“The Connector” is pitch excellent relating to {a magazine}’s workplace politics, and it’s approach off key on the a lot greater image of faux information. Jonathan Marc Sherman and Jason Robert Brown’s conflicted new musical had its world premiere Tuesday on the MCC Theater.
First, the excellent news — of which I do know one thing about, having spent over 40 years as an editor and reporter at varied magazines and newspapers. Most of them are defunct now, however that’s one other story. Few, if any, of these periodicals I labored for had been fairly as illustrious as The Connector — which, by the way in which, is a horrible title for {a magazine}, to not point out a musical. There are revered and dusty shades of the New Yorker’s William Shawn within the editor-in-chief performed by Scott Bakula, who’s given no much less prestigious a moniker than Conrad.
Conrad is an editor worshipped by his readers and his employees, which embody a younger copy editor, Robin (Hannah Cruz) and a brand new employees author, Ethan (Ben Levi Ross), recent from the Ivy League. She is a struggling author, and he has already been blessed as an distinctive author by the all-mighty Conrad, due to an article Ethan wrote for his school newspaper.
A extra revealing title for this 100-minute musical can be “Methods to Cope With Workplace Angst Beneath the Age of 30,” as a result of that’s what Robin suffers as her articles hold being rejected for publication and Ethan’s hold discovering their approach into the journal’s nicely, the place they miraculously enhance circulation. Including to her fury is that Conrad, desirous to play mentor, sees himself within the younger male wunderkind.
Bakula performs the éminence grise with restraint and with out ever turning pompous, which these sorts of prime editors usually are. However “The Connector” is actually Ross’ present, and it’s his efficiency and his phenomenal vocals that drive it. His scrappy Ethan is the Sammy Glick of publishing, and “The Connector” stays on observe when it focuses on the tantalizing topic of what occurs when younger ambition wedded to actual expertise run fully off the tracks.
The place the musical begins to muddy up the workplace politics is when Robin states what could or might not be true: Her failure is all about sexism, though this position may simply be performed by a male actor, with solely the swap of some pronouns. I needed to roll my eyes when Robin lastly will get an article revealed at one other journal and its title is “Methods to Get Out of Texas: Backwards, in Excessive Heels.” That is exactly the form of human curiosity story that editors have at all times assigned to ladies, particularly in the event you put the phrases “excessive heels” within the headline. Robin delivers the excellent news of her first revealed article with out a smidgeon of irony.
Enjoying the put-upon and under-appreciated copy editor with one byline to her title, Cruz is given nothing however discordant music to sing and rapidly emerges as one thing of a tablet, regardless of being the musical’s main whistleblower.
She complains about all of the corrupt and privileged “white males” round her. A fast fact-check, nevertheless, reveals that two of the newest high-profile instances of actual fabrication and/or plagiarism concerned writers who weren’t white males: Jason Blair of The New York Instances and Sabrina Rubin Erdely of Rolling Stone.
“The Connector” is clearly primarily based on Stephen Glass’ sequence of made-up articles on the New Republic within the Nineties — the musical is about in that decade — however that scandal was preceded by The Washington Put up’s Janet Cooke, who returned the Pulitzer Prize after it got here to gentle that her profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict was bogus.
In a latest New York Instances interview with the creators of “The Connector,” director Daisy Prince factors out, “It’s a bunch of ladies who carry [Ethan] down.”
It has turn into a cliché of up to date American musicals guilty each sick of Western civilization on straight white males. Whereas the Glass case is talked about within the Instances interview, conveniently not introduced up are the names Erdely and Cooke.
Since it’s “a bunch of ladies” that exposes Ethan’s fabricated articles, it’s odd that on this musical, the Robin character comes off extra jealous and resentful than ingenious and proficient. The second feminine whistleblower in “The Connector” is a reader (Mylinda Hull) who writes a sequence of letters to the editor complaining about factual errors within the journal. She is a recurring leitmotif named Mona Bland, which sums up her impact on the musical.
There’s additionally a devoted copy editor, Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), who wields a pink pencil and sings that, in addition to being a stickler for the information, she marched with Martin Luther King Jr.. How are we purported to interpret this late-in-the-musical character revelation? Does Muriel’s help of civil rights imply that truth-tellers possess a social conscience {and professional} fabulists like Ethan vote Republican?
Which results in a far better false impression being promoted right here. I’ve written the next phrases so usually in my theater critiques, most just lately with regard to Lynn Nottage’s ebook for “MJ” and Rebekah Greer Melocik’s ebook for “Methods to Dance in Ohio,” however right here I’m going once more: The cultural left hates the press each bit as a lot because the political proper on this nation. “The Connector” blames the general public’s distrust in journalism on awful reporters, though fabrication on the extent of Ethan’s (or Blair’s or Erdely’s or Glass’) is extraordinarily uncommon.
What’s behind the present fixation on faux information goes again to the ethos and ways of a Roy Cohn whose mantra was “deny, deny, deny” and “by no means apologize” and “in the event you repeat it usually sufficient, folks imagine it.” In different phrases, it stems from folks like Cohn’s greatest pupil, Donald Trump, and wackos who don’t even trouble to make use of the spell test on their computer systems to disseminate no matter they fantasize about on the web. Within the Instances interview, Brown mentions Kellyanne Conway’s notorious “alternate information” comment. Hiya! Conway is just not a reporter.
A number of of Brown’s songs carry to life the articles that Ethan fabricates, and whereas the jagged, jazzy music grabs the ear — one quasi rap quantity, sung by Fergie Philippe, actually perks up the present — the at all times intelligent and complicated lyrics don’t illuminate how these tales had been concocted.
It may very well be mentioned that that is a kind of terrific Brown scores, like “Honeymoon in Vegas” or “Mr. Saturday Evening,” that’s subverted by an inferior or problematic ebook. Sadly, it’s his lyrics, greater than Sherman’s ebook, that hyperlink as we speak’s “faux information” mantra to the uncommon incidence of dishonest journalists writing for established periodicals. Ultimately, “The Connector” is as reactionary as a right-wing politician who finds a typo in a Instances or WaPo article and cries, “You may’t imagine something they print!”
Prince’s course is breathtakingly fluid on Beowulf Boritt’s starkly fashionable set; the motion strikes throughout a wide range of locales with nice economic system and virtually no furnishings. In the end that alacrity hits velocity bumps as the fabric turns portentous, and Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography, with its dreary Martha Graham contractions, by no means fails so as to add kilos of pretentiousness to the more and more heavy load.
