Journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross, right) chats with a skeptical colleague, Robert Henshaw (Fergie Philippe, left), as Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz) looks on with concern, in Jonathan Marc Sherman and Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Connector.
The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.
The year is 1997, and The Connector, a prestigious political-cultural magazine, is far from its heyday, but the office is still populated by some of those who remember that heyday, such as editor-in-chief Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula). New corporate overlords are bugging Conrad with marketingspeak, but he still runs things the way he always has, in line with the magazine’s late founder, Aubrey Bernard. This means in-depth, long-form journalism and a patriarchal, boys-club office culture.
Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula, left), editor-in-chief of The Connector, goes out drinking with his promising new hire, Ethan.
The women at The Connector are fact-checkers, like long-time guardian of truth Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), or copy editors, like the young Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), an aspiring writer who repeatedly runs up against the office’s ingrained misogyny. While Robin can’t get any eyes on her work, Ethan strolls in with a manic eagerness, fresh from Princeton and quoting Bernard’s most cherished precept, launching into the song “See Yourself,” which has the refrain, “So you can see yourself, a fragment of, a fragment of, reflected.” The rest of the company joins in the refrain, though Conrad is solely focused on Ethan, whom he sees as a younger version of himself. Soon Ethan is Conrad’s go-to happy-hour companion, as he waxes poetic about Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese. For Ethan, everything is opportunity.
“The year is 1997, and ‘The Connector,’ a prestigious political-cultural magazine, is far from its heyday. ”
Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design features a towering backdrop of magazine proof pages that is also used for projections (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew). Piles of bankers’ boxes and papers clutter the sides of the stage, while the rest of the space is largely open. The cold, businesslike atmosphere, complemented by the costumes (by Márion Tálan de la Rosa) of gray or dark suits, lends the office the feel of an accounting firm rather than a once glamorous magazine.
It’s apparent to everyone but Conrad that Ethan isn’t trustworthy. Robin somewhat puzzlingly forms a friendship (or possibly a romantic relationship, as everyone assumes) with Ethan, yet remains skeptical enough of him to compare herself to Cassandra, seeing the truth but ignored by the men around her. The truth soon emerges: Ethan is a fabulist, and his wonderful stories are all fiction. But none of this comes as a surprise: it’s very clear that he is uncovering characters and stories too good to be true because they aren’t true. The blatantness of his lies eliminates any drama from the revelation that they are lies.
The characters don’t emerge as more than types. Robin spends much of her time telling us exactly what the problem is: that Conrad and his world do not take women seriously. The repetitive telegraphing of this message has the unintended effect of reducing her own story. Ethan, despite Ross’s able attempts to offer glimpses into a tortured self, remains a cipher. The songs, which are very well sung, rarely deepen the characters—many are about Ethan’s fictional profile subjects. The amusing duet “So I Came to New York,” in which Ethan and Robin discuss their previous lives in New Jersey and Texas, respectively, stays on the surface—“Everyone’s an asshole in Texas … Everyone’s a scumbag in Jersey”—and Muriel’s personal ballad of the fact-checker, “Proof,” is more muddled than enlightening.
Mona Bland (Mylinda Hull) is a devoted Connector reader and often writes letters to the editor pointing out possible factual errors, which take the form of monologues. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
The Connector seemingly tries to make the case that the story of Ethan is the story of the death of truth. As Ethan sings in the finale:
There never was an airplane,
There never was a prophecy,
There never was a motorcade,
There never was a Holocaust.
But this leap from Ethan’s handful of invented stories, such as the one about a dazzling Scrabble savant, to the collapse of truth and the “alternative facts” of the Trump era feels abrupt and unearned; for one thing, the piece takes place before social media and barely mentions the Internet. The musical also doesn’t seem to know whether it is valorizing the kind of journalism The Connector did pre-Ethan or critiquing it as narrow-minded, chauvinistic gatekeeping. A story that should be tense and propulsive feels strangely flat, and its intellectual ambitions still in progress.
The Connector runs through March 17 at MCC (511 W 52nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and at 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting mcctheater.org.
Book: Jonathan Marc Sherman
Music & Lyrics: Jason Robert Brown
Director: Daisy Prince
Choreographer: Karla Puno Garcia
Sets: Beowulf Boritt
Lighting & Projection Design: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Sound Design: Jon Weston
Orchestrations & Arrangements: Jason Robert Brown
