The New Yorker:

For the late Broadway composer, crafting crosswords and treasure hunts was as thrilling as writing musicals.

By Michael Schulman

On Halloween night, 1968, a flock of twenty eminent New Yorkers burst out of the door of Stephen Sondheim’s Turtle Bay town house. The group included the Broadway producer Harold Prince, the playwright Arthur Laurents, the composer Mary Rodgers, and the actors Lee Remick and Roddy McDowall. Divided into teams of five, the guests filed into four limousines. They’d been given maps of the city, and objects including string, pins, and scissors, as well as a piece of advice. “Keep talking to each other,” their host had told them. “Do not try to solve these things individually.” Sondheim, at thirty-eight, had already written the lyrics for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” but he had not yet revolutionized the American musical with his dense, urbane scores for “Company,” “Follies,” and “A Little Night Music.” In the meantime, he was plying one of his lesser-known talents: designing elaborate treasure hunts.

Sondheim had devised the hunt with the actor Anthony Perkins; they had met through Perkins’s partner, Grover Dale, who’d been one of the Jets in “West Side Story,” on Broadway. In the weeks before the hunt, Sondheim and Perkins had labored over clues. They planted envelopes around town: under a park bench, behind the pins in a bowling alley. Perkins had a cache of leftover campaign posters for Eleanor Clark French, a local politician who had run unsuccessfully for Congress a few years earlier, and the two men hung them in strategic locations, to give the players visual hints that they were on the right track.

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