What: MCC presents a new Jason Robert Brown musical with book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, about a monthly news journal with a fifty year legacy of accurate and compelling stories. When a young journalist who idolizes the magazine joins and quickly advances to stardom, questions of truth, integrity, and long-held biases come under focus.
And? It's still in previews, so I want to grain-of-salt this, but at the performance I saw the first third of the musical felt like the cast was encountering Sherman's script for the first time: stiff, stilted pauses and a complete lack of momentum to every book scene (the script itself failed to sparkle here as well). The end third is much stronger: tightly done, with tension and stakes. So hopefully the first third can catch up to this. Right now Sherman's script under Daisy Prince's direction feels unfocused. It's unclear who our main character is, and it's ultimately unclear why Dobson does what he does.
Still, there are things worth our time here. Jason Robert Brown has a particular knack for piercing emotional storytelling over the course of a song, and he gives some beautiful gifts to the cast in that way. The song where Dobson works his way through to find the perfect structure of an opening sentence is a beautiful study of what it is to be a writer. And the editor's admonishment, "Truth isn't just what you say it is," feels particularly relevant in this era of misinformation. And the show hits on the question of which is the more damaging block to marginalized voices being heard: the casually dismissive cruelty, or the genial myopia and latent misogyny and racism? (answer: both. it's both.)
Also, and this is for my sister: there's an entire song about Scrabble.
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