The Connector takes place at a New York City magazine publisher in the mid-1990s (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE CONNECTOR
The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 17, $74-$139
mcctheater.org
Beowulf Boritt’s set is the star of The Connector, an otherwise hit-or-miss new musical conceived and directed by Daisy Prince, with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman and music and lyrics by Tony winner Jason Robert Brown.
The show takes place in the offices of a well-respected magazine called the Connector. On the back wall is a rectangular grid of more than one hundred folded-over magazine spreads on which lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew projects various images in addition to, for one fabulous scene, a Scrabble board; neon lights form multiple shapes in different colors on the black floor, also a grid. Off to the sides are mounds and mounds of paper. Tables, desks, and chairs are wheeled on an off to indicate trips to different offices and outdoors.
The magazine is run by Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), who is determined to continue the legacy of the magazine’s founder, Aubrey Bernard, who started the Connector in 1946. It’s 1996, and the conglomerate VorschlagXE are their new partners. When enthusiastic young journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) arrives, O’Brien is immediately impressed by the recent college grad and gives him a job. It isn’t long before Dobson is getting major stories published in the magazine, much to the chagrin of assistant copy editor Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), whose pieces keep getting rejected by O’Brien, and Tom Henshaw (Fergie Philippe), a dependable but unexciting writer.
As Dobson’s stories become more and more popular, fact checker Muriel (Jessica Molaskey) has more and more questions, as does loyal Connector reader Mona Bland (Mylinda Hull), who regularly sends in letters to the editor with praise and criticism, and Martinez, who is suspicious of how Dobson is writing so many articles so quickly.
Ethan Dobson’s first story is about the prowess of Scrabble mastermind Waldo Pine (Max Crumm) (photo by Joan Marcus)
The Connector was inspired by the fraud perpetrated by Stephen Glass at the New Republic in 1998. Much of the show rings true, but just as much doesn’t. From 2001 to 2004, I served as editor in chief of a free local New York City newsmagazine with a small staff, consisting of a news editor, a features editor, and a managing editor. We all proofread and fact-checked one another’s articles as best we could, right at the time that use of the internet exploded around the country. I just find it too difficult to buy how easily O’Brien falls under the spell of the overly cocky and annoying Dobson, ignoring all the warning signs, even as he is distracted by VorschlagXE executive Veronica (Ann Sanders).
One of the show’s aims is to relate its plot to the fake news that now dominates social media and overtly biased television programs and publications, but the connection doesn’t come through. When O’Brien makes a toast early on, proclaiming, “To our fabled history of writers and editors, who still search, reach, and fight for the truth. To our beloved, well-educated, politically active readers,” it’s as if they are already outliers, ill-prepared for what is to come. “Together, we shall thrive and grow for many more decades, pushing forward, staying true to the tenets Aubrey Bernard held so dear!” he adds.
The Connector is a musical, but it feels much more like a play with musical scenes, never quite cohering as a whole. Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography ranges from barely there in the introductory number to fun and fanciful in Waldo’s celebration to head scratching during Dobson’s visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Brown’s (Parade, The Last Five Years) arrangements and orchestrations crackle, but the songs, performed by a small band behind the backdrop, lack consistency as they go from ballads to hip-hop to klezmer. Director Prince, who has previously helmed Brown’s The Last Five Years and Songs for a New World, is unable to get the scenes to smoothly flow into each other. And while there are laughs, a pair of cheap shots at Texas and New Jersey in “So I Came to New York” linger badly.
Ethan (Ben Levi Ross) and Robin (Hannah Cruz) become friends and rivals in The Connector (photo by Joan Marcus)
Bakula (Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down, Guys and Dolls), who was nominated for a Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for 1988’s Romance/Romance, has a firm grasp of his character in his return to the New York stage, while Cruz (Only Gold, Suffs) excels as Martinez, Molaskey (A Man of No Importance, Sunday in the Park with George) is right on point as the fussy Muriel, and Crumm (Emojiland, Disaster!) nearly steals the show as Waldo.
The cast also includes Daniel Jenkins as Connector lawyer Zachary, Michael Winther as cable host Brian Lamb, Danielle Lee Greaves as Jersey City mayoral aide Sheryl Hughes, Ashley Pérez Flanagan as copy editor Florencia Moreno, and Eliseo Román as Nestor Fineman, the fictional head of the real-life New York Press, which was the archrival of the publication I ran twenty-plus years ago.
In the end, The Connector has some worthwhile articles but could use more editing to cut down on the excess.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]