The Big Not-So-Easy

The day after Susan Stroman took home the 2000 Tony Award for choreographing “Contact,” she was on the phone to Andre Bishop, the man at Lincoln Center Theater who had commissioned her work. “I have another show for you,” she said.

That show, “Thou Shalt Not,” opens at the Plymouth Theatre on Thursday. It takes Emile Zola’s lusty 1867 novel “Therese Raquin,” moves its murderous lovers from Paris to New Orleans and sets it just after World War II. Director Stroman’s choreography drives the narrative, much as it did with “Contact,” and veteran librettist David Thompson has crafted the book. But the music and lyrics mark the Broadway debut of 34-year-old singer-songwriter-actor--and New Orleans native--Harry Connick Jr.

Never mind that two-time Grammy winner Connick had never written a Broadway score. Bishop, who took a risk on the unconventional “Contact,” was apparently ready to risk again. “Thou Shalt Not’s” tale of uncontrolled passion and its consequence stars Kate Levering as Therese Raquin, Craig Bierko as her lover, Laurent LeClair, and some 15 Connick songs ranging from jazz and blues to standards, funk and big band numbers.

“I think most people aren’t aware of what a consummate musician Harry Connick is,” Bishop says. “Yes, he is a novice to the theater, but who better to guide him through its perilous shoals than Susan Stroman?”

Actually, Stroman didn’t just guide Connick--she pursued and wooed him. She hounded his management. And when those attempts failed, she sent Connick a copy of the Zola book, the show’s treatment and, later, even an invitation to see “Contact.”

Reminded of that later, Connick candidly admits he knew a lot more about music, film and TV than theater. So he called upon an expert--his high school drama teacher, Sonny Borey. “He was the only guy I knew who would know who she is,” Connick says. “I said, ‘Who is Susan Stroman?’ He asked why I wanted to know, and I said, ‘She wants to do this show with me.’ He said, ‘Do the show.”’

“I just didn’t know if I wanted to sit around at rehearsals and do all this,” says Connick, more accustomed to movie sets, recording studios and concert halls, “but I’m having a blast. Susan and Tom [Thompson] both put a lot of pressure on me, and I happen to love that.”

The tall, lanky interpreter of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin is the first to say he never thought he’d be collaborating on a Broadway show, although he’s done nearly everything else show business offers. In fact, says Connick, he actually loves “to see who can get to the creative finish line first.”

“I’ll write music that I don’t think she’ll be able to choreograph to, that I think will be way over her head and she’ll come in here and tell me things that are extremely challenging to write music to. She’ll say, ‘I need this here and see you later.’ It’s like she’s saying, ‘You want to play that game? OK, I’ll play that game.’ We’re feeding off each other’s energy.”

After a rehearsal one morning, for instance, the three co-creators are talking about a particular stretch of music. It is just days before cast and crew move to the Plymouth Theatre. Stroman turns to Connick and says, ‘Show me what that sounds like, Harry.’ Connick goes to the piano and plays a couple of bars for her.

Then, perhaps 10 minutes later, it’s his turn. He asks about pallbearers in the funeral scene who, he says, “hold the coffin sort of like they’re holding a pizza box.” Stroman shakes her head, turns to her assistant, Tara Young, and asks her to check a reference in their source book about funerals.

“Every time I have these conversations with them, I always apologize because I don’t want to feel I’m overstepping my bounds,” Connick says later. “I mean, who am I to tell Susan Stroman [what to do]? But she made me very comfortable making suggestions, and she has no qualms about saying, ‘Harry, that lyric’s no good there.”’

Connick’s song “All Things” replaces another song called “How About Tonight,” and he says, “I still, to this day, think the song there before was more appropriate for the character. But I understand why they want the new song. I’m not the director of this show. I could pack my things and leave, or I could say [to myself], ‘OK, write another good song.’ And I think I did.”

After all, since his teens, Connick has turned out a dozen top-selling albums, including original as well as covered music. His work runs the gamut from blues, jazz and funk to big band and mellow standards.

Before he became involved with “Thou Shalt Not,” Connick may not have known Stroman’s name--after all, it was before her smash hit “The Producers.” But Connick was not totally unfamiliar with musicals. In high school, he appeared in “Guys and Dolls,” and at 18, he played the piano for rehearsals for a professional production of the musical “Satchmo.” And before working with Glenn Close in a TV remake of “South Pacific” that aired last spring, Connick had done a reading with the actress for a possible stage revival of “Pal Joey.”

Still, Connick says he was concerned about the process of creating a Broadway musical. A few yards from the rehearsal hall in a small room he’s converted into a makeshift writing studio, Connick concedes that he worried about how Thompson would go back and forth between his dialogue and Connick’s lyrics.

“Was he going to start saying, ‘I’ll write the last verse of your song?’ I was real paranoid about that,” Connick says. “But he basically dropped my songs into the book and wrote around them. It got to the point where I’d go up to him and say, ‘What do you think of this lyric, Tom?’ Man, in a million years, I couldn’t imagine asking somebody what they thought.”

That’s how Connick talks, not all that unlike the friendly, down-home character he played in the 1998 “Hope Floats” opposite Sandra Bullock. At one point, he tells the cast, “If you sing a lyric and don’t know what it means or want to talk about it, come find me.”

He’s also not above giving lessons. “I always wanted to learn the way Harry sings and breaks down a song so the lyrics are the star of the song--something he learned from Sinatra,” says Bierko, who played Professor Harold Hill in Stroman’s 2000 Broadway revival of “The Music Man.” “Harry’s been teaching me, on a very basic level, and to get that kind of lesson from somebody who is source material himself is really exciting.”

After the final rehearsal day at Lincoln Center, just before cast and crew sit down to a lunch of New Orleans gumbo, Connick climbs up on the band shell to let everyone know he’d just been over to Tower Records down the street, where he bought a dozen New Orleans-style albums for them to listen to. It was only a couple of blocks away, he shrugs, when asked about it later. No big deal.

“Thou Shalt Not” began more than two years ago when Stroman’s late husband, director Mike Ockrent, gave her the Zola novel to read. “He said, ‘You should make Therese dance,”’ Stroman says. “I read the novel and loved it. But I thought it would be more of a theater piece than ballet.”

Stroman brought the idea to Thompson, whom she’d been hoping to work with again after Kander & Ebb’s 1997 “Steel Pier.” The two of them came up with the notion of moving the story to New Orleans in the mid-’40s. There it could retain the novel’s French elements plus take advantage of the postwar mood when, says Stroman, “there was a feeling of hopeful times in the air. Mardi Gras had been closed for four years because of the war and all the musicians were coming back.”

In the Zola novel, Therese works in a claustrophobic Parisian haberdashery owned by her mother-in-law, Madame Raquin (Debra Monk), while Therese’s husband, Camille (Norbert Leo Butz), and future lover, Laurent, are office workers for the railroad. In “Thou Shalt Not,” which takes its name from Zola’s earlier theatrical adaptation of his novel, Camille’s mother runs a nightclub, daughter-in-law Therese works there and both men are jazz pianists. “Because the main characters are now involved with music,” Stroman says, “it is very believable when they launch into song and dance.”

It’s well-traveled territory. Assorted versions of “Therese Raquin” have emerged on film and stage over the years. Actress Kate Winslet has recently been shepherding a possible screen version, and the Dallas Opera will host a world premiere of “Therese Raquin” in November. Thompson considers the love triangle in Zola’s story a prototype for such films as “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Body Heat.”

The difference here, of course, is the emphasis on dance. So as story problems were resolved, the quest for a composer became paramount. “The whole point to placing the story in New Orleans is that New Orleans is a city all about music,” Stroman says. “There’s music in the street, at funerals and festivals, and we use all kinds of music to tell the story. Harry is the essence of all that music.”

As they tried to persuade Connick to join their project, Stroman and Thompson met with the singer at Stroman’s home in New York. “I really liked what they had to say,” Connick says. “Although I hadn’t done this before, I’m aware of the process of making art, and that you want to be on the same page as the other people you’re working with.”

The musician next invited them to New Orleans, where he was performing. Wanting “to introduce them to the culture and make sure everything was right,” Connick took them to jazz clubs and restaurants, to the French Quarter and less touristy areas. The following week, he walked through Stroman’s front door with a dozen songs in hand.

The three co-creators met several times during the next few weeks before Connick went off to make a film. But even while he was overseas filming, the musician called Stroman to play two songs for her over the phone. “It just poured out of him,” Stroman says. “He was completely obsessed and hooked.”

Connick, who says, “I love artistic challenge,” eventually wound up writing not just the show’s music, lyrics and dance music arrangements, but even its orchestration. “When was the last time a Broadway composer orchestrated his own score?” asks Bishop, who approved a workshop for the development of “Thou Shalt Not” in September 2000.

Raised by lawyer parents who also co-owned a record store, Connick has been playing piano since he was a child. At age 6, he played at father Harry Connick Sr.’s swearing-in ceremony as district attorney of New Orleans--a job the elder Connick still holds. By the time Harry Jr. was a teen, father and son were jazz club regulars.

Connick’s years in New Orleans contribute to such things as the way mourners at a funeral “shake the heavens” in song. And the script even incorporates an uncle’s favorite phrase that Connick can’t really define for the cast but that actor Leo Burmester says with particular gusto.

Thompson also thinks Connick’s jazz training affected the writing, recalling how the two of them would talk about “what it is when you play jazz--that feeling that you have to jump into it, that dangerous spontaneity that has to be there to be good. Harry would play drums, Stro just danced, and what came out of that was what is in the show. It was almost like she threw herself into dance, and when she was done, she had the vocabulary.”

The dancers in “Thou Shalt Not” often serve as the show’s Greek chorus, commenting on the action through movement. Much of their dancing is to drumbeats and, like everything else in the show, very sexual. Stroman early on told her dancers “to always keep your pelvis forward,” and nowhere is the dance more suggestive than in what Stroman calls “the bed ballet” between lovers Therese and Laurent on a spinning bed.

“In musical theater, you can sing about love or do a fox trot. There may be sexual tension, but it’s never shown. Never. You see it in films but not in musicals,” Thompson says. “But if Zola’s book had an impact on people, it must have been shocking, and our task was finding that for contemporary audiences.”

With “Thou Shalt Not” opening this week, Connick now is preparing to return to his other audiences. His two new albums, “30” and “Songs I Heard”--the latter completed during “Thou Shalt Not” rehearsals--will be released Tuesday. And coming up is the release next month of the film “The Simian Line,” and a national concert tour. But this tour will be different: Connick’s leaving behind several musicians from his band, saying their work in “Thou Shalt Not’s” orchestra and onstage gives them what he can’t always provide--”steady work with steady pay”--at least for a while.

“When I’m on the road, I’m not going to have them in the band, which is a little disheartening,” Connick says. “But I know they’ll be playing like that eight times a week making a lot of people happy.” *

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“Thou Shalt Not,” Plymouth Theatre, 236 W. 45th St., New York. Opens Thursday. Ends Jan. 6. For more information, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200.