Thou Shalt Not

There’s a lot of wonderful material in THOU SHALT NOT, the Susan Stroman, Harry Connick musical based on Zola’s Therese Raquin. What’s not so wonderful is the adaptation of the book and the development of the characters, mere shadows of Zola’s victims and victimizers.

Zola like so many of us, took his story from the tabloids: wife murders husband. Around it, he developed a naturalistic novel of passion that is dark, bitter, and guilt-ridden. What engages us reading Zola is his vision of human destiny, and the animals who invent and sustain it.

The musical is a mere glimmer of this, with some tuneful songs by Harry Connick, Jr. One of which, the finale in Act I, is a lullaby about a tugboat so innocent we hardly imagine murder. But that is the outcome for the sickly Camille, who in Act II returns as a ghost to avenge himself on his adulteress wife and her new lover, his old friend, Laurent. These scenes are the most musical. Norbert Leo Butz as Camille transforms into a crooner like Harry Connick himself. But other musical numbers pale by comparison with neither melody nor lyric capturing the emotion.

Therese, played by the understudy Dylis Croman is an artful dancer with as little emotion as a murderess must have. Craig Bierko is a sexy and slimy Laurent while Leo Butz as Camille gives the character its full range, from sickly parasite to lithe crooner.

The sets by Thomas Lynch give us quick strokes of the New Orleans jazz scene, the ongoing life of the blues city painted purple and pink. The lighting, on the other hand, would be artful if it were not so consistently dark.

What fascinates us again is Stroman’s choreography, especially the love making scenes. So explicit and true, they leave us begging for more. And the sense of on-going life, the emotion of the hot dirty city comes to life vividly through the chorus. But after all, one can forgive almost anything in the hands of Susan Stroman not the least of which are murder, rape and a lackluster book.

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.