February 1, 2024
A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.
The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.
“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”
She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.
“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.
But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.
The musical is partly about an ambitious young journalist named Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross), who in the late 1990s lands his dream job at a magazine — The Connector — and, shall we say, takes some liberties with the facts of his reporting. The story will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 2003 movie “Shattered Glass” (or read the Vanity Fair article it is based on), about the journalist Stephen Glass and his scandal at The New Republic. Here, though, there are a few significant updates.
The new show also follows a female character, Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), an assistant copy editor at the magazine who dreams of getting her first article published — if it can make it past the desk of the magazine’s grizzled editor Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula). Another woman, Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), is the longtime head of the magazine’s fact-checking department who grows increasingly incredulous of Ethan’s ever more outlandish stories — and eventually teams with Robin to expose his falsehoods.
“It’s a bunch of women who bring it down,” Prince said. “And it’s brutal because to take down something you love, or to pull away the curtain and find out what’s behind is horrible.”
During a dinner break from rehearsals in mid-January, Prince, Brown and Sherman discussed how working on the musical had changed their perceptions about journalism, how the show had developed over the past decade and what they wanted the audience to leave the theater talking about. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Daisy, how has the show evolved in the decades since your initial idea?
DAISY PRINCE I was naïve in thinking that, somehow, the explosion of social media and the easier access to information would set up a checks-and-balances system. But what I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that we’ve become much more of a culture of belief, instead of one that accepts the fact that there’s objective truth.
JASON ROBERT BROWN The biggest thing that happened was the Trump presidency. The day before we did our first reading, Kellyanne Conway had used the term “alternative facts.” So, suddenly, our show was in the context of this presidency that was built on a foundation of bullshit, and we were like, “Oh, that’s actually the show we’ve been writing is the story of how you get to a culture of bullshit.” How do you get to a place where nobody has any reason to believe anything that they don’t want to believe?
But the show is set in the late 1990s. Why did you decide on that era?
PRINCE If you’re going to try to find a moment when the scales are about to tip, that was the moment. It wasn’t just the explosion of the internet, but because more young people were adept at using the internet, older people found themselves in a very peculiar and precarious position when it came to employment. And the people in this show are struggling with that.
You began collaborating on this show in 2011. Why has it remained a priority for you?
BROWN The idea that an audience comes into this and walks out of it thinking deeply, and perhaps differently, about the way they look at the news, the way they look at the media, the way they look at the internet, the way they look at even their relationships is really important to me.
What do you want people to take away from the show?
BROWN That there is a distinction between truth and facts, between truth and journalism, between stories and facts. The arrogance of the ’90s print media — and especially the arrogance of certain televised media now — to suggest that they are objective and that they share both sides just needs to be punctured.
JONATHAN MARC SHERMAN The question that becomes more and more important is: Is it more important that a story be interesting? Or that a story be true?
BROWN Is it more important that it feel true or that it be true?
SHERMAN Exactly.
PRINCE And also that sometimes there are incredibly important stories and terrific writers, and they’re lost. Every single thing that Janet Cooke [a former Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for a fabricated article about an 8-year-old heroin addict] wrote about was important, and there are beautiful writers who falsified or embellished what they wrote. Is there a need to reform these people, or is there a need to reform the way we look at story, and storytelling?
How much power do you see journalists as still having?
BROWN There used to be really clear gatekeepers. In 1973, it was really clear that [the New York Times dance and theater critic] Clive Barnes was your gatekeeper. Until all of a sudden it was like, “Who are these people who are going to see ‘Wicked’ 400 times?”
PRINCE I follow a lot of #theatertok people, and I love hearing their perspective. So many are so smart, and they love going to theater, and their passion for it feels very much like our passion for it. Do I agree with them about everything? No. I’m just thrilled that they’re using every bit of money they have to support live theater.
BROWN Legacy media still does have a hold on my imagination, this feeling that there’s a place that I’m not accepted yet. The fact that The New Yorker still has not asked me to do an interview, I’m a little like, “What is it [expletive] going to take?”
SHERMAN The fact that serious theater journalism is still being invested in at all — at any place — makes me really happy. Much of the time I love arguing with it, but that it’s there is huge.
How has your relationship with truth and journalism changed as a result of working on the show?
BROWN I’m just as gullible as I ever was, but I’m certainly more wary than I used to be. When the Gaza hospital story came out in The New York Times after Oct. 7, some part of me was like, “I don’t know if that’s right.” [In a subsequent editors’ note, The Times acknowledged that its initial coverage of a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” that an Israeli airstrike was the cause.] And then when it turned out not to be true, I thought, “What are we doing if The New York Times can’t get that right?” [The exact cause remains unclear.]
PRINCE I’ve become a freakish fact checker, because the repost button is very convenient and easy.
BROWN With not even anything remotely resembling bad intent, a lie can be disseminated both by the originator and everyone who then parrots it with the belief that it’s true. And any challenge to that becomes deeply offensive.
PRINCE Belief is scary.
BROWN There’s all this goop now in between truth and fiction. And in that goop is where our show lives.