The Connector, a new musical by Jason Robert Brown at MCC Theater, falls for its own con man. Set in 1997 at a prestige publication akin to The New Yorker, it attempts to examine the blurry lines between fact and fabulation in journalism, as well as biases toward gender, race, and class in legacy media that allow unscrupulous actors climb the ranks with unchecked authority. But the show itself spins its wheels too long and seems more interested in soft-pedaling the narrative of its nominal villain than interrogating the issues at hand.

Brown and his librettist Jonathan Marc Sherman center their story on Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross), an ambitious Princeton graduate with one goal in life: to make his name as a staff writer at The Connector, a hub of intellectual inquiry run by the veteran journalist Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula). Through personal charm and a sharp observational eye, Ethan quickly finds himself the literary world’s new wunderkind, churning out articles that catch the eyes of readers with their combination of wit and spunk. His rapid success catches the attention of Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), a copy editor who aspires to join The Connector’s corps of roving reporters, but who lacks Ethan’s economic and educational advantages.

Long before the material makes it clear, a savvy viewer can suss out that Ethan is cut from the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair cloth of journalistic exaggerators. His stories always come together a little too perfectly. His salacious sources have a tendency to disappear into the wind. Ethan takes the position that everything he writes represents a level of truth, even if some details cannot be perfectly verified, which puts him at odds with the magazine’s “fact-checking legend,” Muriel (a nervy Jessica Molaskey). There is a tacit level also operating beneath Ethan’s surface level assurances: if the stories he tells serve a public good, like ousting a corrupt mayor, does it really matter if things happened exactly how he described them?

Any journalist worth her salt would quickly mutter yes, of course. But The Connector raises interesting questions about the purpose of journalism, as well as the tunnel vision that sometimes afflicts the profession. Conrad, a fearless foreign correspondent turned corner office man, sees his youthful passions in Ethan, which rapidly cast him in the role of his defender, often against his better judgment. He clearly doesn’t feel the same kinship toward Robin – who grew up waiting tables in Texas to put herself through school – and thus, her career flounders until she moves to expose Ethan’s lies.

Yet the musical takes far too long to burrow into this debate, instead spending the majority of its 100-minute running time lionizing Ethan’s prowess on the page in a series of numbers that dramatize his fabricated stories. These sequences benefit from zesty, eye-catching choreography by Karla Puno Garcia, but they ultimately devolve into a frustrating sameness, which afflicts Brown’s musical language as well. Only a Klezmer-inspired song about a supposed reporting trip in Israel stands out from the bland pack, but it’s also so far afield from the rest of the score as to be jarring.

The show also squanders the character of Robin, its nominal narrator. She’s thinly drawn, and although Cruz does her best to flesh out her ambition and drive, she never fully feels three-dimensional. (Cruz, who is a star of the upcoming Broadway musical SUFFS, played her final performance on March 3; Ashley Pérez Flanigan assumes the role of Robin for the remainder of the musical’s run.)

Ethan does have compelling layers, both seductive and off-putting, but they are largely eclipsed in Ross’s too-smug-and-smarmy performance. We see the unethical operator at his center but rarely the charisma that got him in the room. The score also seems to sit awkwardly between Ross’s vocal registers: he sounds totally secure in the many ringing high patches, but the music often pushes him down to the lower end of his range, which can seem waveringly unsteady.

Bakula brings a sympathetic quality to an aging man who feels his industry passing him by and wants to burnish his legacy one more time before passing the mantle to the next generation. The supporting cast includes many fine stage veterans – Daniel Jenkins, Mylinda Hull, Ann Sanders, and Michael Winther, in addition to Molaskey – who end up with very little to do.

Daisy Prince directs this world premiere with a slick eye, although Beowulf Borritt’s electronically augmented set and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s austere lighting feel too flashy for a cerebral 1990s magazine office. Overall, The Connector addresses a worthy subject that still reverberates in our time of alternative facts and fake news, but the material itself fails to connect.