Vulture is mixed-to-negative
https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-jason-robert-browns-the-connector.html
"Ethan’s stories, as he becomes increasingly successful, seem too good to be true, and they probably are. Though the book, by Jonathan Marc Sherman, takes far too long to get around to that revelation, that’s not exactly a spoiler. Prince, Brown, and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman have talked about being inspired by the cases of Stephen Glass, who fabricated a series of stories for The New Republic, and Jayson Blair, who did so at the Times. (The Connector could just be called Shattered Glass: The Musical, down to the fact that Ben Levi Ross, with a rumbly voice and delicate glasses, is sure to remind you of a young Hayden Christensen.) Dobson starts out with human-interest features, but then moves onto political scoops, claiming to have found a man with a videotape of a mayor smoking crack with a teenager, a plot point that also evokes Gawker and the Rob Ford recording. The piece is catnip for his boss, who steamrolls past the fact-checkers to get it published.
Right there, my alarm bells went off. 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. What does an editing process look like, and how exactly could you game it? (Shattered Glass did this exceptionally well, showing precisely how he faked out his own fact-checker.) I love a good song about procedure—in recent memory, Kimberly Akimbo taught me so much about washing checks—and there’s plenty in the machinery of journalism to dramatize: the interviews, the first edit, the second edit, the fact calls, even fighting about what sentences to lose when you cut to fit to a print layout.
Brown, a capital-R romantic, however, writes toward sweeps of emotion, not minutiae. We see Ethan’s writing by way of musical set pieces that focus on the stories themselves, not the work that might’ve gone into them. They play out over Beowulf Borritt’s Tron grid of a set (MCC can reuse it if it’s ever staging a Chess revival) with busy gestural choreography by Karla Puno Garcia. Early on, there’s a verbally dexterous number about a Scrabble star, then a solo for that unverifiable informant, and later a puzzling group number for a story set at the Wailing Wall. The framing leaves us in the dark about the specifics of how all this material was reported, or alternatively, forged. Glass himself was a high-school drama star who went to absurd lengths to make his work seem real—in his maybe-confessional novel, a character playacts a phone transcript with himself!—and any journalist will tell you those are the sorts of details that make a story sing. There’s a good musical in those schemes, but this one misses the trees for a vaguer forest."
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