The Connector
MCC Theater
511 W. 52nd St.
New York
Runs through March 4
Just under halfway through The Connector, we see Ethan Dobson, a wunderkind magazine writer, on a Jersey City street at 3 a.m. interviewing Willis Taylor, a Black man who may have a videotape of the city’s corrupt mayor smoking crack with a teenager. Ostensibly in response to a question from Ethan, Willis lays out work as an “unelected, off-the-books political operative.” He struts around the stage, boasting about being impenetrable in densely rhymed hip hop.
As the song goes on, it becomes clear that we’re not seeing Ethan’s interview. We’re seeing his story. Everything we know about Willis and the tape and the Jersey City street is filtered through Ethan’s subjective lens – and the free-wheeling journalistic liberties he takes.
That tension among the facts, the truth, and something else entirely is at the heart of The Connector, a riveting new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman currently running at MCC.
Set in the late ‘90s at a legendary magazine reaching the end of its heyday, The Connector follows Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross), the magazine’s fresh-out-of-Princeton rising star reporter, as he publishes a series of stories, each more impressive – and implausible – than the last.
It’s told through the piercing gaze of Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), an overlooked Latina writer stuck at the magazine’s copy desk, whose fascination and resentment with Ethan drives her to look for the holes in his stories. She’s the Aaron Burr to Ethan’s Alexander Hamilton or the Judas to his Jesus Christ Superstar, if either of the two other narrators ever had to stare up at a glass ceiling. From the moment Ethan arrives at the magazine, he sails into the career Robin’s spent years working for: articles in the magazine, drinks with the editor-in-chief, and instant admission to journalism’s old boys club that’s kept her at bay.
When editor Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula) takes Ethan under his wing, he does so at the expense of being able to hold him accountable. Even the magazine’s legal counsel is swayed to defend Ethan’s increasingly dubious reporting. Robin aside, it’s only Muriel, the magazine’s stalwart fact-checker (played with wry gravitas by Jessica Molaskey) and an eagle-eyed reader who think to push back against him. At each turn, it’s clear that the show’s slow-motion scandal of journalistic integrity is just as much a scandal of patriarchy.
Running at a crisp hour and 45 minutes, The Connector moves like a true-crime thriller. Directed and conceived by Daisy Prince, it’s tightly constructed, and, conceptually, it knows exactly what it’s doing.
At a few points, Ethan sings a motif about his compulsion to write: “And you can see yourself/A fragment of, a fragment of./And you can see yourself reflected.” The lyric is somewhat hard to parse, but it crystallizes something ineffable about the musical. The Connector holds a mirror up to nature, but then it holds a mirror up to the mirror.
Working in tandem with Sherman’s streamlined book, Brown’s score is similarly clever. If it’s not sweeping like Parade or The Bridges of Madison County, that’s because it feels like a continuation of earlier work on The Last Five Years and Songs for A New World, both of which were collaborations with Prince. Sonically, the driving pop-rock grooves and soaring melodies are familiar – so are the lyrics, which meld poetry and snark – but it’s more restrained and concentrated.
Ethan’s songs are idealistic almost to the point of freneticism. He’s constantly creating and editing his own reality through language. Ross, a former Evan in Dear Evan Hansen, keeps Ethan buzzing with high-energy anxiety, letting him stay endearing even as he gets slick. Writing for Robin, Brown puts Cruz’s thrilling belt to use. In “Cassandra,” a propulsive solo, she seethes, her resolve laced with venom and grief: “Half the stories of the world are left unwritten/Half the stories of the world are left unread.”
For Ethan’s stories, The Connector leaps head first into pastiche to varying results. For a profile of a Scrabble master holding court in a Greenwich Village bar, there’s an off-the-wall ‘80s pop production number that pumps the room with energy. Later on, Willis’s song is less effective; the rap seems too stilted to be intentionally so. Still, both numbers help pull the musical out of the office and help us understand why Ethan’s stories are alluring enough to merit fan mail.
Those moments work thanks to choices from the musical’s designers. Beowulf Borritt’s sleek obsidian is furnished only with tables and chairs against backdrop of carefully-hung magazine pages. Rather than traditional wings on either side of the stage, there are massive stacks of paper and file boxes where actors perch when they’re not in scenes. As we watch Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s precise lighting and projections illuminate isolated magazine pages and type out headlines, we’re subconsciously cued that the musical happens not so much in the office but in the magazine itself.
If there’s one major hole in The Connector it’s in Ethan. Although he’s clearly drawn at the beginning of the musical, the further on it gets, the more opaque he becomes. That’s partially because the writing’s focus shifts to Robin, but it’s also because getting a window into his thought process would undermine the show’s major structural move.
Ultimately, there’s no psychological examination of why Ethan fabricated his stories, just the revelation that he did. As it happens, the rest of the ensemble tears sheets of paper around him, and the wall of magazine pages cascades to the ground, making us wonder how much of it we can even believe.
