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‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.

The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.

“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”

She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.

“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.

But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.

Ben Levi Ross, left, as Ethan Dobson and Hannah Cruz as Robin Martinez in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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Source: Elections - nytimes.com


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