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Editorial Notes on The Connector
“Can we get more specific in this section right here?”
It’s not necessarily a healthy or charitable way to respond, and if the rest of the piece is coherent and engaging on its own terms, it shouldn’t matter, but it can be hard to resist the knee-jerk urge to go, “well, that’s not how that works.” That all becomes that much harder when a show courts that kind of response, as with TheConnector, a new Jason Robert Brown musical about working—and indeed, fact-checking—at a famous New York magazine. The real Stephen Glass did something like that, smearing Clinton ally Vernon Jordan by way of invented sources, but those were fictions embedded within an appealing narrative, which made it juicy, not a story all built around a single unverifiable character and artifact. It’s hard to imagine that a serious magazine would go full-speed ahead with that, doubly so with Ethan’s excuse that it’s a character study meant to ask, “what is truth?” Sure, you need something obvious to make even the less attentive members of the audience sense that something’s amiss, but The Connector, as a whole, continually skimps on the nitty-gritty details.
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