Characters don’t have to likable to attract us. But what do you do with a musical whose lead you want to punch in the mouth from beginning to end? That’s the unhappy dilemma I faced throughout The Connector, a new Off Broadway show with a few pluses–and one overwhelming minus at its core.
Plus: Composer Jason Robert Brown, of the Tony-winning Parade and The Bridges of Madison County, and the evergreen love story The Last Five Years, who maybe you can see conducting the band and playing the piano onstage at MCC Theater’s sparkling space at the Hudson River end of West 52nd Street. Plus: Director Daisy Prince, a frequent collaborator with Brown. Plus: Book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman (of Things We Want and Clive), who has the right sensibility for a show set in the most sophisticated precincts of NYC journalism, back in the much different atmosphere of the mid-1990s.
But the story they’ve brought to life is a familiar tale that hasn’t gotten any more interesting, or any less irritating, in the telling. The Connector is an esteemed publication with the prestige and longevity of The New Yorker and The Atlantic and the buzz of the shorter-lived Talk and George. Its storied editor, Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), is less worried about “the World Wide Web” and more about his own legacy, which was cemented in Vietnam War coverage and the swashbuckling era of New Journalism. He takes an interest in a young writer, Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross), who knows all about the old days and has the writing chops and storytelling flair to perhaps usher in the new. But Ethan’s quick rise to the top proves disconcerting for his colleague Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), who like most women and people of color hired by The Connector languishes as a copyeditor. Not unsympathetic to the twitchy Ethan, Robin sees into his insecurities and bravado–and soon sees right through him, as Ethan’s difficult-to-verify “scoops” are all launched in his imagination. But her suspicions, and those of the monthly’s dragon lady fact checker Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), are dismissed by O’Brien and his coterie of aging white men, who see the delusional, and deluding, Ethan as one of them.
It might be one thing if Ethan was a charming fraud, like the character Daniel Radcliffe played in the lighter-hearted play The Lifespan of a Fact a few seasons back. But Ross, a former Evan Hansen, is no Daniel Radcliffe, and Ethan no Evan, trying to make things right while messing up repeatedly. He’s sweaty, cringing and unsympathetic from his introduction, and I didn’t believe for a second that O’Brien could be taken in so quickly. (Maybe another actor could sell this, but Bakula, after Quantum Leap and seasons of TV procedurals, has acquired a Harrison Ford-like gravitas, and doesn’t look to be anyone’s fool, no matter how much I enjoyed seeing him singing and “moving,” about the extent of his choreography.) Ethan’s plagiaristic sins, which bring down a hapless Jersey City mayor and more, seem calculated to come as a surprise, but Sherman’s book and Ross’ performance telegraph everything far in advance.
Which is to say, if you recall the names Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair, or remember the Stephen Glass story as retold in the excellent 2003 film Shattered Glass, this is old news about fake news (V.1). The creators might have tried to create a Bonfire of the Vanities-type story from the raw material of the era, the last time print journalism really mattered, and one I observed from my extremely modest (but fun) perch as a trade journalist. Instead we get leftovers and platitudes from stock characters, including in the lyrics, and a few decent songs, mostly the ones dramatizing the phony stories (playing a Black office drone, Fergie Philippe springs to life as a dubious made-up source for “Wind in My Sails,” and the entire ensemble gets in on the act for the rousing, Jerusalem-set “The Western Wall.”) The techie glass-and-LED design, augmented by boxes of files strewn about the sides of the set, is a wobbly fit with the period. With AI poised to make plagiarism even harder to spot there should be an urgency to The Connector, but it shallowly addresses the time in which it’s set and is disengaged from our own.
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