A Self-Serious, Heavy-Handed Take on the Business of News, ‘The Connector’ Misses Its Mark

Puzzlingly, while the importance of ‘truth’ is repeatedly invoked, no real connection (pun intended) is made to ongoing debates over ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’ that have popped up on both sides of the political divide.

Joan Marcus
Ben Levi Ross and Hannah Cruz in 'The Connector.' Joan Marcus

Over the past year, on and off-Broadway, I’ve seen shows documenting all manner of depravity and destruction, from lynching to mass genocide, but I can’t recall a production as darkly self-serious as “The Connector,” a new musical conceived and directed by Daisy Prince — daughter of the late, great director and producer Hal Prince — in which the crime against humanity in question is … dishonest journalism.

Don’t get me wrong: The flat-out fraud in focus here — starker than the kind of media bias we hear politicians complain about regularly these days — can be an egregious and even dangerous form of betrayal, not only to readers but, on occasion, to editors. This was proved back in the late 1990s and early aughts, when the reporters Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair were shown to have fabricated key details and in some cases stories in scores of articles published in, respectively, the New Republic and the New York Times.

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