Jason Robert Brown's new musical fails to connect

 

The plot of The Connector, the new Jason Robert Brown musical at MCC Theater’s Newman Mills Theater, is more promising than its execution.  The story of a gifted and ambitious young writer who shoots to stardom at his magazine by fabricating much of the content of his feature stories was inspired by real journalists.  The fictional reporter and the editor he deceives are both so unlikable, though, that I was getting bored waiting for their inevitable downfall. The show is too black and white.

Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz) serves as narrator and a young assistant copy editor focused on getting published in the esteemed journal.  She introduces the story in the opening number, “A Young Man Dreams,” about a 25-year-old man in 1944 who envisioned a monthly magazine that would speak to his generation through deep investigative reporting.   Two years later, from a townhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, The Connector was born, she sings.  “And the whole world changed, and everything stayed the same,” the ensemble chimes in.

The magazine becomes revered.  In 1981 a new editor, Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), takes over after a stint reporting from Saigon.  He is introduced with Robin singing the same song but geared toward him: “A young man dreamed, in his room up at Harvard, that he’d someday write for his favorite publication.”

All is well until Robin has a third young man with a dream to introduce.  This one dreamed from his bedroom in New Jersey of his name on a byline in The Connector.  Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) is hastily hired based on his writing in the Princetonian, which O’Brien’s wife had read and admired.  O’Brien thinks he’s found a genius and approves story after story despite the concerns of Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), head of the magazine’s fact checking-department whose zeal for accuracy is legendary.

Big mistake.  Those two overbearing, egotistical men will be brought down by those two smart women.  No surprise.  As I said, black and white.

The idea for the show came to director Daisy Prince nearly two decades ago, inspired by the rapid rise and fall of young journalists like Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter at that time who disgraced the paper and the editors who failed to scrutinize his work, which played loose with facts.  The idea seemed ripe now that charges of “fake news” bring into question just what information can be trusted.

Prince conceived and directs the show, with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman and Brown’s music and lyrics.  Beowulf Boritt designed the minimalistic set and Tom Murray directs the elevated onstage and unseen orchestra.

The most dramatic – and unexpected – action of the show happens at the end, in the minute before the lights go out.  It takes an hour and 44 minutes to get there.