From Tony Award-winning composer JASON ROBERT BROWN (PARADE) comes a timely new musical about two talented young journalists on increasingly diverging paths. Set in the late 1990s amid a rapidly changing media landscape we meet a fast-rising journalist, Ethan Dobson, and an assistant copy editor, Robin Martinez, at the revered magazine The Connector. In a world that values the next big sensation, Ethan’s writing prowess and ambition force him to confront how far he’ll go for the ultimate scoop and Robin to consider how far she’ll go to stop him.
With a book by JONATHAN MARC SHERMAN, THE CONNECTOR will feature Brown leading the band at each performance and reuniting with THE LAST FIVE YEARS and SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD director DAISY PRINCE.
With The Connector, composer Jason Robert Brown has added yet another bravura score to his incomparable canon. His music draws on a rich palette of influences, and each song stands alone as a world unto itself. He is clearly in his element here, combining nuanced lyrics with an eclectic array of rhythms and melodies that both please the ear and propel the story. And it is a story that strongly resonates in our post fact universe.
Brown’s score, one of his best, has a decidedly ’90s groove, from the plaintive “Now What”—in which Conrad muses on the state of the news industry—to the twangy “So I Came to New York,” a duet that allows Robin to slam her home state (“Everyone’s an asshole in Texas…”) and Ethan to trash his (“Everyone’s a scumbag in Jersey…”). Musical numbers led by Fergie Philippe and Max Crumm, as Ethan’s dubious sources, give the musical space to breathe away from the office. And Jessica Molaskey and Mylinda Hull, as fact-checkers on Ethan’s trail, are so good that you wish they had even more to do, perhaps in a two-act version of this intermission-less show. But then again, in deference to their characters, this particular story might best be served by just-the-facts-ma’am brevity.
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