‘The Connector’ Review: When Fake News Was All the Rage

If you’re even a little sensitive to signs of sociopathy, you’d peg Ethan Dobson right away. Someone at the start of a promising career in journalism who is so aggressively flattering and greasily evasive, with a snap-on, snakelike, aw-shucks smile, has got to have a scheme up his sleeve. Or rather, in Ethan’s case, a dangerous bunch of lies in his pocket.

To ask why the editors of such an obvious fabulist don’t catch him until they’ve published at least six of his articles, each one a long, lurid and uncheckable fantasy, is to ask why the editors of The New Republic took so long to catch Stephen Glass doing much the same thing. Or why the editors of Rolling Stone took so long to catch Sabrina Erdely; USA Today, Jack Kelley; The Washington Post, Janet Cooke; and The New York Times, Jayson Blair.

They didn’t want to.

That’s the most intriguing idea to emerge from “The Connector,” a murky new musical about journalistic fabrication that opened on Tuesday at MCC Theater. It sees Ethan (Ben Levi Ross) as the beneficiary of a long history of male editorial vanity that sentimentalizes its past and falls for the excesses of New Journalism over old facts. That makes Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula) — the head of a prestigious monthly called The Connector — an easy mark; when he takes Ethan under his handsomely graying wing, he thinks he’s securing his glorious legacy when actually he’s destroying it.

But that animating idea is also a problem because aside from Jason Robert Brown’s typically propulsive songs, which excite even the most absurd moments of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s book, the engine of the story, set in the 1990s, depends on uncertainty about Ethan’s veracity. That’s a nonstarter. After just one meeting at the magazine, a young copy editor and frustrated writer named Robin (Hannah Cruz) is already suspicious: “I’m watching you map the boundaries,” she sings, in a number that also serves as a vaguely romantic red herring. And the magazine’s “fact-checking legend,” Muriel, played by Jessica Molaskey, sees right through him even faster.

So do we, and we quickly lose interest.

That’s not the fault of the beamish, resourceful Ross, who, as a recent Evan Hansen, has experience portraying liars. Here, though, he has little to play; not pinning Ethan down is how “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Daisy Prince, keeps itself moving forward. This leaves the show devoid of psychology — the most important thing a musical might have added to the already well-covered histories of journalists who make stuff up. It helped, if you believed him, that Jayson Blair, after his deceptions were discovered, explained that he suffered from bipolar disorder.

But Ethan? We have no idea. The worst impediment we learn about him, in a song called “So I Came to New York,” is that he’s from a place where “everyone’s a scumbag”: New Jersey.