first 10 Broadway productions ("West Side Story" to "Merrily We Roll Along") as well as his first professional production ("Saturday Night") and another piece ("The Frogs"). A second volume - 'Look, I Made A Hat' - will follow in late 2011 with all his post-1981 lyrics, as well as his earlier TV and film work, and (assumedly) various songs he wrote for individual productions in the early days. And indeed, these two volumes are going to have pride of place on my shelf for many years to come.

To call Sondheim intelligent is a cruel understatement. As evidenced by the lyrics here, he never just dashes off a song and ignores it: a change of pronoun or a shift in tense conveys so much meaning in a Sondheim song. He discusses here the use of non-Latinate words in "Pacific Overtures", the reasons why some patter songs ("Getting Married Today") have a strong sense of structure while others ("The Worst Pies in London") do not, why inter-rhymes should only be used in the right situations with the right characters, and so on. Duly, Sondheim gives credit to the book writers with whom he has worked, and the array of talented directors, cast and crew who brought these visions to life. Sondheim is an artisan and part of a team, true enough. But this cannot disguise the fact that he is musical theatre's Shakespeare, never shirking from a challenge and always presenting us with more dimensions than we could have thought possible. This is a masterclass in song writing (not just for musicals, incidentally) written by the unparalleled master of the form.

In addition, Sondheim offers up his distilled thoughts on a number of 'Golden Age' lyricists - from Gershwin and Porter, to Fields and Hammerstein - but refuses to sugarcoat his opinions. Noel Coward is taken out and shot, basically. It's refreshing, first of all, to hear these uncensored comments. Sondheim is by no means cruel: personal opinions may surface, but we're presented primarily with academic discussions on the failings (or successes) of the typically-accepted pantheon of American songwriters. (My personal favourite was when Sondheim pointed the obvious flaws in some of Henry Higgins' lyrics in "My Fair Lady" - a musical he very much enjoys, but suggests is less gramatically correct than someone of Higgins' idiosyncracies would accept.)

At the same time, though, Sondheim is not a fool: he acknowledges that the pre-Hammerstein lyricists were working in a different era, with different goals as to character creation. The aim is not to limit the enjoyment of those who listen to this songs, but merely to argue for recognition of the growth and evolution of the medium. And Sondheim himself hardly gets off lightly: he is his own harshest critic, disdainful of lyrics that I - and many other fans - would surely adore. (The sweetest moments - although few and far between - come when he acknowledges that he does like a particular lyric of his own, one example being the simple but chilling "...and it was" from the end of 'Four Black Dragons'.)

At the end of the day, this is a necessity for Sondheads, highly recommended for any lovers of the musical theatre, and really a good read for anyone who has pondered lyric writing, or just enjoys the creation of art. Like all fans, I'm sure, there were many lines when I was disappointed to see no annotations but - of course - most of the time there would be very little to be said other than "this was good" or "this was bad". His lyrics stand as testaments to the art of presenting character, plot, theme and emotion through song. I don't mind when 'mainstream audiences' prefer to attend "Grease" or "Jersey Boys" to "Pacific Overtures"; that is the status quo in any artistic medium. But it does annoy me to a feverish degree when 'Broadway lovers' or 'musical theatre geeks' spend their days belting out tunes from 'Wicked' - whose lyrics I'd love to hear Sondheim take apart - while ignoring the great variety of works featured in this two-volume collection. I truly hope that - with re-releases of his recordings, and the release of these books - the lyrics contained herein, along with their masterful music, characters and stories can come to be appreciated by a far wider audience.… (altro)

I love most Sondheim songs so it's not surprising that I loved this book. It's a big (oversize) book filled with photos from his shows, lyrics, handwritten notes and anecdotes about his relationships with lots of other musicians, lyricists, and collaborators. It's basically a crash course in lyric writing which I found fascinating. To start with, I never knew there were so many different types of rhymes ... true rhymes, near rhymes, visual rhymes, regional rhymes, assonance, consonance, run-on, identities, etc. You'll learn why he used a particular word over another in a song and why certain lyrics didn't make it into a show. This book covers his thoughts and personal notes on 13 shows from West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd and Follies just to name a few. Can't wait for volume two!… (altro)