Connections in 'The Connector'

The Connector, the 2024 Off-Broadway musical by Daisy Prince, Jason Robert Brown, and Jonathan Marc Sherman, was recorded by the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive on March 3, and the recording will be made available after it is fully edited and cataloged. 

Set in the offices of a New Yorker or Atlantic-style prestige news magazine called The Connector, the musical is partially an exploration of how “fake news” corrodes the public trust in journalism and casts doubt on the historical record more generally. It is also a critique of the way in which women’s voices are often ignored, dismissed, and silenced to the detriment of society more generally. 

In the musical, the titular magazine The Connector was founded in 1946 by a 25-year-old entrepreneur named Aubrey Bernard. It then passed to one of Bernard’s proteges, Conrad O’Brien, who became new editor-in-chief in 1981. As the musical opens in 1996, the magazine has been purchased by new corporate owners and a new young man, Ethan Dobson, has just joined the magazine as a star writer. 

Ethan’s rise at The Connector is meteoric, and Conrad invests considerable time and effort in his career. The rest of The Connector staff, notably a Black staff writer named Tom Henshaw, a Latina copy-editor named Robin, and a white fact checker named Muriel all struggle, to varying degrees, to catch Conrad’s attention at all. Robin, who is roughly Ethan’s age, is particularly aware of the disparity, and brings it to Ethan’s attention but receives little sympathy or support.

The fictional history of The Connector bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the producing offices of producer and director Harold Prince, father of Daisy Prince and director of Brown’s first Broadway show, Parade. Conrad O’Brien had joined the magazine as a young man in the 1960s while on a stint in the Vietnam War. Likewise, Hal Prince joined George Abbott’s office shortly before being drafted into the army during the Korean War, and returned to the office afterward, where he quickly became a producer. He later took over the offices. Scenic designer Beowulf Boritt decorated O'Brien's offices with spreads from the magazine just as Harold Prince's offices were covered with posters from the shows he produced and directed. 

Ethan Dobson is hired to work at The Connector after Conrad’s wife encourages her husband to read a piece Ethan has written for the Princetonian. Likewise, Jason Robert Brown came to the attention of Hal Prince when Hal’s wife Judy recommended him, based on the work Brown was doing with their daughter Daisy. Prince and Brown have both been described (by themselves and others) as extremely energetic and ambitious to the point they annoyed their colleagues. Ethan Dobson comes across the same way, and it is implied Ethan reminds Conrad of an earlier version of himself.

When Dobson (whose name, it should be noted, is related to an alternative Middle English form of Brown’s middle name, Robert), is hired at The Connector he begins a friendship, and an implied romantic relationship, with Robin (a name that is the Germanic version of Robert) Martinez, a copy-editor who is roughly his age but who has yet to capture the attention of Conrad. When Brown started working on Parade, he started dating, and eventually married, an assistant in Prince’s office, an aspiring actor who did not find the kind of success afforded to Brown.

Brown and his first wife divorced, and although The Last Five Years is not directly based on their marriage, many have observed the similarities between the plot of the show and the public details of Brown’s life at that time. More interesting is The Last Five Years' treatment of the characters of Cathy and Jamie as compared to The Connector’s treatment of Ethan and Robin. In The Last Five Years, the audience is never asked to doubt that there is a significant gap between the levels of Jamie and Cathy’s talent in their respective fields. Jamie may not know how to balance the competing demands of love and art, and he may not be especially empathetic to Cathy’s own struggles (he sings, “I will not lose because you can’t win”), but ultimately Jamie is a version of Sunday in the Park with George’s Seurat. While he swears to Cathy that “he will be there soon” he begins to realize “the kind of woman willing to wait's/ Not the kind that you want to find waiting.” In The Connector, we realize that Robin might be just as talented as Ethan, but systemic sexism has not afforded her the same opportunities. One wonders if this might be the artists’ more mature reflection on the issues they first tackled in The Last Five Years.

Brown is now married to Georgia Stitt, an exceptionally talented composer-lyricist who, despite several commissions by important regional theaters and truly impressive albums showcasing her work, has somehow not had her work produced at a major New York theater. In 2017, she founded Maestra, an organization dedicated to supporting and bringing attention to the many women working as composers, music directors, and musicians working in musical theater, many of whom have not yet had their remarkable talent noticed. One of the show stopping numbers in The Connector is a song sung by Robin, “Cassandra,” in which she notes that the sexism of places like the Connector means “Half the stories of the world are left unread.” The song could be an anthem for Maestra. It is a biting irony that this observation is given a platform in a musical written by two men (though conceived and directed by Daisy Prince) rather than, say, in a musical by Stitt.  But it is sadly very possible that had the observation been written by a woman, it would not have been received in the same way.