The musical, which opened Thursday at Broadway's Plymouth Theatre, is the handiwork of prolific director-choreographer Susan Stroman, who has three other shows - "Contact," "The Music Man" and, of course, "The Producers" - currently running in New York.

Stroman works hard and often inventively but she is handicapped by a story and score that fail to do justice to the musical's original source material, Emile Zola's "Therese Raquin." The tale has been transplanted from 19th century France to 1940s Louisiana. It's an intriguing idea, yet book writer David Thompson doesn't do much with it. He provides more of an outline than a fleshed-out story.

His illicit lovers, Therese and Laurent, are a pale pair of paramours. They are defined primarily by their passion for each other. Which means, once they get out of the bedroom, they are pretty dull folk.

Therese, played by the lovely and leggy Kate Levering, pouts quite a bit. Laurent, the big, beefy Craig Bierko, swaggers effectively. Yet they never become credible characters, which dooms the musical right from the start. What's worse, despite the erotic acrobatics of Stroman's choreography, the twosome generate little heat.

It's the show's secondary characters who are more interesting and more completely realized.

Therese is the unhappy wife of a mama's boy, Camille, a whining, sickly fellow. As portrayed by the creepily effective Norbert Leo Butz, Camille has some spirit, particularly after he's dead. The lovers do him in right before the first-act curtain, drowning the guy in Lake Pontchartrain.

Camille is reborn in Act 2 as a song-and-dance ghost, and Butz puts over his big number with pizzazz. He's kind of a Cajun Joel Grey and sounds a bit like Frank Sinatra, which is understandable, since the score was written by Harry Connick Jr., a young man who often recalls ol' Blue Eyes himself.

Connick's music, his first for a Broadway show, is at its most flavorsome when he is conjuring up the jazzy sounds of a lowdown dive or the Dixieland melodies of a New Orleans funeral. When he has to delineate character or advance the plot, his inexperience shows.

The composer doesn't have much luck with the comedy songs either, which waste the considerable talent of Debra Monk. She plays Camille's bossy, overprotective mother. It's hard to imagine a more ebullient and likable performer than Monk, so when in the second act mama is silenced by a stroke, the dramatic consequences are quite effective.

It's far more dramatic than the ham-handed attempts to portray the guilt shown by Therese and Laurent after her husband's death. Guilt is not an easy subject for a musical, and even Stroman has a difficult time putting it on stage in dance.

Yet her show-biz savvy keeps the musical moving, and her dancers are always among the strongest on Broadway. Here, they shimmy, shake, slither and slide, particularly in the show's atmospheric opening number. Too bad the rest of the evening doesn't retain that initial heat.

One hopes this production doesn't discourage Connick from trying his hand again on Broadway. The American musical theater needs all the new blood it can get. Whatever its faults, "Thou Shalt Not" is an honorable effort, a musical whose ambitions get the best of its sporadic entertainment.