[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new off-Broadway musical takes us back to the 1990s New York City in the hallowed halls of a prestigious magazine called The Connector. Think, the New Yorker meets the Atlantic. A young, enthusiastic, and maybe a tad too ambitious Ivy League grad named Ethan charms the editor-in-chief and waltzes past his colleagues to some plum assignments and drink invitations with the EIC.

It seems that Ethan has the golden touch and his articles sell magazines, something The Connector's new corporate overlords love. Ethan's ability to find extraordinary subjects is amazing, too amazing. Some people, women mostly, aren't buying what Ethan is selling. The longtime fact checker Muriel, the copy editor Robin, who he leapfrogs at work, and an eagle eye reader named Mona Bland. They know Ethan's stories and stories about his stories don't add up.

Now playing at the MCC Theater through March 17th, the musical, The Connector, has shades of the true story of Stephen Glass who fabricated all or some of 27 of 41 articles he wrote for The New Republic. He's not the only journalist who has done this. The show explores who gets to make and break the rules and asks us to consider the difference between truth and fact and if there should be a difference. The score was written by my guest, Jason Robert Brown, who was working once again with my other guest, Director Daisy Prince. They met at a piano bar a long time ago and have since worked together on songs for New World in the last five years. Welcome Jason and Daisy.

Daisy Prince: Thank you.

Jason Robert Brown: Happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Also with us is actor Ben Levi Ross, who is playing the boyishly charming yet unctuous fabulous Ethan Dobson. Welcome, Ben.

Ben Levi Ross: Hi. Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: Jason, what happened at that piano bar?

Jason Robert Brown: What happened at the piano bar is I was very, very young and unctuous. I was showing off at piano bars all over town whenever I could. I was in my very early 20s and wanted to make a name for myself in the city, so I figured just go to the places where I can do the one thing I know how to do, which is to play piano and sing songs. Daisy happened to be at that piano bar on one of those nights, and somebody said I should sing one of my songs for Daisy.

The song that I chose to sing in what was either a brilliant decision or an absolutely lunatic decision, or actually probably both was a song I had written called The Flag Maker, which is a weird historical interpretation of Betsy Ross sewing the flag in the middle of the Revolutionary War. This was, mind you, 30 years before Hamilton. I wrote that. As Daisy said, it had a magnificent effect of clearing the entire room, but also drawing Daisy to me because it was the kind of work that she thought, "That's what I want to work with."

Alison Stewart: Daisy, how did you know that Jason was someone you'd like to work with?

Daisy Prince: I guess I have, in some way, some faith in my own taste. By the way, it's not hard. When you listen to Jason's songs, even though they were written when he was really young, I take no credit for being brilliant and discovering anybody, because anybody with half a brain could listen to it and think it was extraordinary. It really was me being in the right place at the right time and at the same time. Everything happened starting from there. Then I heard everything else, everything else that he had written, and we started working together.

Alison Stewart: Ben, Jason, Daisy, and I can remember the '90s. You can't. No. What's something you found in your research or learned in your research about magazines about the '90s that really helped you understand Ethan?

Ben Levi Ross: God. I was born in 1998, so there is some footage from my childhood that-- This show ends in '97, so actually that's not true, but --

Jason Robert Brown: It's a nice try though, Ben.

[laughter]

Daisy Prince: There's footage of my parents is what you meant to say.

Ben Levi Ross: I was in the background as [inaudible 00:04:30]. I think the thing that I've learned from listening to Jason and Daisy and Jonathan Mark Sherman, our book writer, about why they picked the '90s to set this musical is that this was a really specific time before things tumbled into the technological age, but things were still being introduced. There's a line that Conrad O'Brien, the editor-in-chief of The Connector played by Scott Bula says where he is like, "Our new owners want us to start a website, but I have no idea what that is." Ethan is trying to describe to him what a search engine is for the worldwide web. it's a very specific time in our history that I think we're going to look back on in-- It's just a really interesting time to place the story about truth and facts. I don't know if that answered your question.

Alison Stewart: Yes, all good. Daisy, so you had the idea for this pre-Trump presidency. I think your first reading maybe was in 2016. How has the show had to change in tone and some of the ideas, have they had to change at all? And if so, how? Oops.

Jason Robert Brown: Oh, you're muted.

Alison Stewart: You're muted, my dear.

Daisy Prince: Oh dear. The first time I thought of doing this was actually a long time ago, almost 20 years ago. How has it had to change? It has evolved a little bit because we've been able to expand on some of the original ideas. A lot about women's place in the workforce, about how all of that ended up spinning. I thought erroneously that the minute the internet exploded, there would be no need for this kind of debate, because you'd be able to have easy access to the facts at your fingertips, and therefore, it would be very easy to discern what was true and what was not true. Hello, what was I thinking? A lot of the story hasn't changed. What's really strange is that it became more vital a story the more entrenched we got in the Trump years and a little bit more frightening. The cautionary tale aspect of it was even more vital as a result of what happened during that election and everything since continuing to this day.

Alison Stewart: Jason, as you were thinking about the music for this show, how did the time, how did the '90s shape the sound that you wanted, shape the way you wanted the songs to be sung and delivered?

Jason Robert Brown: What's interesting, when you were summarizing the play at the beginning of this segment, you were talking about, and I was like, "This is a musical?" I think that that never occurred to me. When Daisy pitched the idea to me, I immediately thought, "Oh, yes, I know what the music is. I think whenever I start to write a musical, what I most need to know is what's the milieu? What's the world? How does it sound?

This milieu, it felt very obvious to me in terms of I knew what this show should sound like. I was around in the '90s in New York City, in my early 20s, and so there's something about that knitting factory acid jazz, late-era CBGB thing that-- That's not my wheelhouse as a composer, but that stuff all felt like it filtered into the way I was writing. For me, most significantly, I went directly to Steve Reich.

I went to what I think of as that New York City propulsive minimalism to try and figure out how to integrate that with the rest of the sound, not only of this world but of these characters who there are characters of many different ages in the show, and so they all translate the sounds around them into very different musics. That's one of the great joys of writing musicals, is to figure out what each character is going to sound like and what world they live in. You talked about Muriel, the fact checker who contrary to the way when Ben as Ethan is singing, much of that is a pretty straight-ahead rock stuff. Then when Muriel sings, the harmonies are Schumann and that was-

Alison Stewart: It's tortured.

Jason Robert Brown: -very much the way that she navigates her sound world.

Alison Stewart: Ben, you've played a liar before in a musical in Dear Evan Hansen. In your mind, has Ethan ever lied in his writing before he gets The Connector, or was it something about The Connector and something about his ambition that caused him to cross the line?

Ben Levi Ross: This is something that we've talked about in the rehearsal room with Daisy. There's a moment, not to give too much away, but Ethan has a brother who appears in the story that he reaches out to when he's in a heightened moment of need. We've talked about how I think that Ethan needed to reach out to his brother on multiple occasions, whether that be for exactly this type of situation or something else.

I think Ethan has gotten himself in trouble before. I don't know if it's been to this extent. I think that the pressure that's placed on Ethan at the beginning from Conrad, I think Ethan is really feeling the pressures of making this newspaper succeed in a time when magazines and newspapers really were on the decline. I've felt like that was his impetus to just go, go, go. The culture of the '90s at that point, it carries over from the '80s, the sort of, buy buy, buy, sell, sell, sell mentality. It was alive in the journalism world as well. Sure, Ethan may have fibbed a bit in some of his pieces in the Princetonian, but I think never to this extent, and it's because of this pressure and this almost God complex that he has when he gets away with it the first time.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The Connector at MCC theater on West 52nd. It is up through March 17th. My guests are Ben Levi Ross, the actor, Daisy Prince, the director, and Jason Robert Brown, who composed the show. The set is by Beowulf Boritt. Gorgeous. Hi, Beowulf if you're listening. Really exciting. It's very vibrant and I won't give anything away. Obviously, the story bleeds off the sides of the set. There's papers and magazines stacked high off the main stage, and you have your actors, Daisy, sitting and they're often in sight. Why did you want the cast to be partially visible, and what is your job as a director to those actors when there's so much going on center stage?

Daisy Prince: I think the biggest thing I could give to them is a sense of purpose when they're sitting there. They're not there to be observers necessarily of everything going on on stage. That felt important for me to tell them. Also, the fact is we're creating a story. Anytime we can point the arrows to the fact that we are storytelling and that we're all embedded in the same story together and that we will begin the story at the same time and end the story at the same time.

That felt important to me, in the same way that there are periods when we can see the band on stage. It feels important constantly for us to be acknowledging our own storytelling and the role that that plays in crafting this piece. That was it. Also to have this wonderful metaphor of the rest of what a real office would look like. In our story, the office is painted very abstractly. The banker's boxes and pages, and piles of things that bury people, not only represent everything that happens in the workplace, but also very much a reminiscent of the end of things.

Also, the way in which we get swallowed up by the stories we create, by the offices we live in, by the lives that are not necessarily the lives of our creation, but the lives that are thrust upon us by our workplace, the reality of our workplace. It's a lot there, and to them, I gave them all something that they could do, that they could work with. What do you do in the workplace when you're in the break room? What do you do? What piece of your personal life?

Because we don't talk a lot about personal lives in the show, actually. What do you do in your private time when you have a minute to do something that defines yourself in the workplace? We talked a lot about that, and everybody chose something. Whether it be a book they wanted to read, whether it be a hobby they had, whether what they'd be doing is sitting, working, still working, but with a cocktail in hand, whatever. We went through all of those decisions. Where is that private person in that public place?

Alison Stewart: Jason, a lot of the big numbers in the show are dramatizations of Ethan's stories that he's written. What was interesting to you about turning articles into musical numbers?

Jason Robert Brown: I think when I started working on the piece with Daisy, my initial impression was that the only songs in the show were going to be Ethan's stories. There was a show in the forties called Lady in the Dark. The only things that happened in that show, the only musical numbers were dream sequences. I thought, "Oh, we'll do something like that." Then the interior lives of the characters just became very musical to me, and I thought, "No, I really want to hear them sing."

Jumping into Ethan's stories as the production numbers felt like that's when the show biz comes out. I think musicals have a certain obligation at a certain point to acknowledge the show biz. Musicals are this big declamatory art form, and when do you get to satisfy that? This was a wonderful opportunity, because Ethan is a showboat. Ethan, he likes to show off and he likes to entertain, and that's part of his enormous gift.

For all of the things we will say negatively about Ethan, he's an enormously gifted writer. It was fun for me to go back to how I wrote when I was 23 years old and think, "What are all the tricks that I used to throw, just to say, look, I can do all of it." My instinct now as a writer is not to throw all my cards on the table all the time because as you get older, you don't have as many cards. You don't know that when you're 23.

I needed them to be-- I would say they needed to be extremely brilliant with a lot of quotation marks around both of those words. It was pastiche, but it needed to feel as authentic and funky as it could. I needed it to really speak to the worlds that Ethan was trying to bring to life. It was a challenge, but it was really fun. The whole show was a lot of fun to write, but those numbers definitely had to put my brain in a different place.

Alison Stewart: Then at one point, Robin, who's the copywriter, who Ethan leapfrogs over and becomes the star young player in the office. Robin's like, "Hey, you were born on third base and you think you hit a triple." Does Ethan think this?

Ben Levi Ross: No. My God, no. In fact, as we've continued to-- things change really every night, weekly. I'm discovering more because we're doing this show eight times a week, and that's how you keep it alive. I think something happened early in the process where I actually heard her say that for the first time, like, really heard her say that. I was like, "Oh, I'm going to give you a moment to apologize actually for what you said."

That took me by surprise that that came out of my Ethan's brain. I think that that really is Ethan's reaction. I worked just as hard as you, and in fact, I'm younger than you. I'm getting my stuff done in a way that you can't. Listen, I have to empathize with this person. I'm not saying that this is right. I'm not saying that this is acceptable behavior, but that's the only way the show works, is for me to completely empathize with his-- it's neurosis really at the end of the day. He's neurotic and he's pompous, but he's very driven. I think when someone like that is met with someone telling me that I was born on third base and that all of these things were handed to me, it's like, "God, I don't know what to tell you, hun." That's just not the truth. It is.

Alison Stewart: It's a fact, but it's not the truth as they say [unintelligible 00:19:14].

Ben Levi Ross: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Daisy, I remember from school that you're a great singer and a great performer. How does your having been a performer helped you as a director?

Daisy Prince: I think what I try to do is figure out the things that I needed when I was a performer that sometimes I got and sometimes I didn't. The first thing being a room that's harmonious and peaceful and joyful. I try to create that work environment. An environment where I say when I think I messed up or I did something wrong, because I don't recall hearing a tremendous amount of that. Also a world that is unabashedly female-driven, and I don't feel the urge. I feel that while the direction of the show is unapologetically muscular, the way that this was, for lack of a better word, but the way that we put this together and how we worked on it is not just from the abstract visual metaphor, tell the story. Let's work toward this singular goal as authors and creators, but also rich detailed performances.

That's really what I love to do. I think that's been most helpful to me, is trying to create a nice balance between the larger picture and the performances of the actors, because I do love actors, and I'm so impressed by what everyone can do. The skill sets now are just crazy. We have a cast of people. We have a dream cast. I wanted to honor everybody's contribution because they are all vital.

Alison Stewart: The Connector is at the MCC Theater on West 52nd through March 17th. I've been speaking with composer, Jason Robert Brown, director, Daisy Prince, and actor Ben Levi Ross, thanks for spending time with us.

Jason Robert Brown: Thank you so much, Alison.

Daisy Prince: Thanks, Alison.

Ben Levi Ross: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, we'll celebrate the immigrant history of American traditional music with the group American Patchwork Quartet. They'll join us with some exclusive performances and a song for our 2024 Public Song Project. That's happening right after the news.

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