REX
Music by RICHARD RODGERS
Lyrics by SHELDON HARNICK
Book by SHERMAN YELLEN
To see this musical is like watching a marauding shark becalmed in a suburban swimming pool. As an actor, Nicol Williamson radiates a sense of imminent danger, mercurial passion and magnetic authority in such a way that he could be every inch the awesome monarch that Henry VIII was. But in Rex he is submerged in a book that swamps that masterful Tudor reign with research-soaked tedium.
The drift of Sherman Yellen's book is that Henry divorced or beheaded wives in quest of a male heir. Actually, there was a son,...