... Actors and playwrights are often stung by critical comment, but few sting back. Now, however, Elizabeth Sharland-Jones retaliates. She has written and directed a play which will open today, ''To Kill a Critic,'' which she describes as a ''murder mystery about the death of a Broadway critic after he 'kills' a new play.'' The cast includes Maggie Wood, Robert Zaleski, Ken Kerman, Margaret Mackey, Jordan Fischer and Jim Farley. Performances are at the American Theater of Actors (757-1799), 314 West 54th Street, at 8 P.M. tonight through Saturday. Admission $8.
(A version of this article appeared in print on September 23, 1987, on page C25 of the New York edition, and online at http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/23/arts/going-out-guide.html)
ByShannon Donnelly
Daily News Society Editor
Saturday, March 20, 2010
A local author who specializes in the London theater was the guest speaker at the February dinner of the St. George’s Society of Palm Beach.
The event took place Feb. 25 at the Chesterfield Hotel.
Elizabeth Sharland-Jones, the author of seven books on theatrical London, offered guidance to society members planning a visit to that city’s theaters and museums.
St. George’s Society of Palm Beach is a nonprofit, charitable, and social organization with a mission to promote fellowship among its members as well as to provide support for educational, social and cultural efforts in England through activities and fundraising in Palm Beach County, and to support both local and English charities that promote positive exchanges.
By Scott Eyman
Palm Beach Post Books Editor
March 19, 2010
I have a friend who’s a devout Anglophile, traveling to London every year to see some shows and, mostly, walk around town and bask. He will, I suspect, love Elizabeth Sharland’s Behind the Doors of Covent Garden, a book that covers the years from Bonnie Prince Charlie and Nell Gwynn to Princess Diana.
There’s a particularly interesting chapter here on the theaters of Covent Garden, among them the magnificent Drury Lane, which has housed everything from the great Ivor Novello shows of the 1930s to Miss Saigon, which ran for at least a decade.
The book also includes a lovely guide to interesting shops in the area, including Pleasures of Past Times in Cecil Court, my favorite London bookshop — actually, my favorite bookshop in the world.
Sharland, who spends part of the year in Palm Beach, knows every foot of the place — I didn’t know that the Palm Court of the Waldorf Hotel was modeled after the Palm Court of the Titanic! — and does justice to it in her rich and spirited book.
Elizabeth Sharland's new book Passionate Pilgrimages: From Chopin to Coward is a compendium of her tours of the houses of artists that have meant the most to her. There is time spent in Jamaica, at Noel Coward's house, but I was particularly interested in her visit to what used to be the London apartment of Ivor Novello, the star of Hitchcock's The Lodger, and one of the great matinee idols of the English stage, who is too little remembered these days. His apartment was above the Strand theater and is now the office of the English theatrical producer Duncan Weldon.
Sharland takes us through Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque as well as George Bernard Shaw's rather severe house at Ayot St. Lawrence. Some of these stories are more autobiographical than biographical, as in her story of living in Tangier in the hope of getting to know Paul Bowles and his wife, only to find out that Bowles was spending that year in New York.
In spite of the occasional missed connection, it's a stimulating guided tour by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/ae/content/accent/epaper/2008/11/23/books_column_1123.html
--A glance into a celebrity’s personal life juxtaposes what it meant to be famous then and what it means now--
Elizabeth Sharland is not your average author. She devoted her life to studying the art of acting and theater production. With acquired knowledge from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Elizabeth excelled. Her first job was with London’s Old Vic Company to tour Australia for six months, with Katherine Hepburn playing the leads. Later on she toured the States with Yul Brynner in his tour of “The King and I” as his personal assistant. After living in the spotlight, Sharland credibly divulges to her readers what it means to be an actor.
Sharland chose to honor the life and achievements of the beloved thespian in her new novel, Blue Harbour Revisited. Coward purchased land in Jamaica as a personal vacation spot. He called it ‘Blue Harbour’ and considered it his sanctuary. Between writing, performing, and attending plays, Coward hosted lavish parties and escaped from the chaos of the business at Blue Harbour. Today, the home, still originally furnished and maintained, is up for sale and is sure to be modernized.
Blue Harbour Revisited brings Coward’s dream destination alive once more. In the course of the novel, British actress Nicole Bennett, an Oscar winning actress similar to Judi Dench or Helen Mirren, goes to stay at Blue Harbour where she is faced with the decision to abandon her passion for acting or abandon her true love. Thereafter, Sharland begins to blend history with the modern stigma of celebrity life.
“Blue Harbour Revisited is much more than an entertaining look into a young actress’ life. With Blue Harbour about to be settled, I didn’t just want to highlight the impact that Coward had on the entertainment industry for those who knew him,” Sharland said. “I also wanted to share a piece of history with those who don’t know him.”
Sharland incorporates her own theater knowledge into Blue Harbour Revisited. The sacrifices Nicole Bennett makes mirror the actual challenges celebrities overcome to maintain their career.
“The novel relates to modern celebrity life,” Sharland stated. “In the book, Nicole is forced to abandon just one thing she loves whereas today, celebrities give up relationships, privacy, and normalcy, among others, to be in the spotlight.”
Blue Harbour Revisited offers readers insight into true theater occurrences, such as:
* The struggle which young actresses face to become established
* The Golden Age of West End Theater and the people who were a part of it
* A history lesson on the British invasion of Broadway
* The life of Noel Coward and his impact on theater
With a nostalgic look into original British theater and a focus on acting icons, Blue Harbour Revisited combines the modern perception of celebrity life with factual struggles. Through the eyes of Bennett, Sharland invites everyone into a world inaccessible to most. It will leave readers with a different perception of what’s it’s like to ‘have it all.’
Elizabeth Sharland attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where she learned the proper skills to excel in the theater world. Before committing to theater and production, Sharland trained as a concert pianist. Her first job was with London’s Old Vic Company to tour Australia for six months, with Katharine Hepburn playing the leads. She worked as the personal assistant to Yul Brynner on his final tour of the Broadway production of “The King and I.” Sharland is a member of multiple theater and arts organizations, such as the English Speaking Union, the New York Sheet Society, to name a few. She is an accomplished public speaker and has been interviewed on both BBC Live and BBC Radio.
Elizabeth currently lives in New York with her husband, a Dublin psychiatrist. Blue Harbour Revisited is the sequel to The Best Actress, one of Sharland’s six published books. Website: www.sharland.com
Blue Harbour Revisited is available at www.amazon.com
DURING those months when Nicole Kidman was slithering on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in Sam Mendes’s production of The Blue Room, she astounded the London theatre world. Not just because of her Viagran nudity. No, Kidman’s real break with the mores of the London stage was in ordering sushi take-out from Nobu in Mayfair, instead of supping on toast in the green room or eating kedgeree at Le Caprice.
The West End actor is a fragile beast when it comes to food, as a new book on the subject by Elizabeth Sharland confirms. Unlike the Hollywood actor, whose regimen is determined almost entirely by the producer’s desire for them to cut carbs and lose inches, the stage actor’s diet has traditionally been governed by the search for comfort. Forced to eat at odd times to fit in their performances, the stage labourer treats his or her stomach as if it were a cross between an invalid and a child, who needs to be fed, yet at the same time treated like a delicate flower.
Noël Coward, the patron saint of luvvies, used to collapse with “something eggy on toast on a tray”. Sharland, a theatrical producer, always made tea and cinnamon toast backstage, sprinkling sugar and cinnamon over melting butter. Actors would then confide their favourite comfort foods to her, which nearly always involved toast. Other favourites were rice pudding, trifle and spotted dick.
For the out-of-work or impoverished actor, comfort eating has to come cheap. Before he got his big break as Henry V at the RSC, Kenneth Branagh (soon to delight us in the new Harry Potter film) subsisted on burgers with fried onions and liver casserole cooked for an eternity in seedy digs in Willesden.
Many of the greatest theatrical types never outgrow this style of eating. Cicely Courtneidge and Sir Terence Rattigan both loved steak-and-kidney pudding. Dame Sybil Thorndike’s favourite was “everyday stew”: “Take anything that’s left over, fry it all up with vegetables of any or every sort, put any flavouring you like (Worcester sauce preferred), cook and cook and cook till it’s a gorgeous mess. And if you don’t like it, I’ve no use for you at all: for it’s lovely”.
Many thespian comfort eaters, however, have been rather more fastidious than this. Dame Judi Dench, for example, is fond of poached salmon and can’t do without her tea with honey (terribly good for restoring a larynx strained from an evening’s emoting) and her royal jelly. Sir Ralph Richardson always had to have Spanish omelette — that restoring mixture of eggs, oil and potatoes — when he dined at the Connaught, after which he might retire early, complaining of being bored.
After getting an Equity card, Sharland claims, “the next success in becoming a professional actor is being able to afford dinner in Rules, Le Caprice, The Ivy or The Savoy and waving to fellow thespians who too are ready to follow in the footsteps of the famous”. Here, the scope for comfort eating becomes altogether grander.
At The Ivy, you can order caviar and steak like Maria Callas; at The Savoy you can nibble on smoked salmon and foie gras like every legend of the West End who ever held a fork. Or, at Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, you can sit where Sir John Gielgud (God rest his soul) always sat, and eat his favourite oysters. The food Gielgud offered when he entertained was also luxurious, in an obvious sort of way: smoked salmon, asparagus or cold soup, followed by duck purchased from either Fortnum & Mason or Marks & Spencer; and for special occasions, an enormous pyramid of profiteroles for dessert.
Given the strange hours they keep, one of the best eating options for actors is afternoon tea. Gone are the days when matinée audiences disturbed productions by rattling teatrays brought to them by usherettes; but on non-matinée days, performers can still enjoy a spot of cake.
Perhaps the greatest thespian tea-eater of them all was Robert Morley, the great character actor and father of the theatre critic Sheridan Morley, who padded out his splendidly curved form with copious four o’clock collations. For his ordinary workaday teas he ate only “flapjacks or crumpets, shortcake and gingerbread, Swiss roll and chocolate biscuits and one or two cakes which need eating up”. But on Sundays, tea in the Morley household was “an elaborate affair, with ginger snaps filled with cream and playmate biscuits and cucumber and pâté sandwiches and scones and jam and the cakes of course are fresh, like the brown bread”.
Morley lamented the passing of Fuller’s walnut cake, the centrepiece of many backstage teas, and felt that teashops were going downhill.
But for the very brightest stage stars, teashops have always been too staid a pleasure. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier did their comfort eating at glittering house parties or out and about in the West End. Despite her tiny waist, Leigh could really put it away and loved eating lamb with fennel at Le Caprice. As for Sir Larry, he cooked the crème de la crème of thespian comfort food: blanquette de veau, which he recommended serving with “the creamiest of mashed potatoes and the newest of peas” and drinking with it “a light, very cold white wine”.
Sir Larry understood the theatre of the table. He did not go so far as Edmund Kean, the flamboyant 19th-century performer, who varied his diet according to the part he was playing — roast pork for tyrants, raw beef for murderers — but Olivier was not averse to a little drama at dinner.
On one occasion, after the death of Vivien Leigh, he ordered an enormous meal, composed of all her favourite dishes: a vast salad with blue-cheese dressing, a huge steak, onion rings and three scoops of vanilla ice-cream covered with crème de menthe. But instead of eating any of it, he simply stared at his food, watching the ice-cream as it mournfully melted in its bowl. This gives new meaning to the phrase “restaurant as theatre”.
Curtain Call
Patrick Newley
THE STAGE
9 September 2004
Once a personal assistant to Yul Brynner, playwright and lecturer Elizabeth Sharland has published several successful books about British theatre. Now she turns her hand to Broadway, that sparkling thoroughfare in New York known as the Great White Way.
Called the Street of the Midnight Sun by ‘Diamond’ Jim Brady and immortalised by writers such as Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon as the Hardened Artery or Main Stem - Broadway is the embodiment of the history of live entertainment in America.
In Sharland’s A Theatrical Feast in New York (Sutton Publishing) she writes about the NY theatre scene and how food - along with art deco skyscrapers, yellow cabs and art galleries - has literally and figuratively sustained the theatre industry and its most famous stars.
All the well known restaurants are here - the Rainbow Room, where Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich dined together, Elaines, a favourite with Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood, and the legendary Sardi’s, the place where all first night parties are held.
At Tea & Sympathy, a distinctly British diner, Welsh rarebit, shepherd’s pie and sticky toffee puddings are the order of the day, much loved by regular customers Naomi Campbell, Joanna Lumley and Rupert Everett.
Some stars were not bad chefs themselves. Alfred Lunt used to rustle up a mean clam chowder, cardomon coffee bread and crushed strawberry ice for his guests. Robert Morley majestically served English high tea to fans in his Broadway dressing room.
As well as food and restaurants Sharland writes of NY’s theatre clubs such as the Players, Friars and Lambs. The Algonquin was the meeting place for wits Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. It was Benchley who arrived at the Algonquin drenched from a rainstorm and said: “Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”
Fringe theatres, aceric critics and theatrland walks are also covered in this wonderfully informative theatrical guide to NY which is a must whether it is your first visit or your 100th.
Sharland has also penned an intriguing theatre novel The Best Actress (Barbican Press), a sort of Jackie Collins saga about the ups and downs of stardom - but without the raunchy bits. Light and easy reading for the dressing room or beach.
By Patrick Newley
Rogues
and Vagabonds Theatre Website
Paris is surely one of the great theatrical capitals of the world, a city crowded with great theatres where stars such as Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan and Maurice Chevalier performed and where cafés jostled for the attention of writers such as Cocteau and Beckett. If you are lucky enough to have lived there as a young man, mused Ernest Hemingway, Paris stays with you for the rest of your life. It is a moveable feast.
Fittingly, actress and writer Elizabeth Sharland has called her potted theatrical guide to the city A Theatrical Feast in Paris: From Molière to Deneuve. In it she explores some of the city's most famous theatres such as the state-run Comédie-Francaise with its repertoire of Racine and Molière, the Marigny Theatre where the legendary Jean-Louis Barrault had his own company and the vast 1,200-seater Théâtre National de Chaillot which has a stage big enough to accommodate 500 dancers.
Unlike London most theatrical restaurants in Paris have almost cathedral-like interiors and are noted for their lavish decor and ornate furnishings. Le Train Bleu is actually housed inside a train station and was used in the film Travels With My Aunt. The magnificent Banquet Room in the Grand Hotel was the scene of one of Sarah Bernhardt's greatest triumphs. In 1896 ‘she wafted across the room in a halo of glory’ when a group of actors and writers planned a day of ‘glorification’ to honour her contribution to world theatre. No less impressive is Foquets on the Champs Elysées, much favoured by stars who visited Paris including Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Alfred Hitchcock.
Sharland, who lived in Paris for some years, paints both an intriguing historical and contemporary portrait of this great city. In the seventies she set up her own English speaking theatre company in the capital, Le Poteau, presenting new and classic drama and she writes wittily of the group's ups and downs.
As well as being a useful guide to theatregoing and eating in Paris there are also chapters on ex-pats such as Nancy Mitford and Oscar Wilde plus pen portraits of Bricktop, Yvonne Printemps, Sacha Guitry, Peter Brook and many others.
A must for your next Eurostar trip.
Patrick Newley © 2006
By Scott Eyman
Palm Beach Post Books Editor
Palm Beach's Elizabeth Sharland has written A Theatrical Feast in Paris: From Moliere to Deneuve. The book combines many things — a partial autobiography concerning Sharland's own time in Paris, and a history of the Comedie Francaise.
It then broadens to include chapters on George Sand, Colette, Georges Feydeau and — to cover as much territory as possible — the '20s expats, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
There are very nice illustrations of favorite restaurants and watering holes of the various personages who pass through the pages, and the book concludes with the author's own favorite restaurants and brasseries. Sharland is at all times a graceful tour guide for the ardent Francophiles among us.
I was particularly glad to see that she mentions Terminus Nord, a wonderful restaurant next to the Gare du Nord that contains one of the finest early-20th-century interiors you'll ever see.
Theatrical New York Mind you, the fact that she personally has a glamorous trans-Atlantic
lifestyle, dividing her time between apartments in New York, London and Palm
Beach, gives her an advantage over many other travel writers. As does the
fact that she has worked - as actress, writer producer and, on The King and
I, as assistant to the legendary Yul Brynner - in theatre in England and the
United States. She is also the author of Waiting For Coward, a play set in
New York, centred around a meal, in a luxury hotel, between a group of English
friends and the visiting Noel Coward. In this book she takes us through many of the famous (in America,
at any rate) theatrical clubs, along with restaurants like Sardi's (Manhattan's
equivalent of The Ivy) and hotels like the Algonquin. Most of the emphasis is on past stars - the Oliviers, John Gielgud,
Noel Coward (of course), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne - but current ones
like Rosemary Harris and Dame Judi Dench. Food has always been closely associated with acting - one of
the best lines in The Producers is when Max Bialystock denies that actors
are entirely human, asking his protesting side-kick, Leo Bloom, "Have you
ever eaten with one?" This book is a light-hearted, entertainingly written and highly
atmospheric guide to the links between theatre, food - and martinis - that
any English reader visiting Broadway will find a useful guide. It's also of
interest to armchair travellers, too, who can visit the places Sharland describes,
in their imagination, from the comfort of their own home. Recommended. By Paul Webb
Friday August 27, 2004
Elizabeth Sharland's
A Theatrical Feast in New York is a fascinating guide to the eateries and
drinking places of New York. Miss Sharland has already written a guide to
London's theatrical watering holes and dining establishments, and now she
reprises her research on the other side of the Atlantic.
Actresses' Globe-Trotting Theatre Novel
Friday November 14, 2003
Elizabeth
Sharland, pictured here in New York with actor David Suchet and director Sir
Peter Hall, is best-known for her informative and entertaining non-fiction
books about theatre stars (like The British on Broadway) and for her popular
and long-running show Love From Shakespeare to Coward - an anthology of plays
poems, letters and diaries around the theme of love.
Now she has written a pacy novel, The Best Actress, which though centred on the love life of an Oscar-winning actress describes its central character's climb to stardom via drama school, the National Theatre and Broadway.
There are too few theatre novels about, and this one will help fill a gap in the market - which is presumably why it was prominently displayed near the main counter of Hatchard's in Piccadilly recently. Given Hatchard's up-market clientele (it's one of the few central London bookshops with several royal warrants prominently displayed at the front), many of its customers will no doubt have identified with Miss Sharland's jet-set locations.
The cover of the book, with its pictures of the Italian coast, an Oscar, and a beautiful actress, promises an insight into a way of life that belongs more to the film world and Hello magazine than the theatre world and The Stage newspaper, but the cover's dominant image remains that of the Savoy hotel, which is the most resolutely theatrical five star hotel in London, so there's something there for theatregoers, too.
We'll be providing a round-up of theatre books in the run-up for Christmas, though of course the best Christmas present for a theatre lover is a theatre ticket!
By Paul Webb
This book recalls the days when actors not only held court on stage, but also went out to dinner after the show to receive another round of applause at such restaurants as The Ivy, Rules, Sheekey's, The Gay Hussar, Quo Vadis, the Caprice and The Savoy Grill. They are all still there but no longer have the associations they had in their heyday. Most actors tend not to dine out afterwards but sneak off and head for home. There are exceptions and every night at Joe Allen you'll see a clutch of thesps and the theatre-going public catching a glimpse of their favourite stars. But, long gone are the days when Henry Irving held suppers on stage at the Lyceum or Graham Greene celebrated his birthday at Rules. Simpson's had associations with Dickens, Wodehouse and Captain Scott, while oher memories are evoked of Gielgud, Betjeman, Galsworthy, Maugham and Rattigan, coming right up to date with Robert Morley and Judi Dench. There are even celebrity recipes: Rex Harrison's Smoked Tongue, Evelyn Laye's Southern Fried Chicken, Ivor Novello's Chicken Mornay and Wilfred Pickles' Yorkshire Pudding in this treat of a book.
From:
The StageJuly 20, 2000 |
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NEW YORK, USA A show honouring Alexander H Cohen, featuring a cast of mainly non-actors, has prompted a friend of the late producer to stage her own salute, writes Sue Fineberg. Playwright and author Elizabeth Sharland felt the original memorial to Cohen, whom she credits as starting "the British invasion of Broadway", was "poorly conceived", as it featured numerous people who worked with him, but had no major acting presence. "[Drama critic] Frank Rich was on the stage," she said. "I was appalled that they would have the 'Butcher of Broadway' talking at this memorial." Former New York Times critic Rich spoke in the show, held at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, about Cohen shows he had panned over the years. "I don't know why they didn't have Rosemary Harris or Lauren Becall," said Sharland. Both actresses were starring in Cohen's final Broadway production, Waiting in the Wings, on the same theatre the tribute was being staged in. "I just felt so frustrated the people in the profession could not speak. So I wrote to Rosemary afterwards and said, let's do our own tribute." |
Sharland presented A Tribute to Alexander H Cohen from the British on Broadway on June 26. The show was a British salute to the man who, in his long producing career, brought dozens of theatrical productions over the Atlantic. Harris, mother of Jennifer Ehle, appeared, as did actors Roy Doltrice (currently starring on Broadway in O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten), Carole Shelley (currently starring in Cabaret), Michael Allinson and Kate Britton - all of whom had worked for Cohen at one time or another. Some of the highlights included a reading by Doltrive from music hall comedian Billy Bennett's My Mother Doesn't Know I'm on the Stage and Allinson's rendition of Noel Coward's I Like America. There were also excerpts from At the Drop of a Hat, The School of Scandal and The Rivals. Some of the shows Cohen produced include Angel Street in 1941, 1964's Hamlet, starring Richard Burton, Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, Home, staarring Gielgud, and Black Comedy with Geraldine Page. Sharland had known Cohen for roughly ten years. They first had contact during the run of an Off-Broadway play she had written called To Kill a Critic. |
Ms. Sharland - who left her native Hobart in the 1960s for the London theatre world, is married to a Dublin-born psychiatrist and now divides her time between England and the US - has written From Shakespeare to Coward, From the Globe to the Phoenix Theatre, a guide to London's theatres and Thespian heritage.
In a letter to the Mercury, Ms. Sharland said copies of the book - not yet available in Australia - would be on sale on the huge cruise liner QEII, which will be on a 12-hour stopover between New Zealand and Adelaide.
Ms. Sharland is well known on the QEII and lectures on the liner during cruises between London and New York, where she has homes.
She has drawn on her expertise on London theatre for the book, which includes such notables as Noel Coward, Ivor Novello and Somerset Maugham.
She writes of their flats down the Strand, the restaurants they frequented and theatres and theatre museums which evoke their memories - as well as the places they lived.
Ms.Sharland has had three plays produced in New York and two in London.
She formed an English-speaking theatre company in Paris and produced Love From Shakespeare To Coward, an anthology about the theatre which used more than 100 actors in showcases in London's West End. She worked as Yul Brynner's assistant before he died of cancer in 1985.
Ms. Sharland's late father, Michael Sharland, wrote a nature column for The Mercury for 60 years until 1986, under the pseudonym Peregrine.
In her book, Ms. Sharland, tells of her first acting roles, with the local repertory company on stage at Hobart's Theatre Royal, "an architectural and historical gem [which] has so far escaped the bulldozer and progress."
