Fergie Philippe, Hannah Cruz, and Ben Levi Ross in The Connector. Photo: Joan Marcus

Like a good mystery novel, The Connector, an outstanding new musical by Jason Robert Brown (music and lyrics) and Jonathan Marc Sherman (book), shows you all the clues. The very first line of the show, spoken by Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), shows us the victim: “The story you’re about to hear,” she says, “was first published in…the final issue of the legendary magazine The Connector.” (The Connector may not literally be The New Yorker, but it’s not not The New Yorker either, as some clues in the table of contents–aka song list–in the program, and the page layouts that tile the upstage wall of Beowulf Boritt’s set, with their black-and-white line illustrations, will tip you off right away.) It will take till the musical’s closing moments to see exactly how this demise plays out, but the thing that’s so clever about the show is how well those clues are laid in both the script and the music.

The other thing that very first line establishes is the time: 1997. Which proves key for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the internet is still barely more than a gleam in media’s eye; The Connector’s new corporate overlords, a German conglomerate, thinks they should probably have a website but no one seems overly enthused, or concerned, about it. Print media is beginning its downward spiral, but the internet as a thing that you carry around in your pocket hasn’t yet come anywhere near taking its place. Which is one of the ways the infamous journalistic fabulists like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair got away with it. The Connector is largely based on Glass’s career (though one of its most telling details, I believe, is plucked from Blair’s story): the Ivy League wunderkind who rockets to the top of his profession, seemingly master of both his craft (gaining the respect of the magazine’s Vietnam-correspondent-turned-editor-in-chief, Conrad O’Brien) and of audience engagement in “the two younger quadrants” (gaining the seal of approval of Veronica Kraus-Ifrah, the liaison to Vorschlag XE, the new parent company.) 

Here, the wunderkind is Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross), whose story for the Princeton alumni magazine catches the eye of Conrad O’Brien’s (Scott Bakula’s) wife. Seemingly moments later, he’s turning in finely wrought character studies, actively blossoming under the tutelage of the man who sees his younger self in Ethan. And that’s the other way the fabulists get away with it–they know how the game is played; they know what their audience, both their bosses and their readers, want to hear, and they know that’s often easier to sell than the facts. “The facts can always be manipulated,” Conrad sings at the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary party, announcing their “partnership” with the German conglomerate. “We are not purveyors of facts, we are tellers of truths.” 

The question is, though, who gets to be a credible witness? Whose truths are we telling? Ethan’s got a knack for the quirky character study—a West Village Scrabble hustler named Waldo (Max Crumm) and a shady Jersey City fixer who’s willing to turn whistleblower for the right price (Fergie Philippe). The magazine’s notorious fact-checker, Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), can’t vet the article, but never mind: Ethan’s truths just “feel” right to Conrad. As opposed to the work of Black staff writer Robert Henshaw (Philippe), whom Conrad dubs “adequate.” As opposed to the work of copy editor Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), who got herself from an unpaid internship at a shitty Texas magazine on dedication and talent and still can’t get Conrad to view her writing with anything more than distracted condescension. 

“The whole world changed and everything stayed the same” is the refrain of the opening number, a clever piece of musical exposition that takes us through the history of the magazine. (Brown’s lyrics build the foundation of both plot and character throughout.) The Connector is the future of media, until it’s about to be relegated to the past; The Connector mints new talent and yet somehow it looks just like the old talent. Ethan knows how to schmooze, absolutely–but he also does it as a matter of course. He’s raised to believe he deserves to be anywhere; he’s a nerd, but Ben Levi Ross gives him the “aw-shucks” confidence of someone who never had to learn the difference between politely feigned humility and actual self-doubt. The only people who can see through him are the ones who’ve had to fight every step of the way to where they are. Muriel never trusted Ethan. Bob is flattered, then suspicious. Robin is unsurprised, then tries to learn what she can from Ethan’s political acumen–but when she starts to realize how nonmutual their respect is, she becomes disillusioned enough to engineer his downfall. 

Brown, Sherman, and director Daisy Prince lay this groundwork subtly, at first—of letting us see how eager and ingratiating and enthusiastic Ethan is, how much fun his first story is, but also how very much Conrad is primed to pass the torch to someone who recalls his younger self. Conrad’s excitement is genuine, and Bakula plays him with winning sincerity–but so are his blindspots: Genially suggesting Robin will particularly value working on a piece by a writer named Castro. Taking Ethan out for regular happy hours. Standing up for him against the fact-checking department. Quietly dissing Bob as “up to par.” Never quite getting around to reading Robin’s work, or the letters to the editor querying some of the facts in Ethan’s pieces. And Brown’s music tells the same story: Ethan’s songs echo Conrad’s, when they’re not actually singing in harmony, staged by Prince as parallel silhouettes. Robin’s are spikier, edging toward discordant, with metrically complex lyrics that Hannah Cruz fills with wit and anger. 

But it’s in the songs that dramatize Ethan’s articles that you really see what Brown’s been up to. They pop with style–with “verve,” to quote one of the Connector journalists–but that verve starts to shade toward the familiar, almost toward stereotype: The song of the Jersey City fixer starts to edge into a rap song. The song of the Scrabble shark is jazzy and quippy. And the final piece–the one that brings Ethan down–is set at the Western Wall, and the song builds on the simple rhythms of traditional Jewish music. It started to bother me, until the lightbulb went off and I realized that’s the point—Ethan didn’t do the legwork; he’s giving his editors what they expect to hear. The idiom is predictable because every one of those songs is a clue. (And if the show fails anywhere, it’s in getting afraid the audience won’t pick up the clues and gradually starting to spell it all out. Granted, I’m an audience member who’s primed to pick up on the expert sketch of unconscious bias that’s being drawn here, but I think I would have liked Robin’s hard-hitting song “Cassandra” even more if it hadn’t actually contained the lines “What you won’t admit is: her gender colors your interpretation of the things she said.”) 

In some ways, The Connector feels like a companion piece to the 2018 play The Lifespan of a Fact, or perhaps a prequel, since Fact is set in 2012 and this takes us back to the age before “alternative facts” and “truthiness,” to the moment when we first started to see the perverse incentives of the attention economy and what that might do to a journalistic ecosystem. But where Lifespan zeroed in on that balance between fact and truth that Conrad sings about here, and ultimately leans in to the power of story to tell “truer truths” than the facts, The Connector steps out to ask whose story we’re inclined to listen to. In the end, The Connector is Robin’s story–but she only gets her chance to tell it once the edifice is already crumbling. “I type a sentence and I influence the way we understand what is the future or the past,” Ethan sings, early in the play, but by the end, he’s singing “We believe what we believe, and all we want is someone to confirm it.” Both facts and truth have been subsumed in a chorus of “There never was”–belief unmaking itself.