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Tony Sheldon’s career began in childhood in the way that family dynasties encourage. He was just seven years of age when he appeared on television singing along with a comic actor, Graham Kennedy, on the Australian variety television show, In Melbourne Tonight. Before that appearance Sheldon had featured on In Brisbane Tonight, singing the song, ‘Swinging on a Star’, alongside his mother, the popular entertainer Toni Lamond.
Throughout his extraordinary career Tony Sheldon has performed in Shakespearean drama, cabaret, musical theatre and contemporary plays written by Australian, American and British playwrights, including premiere productions of plays by leading Australian playwrights, Peter Kenna and Louis Nowra. He has appeared on all the main stages of Australia and has worked in many smaller venues. Sheldon has written plays for musical theatre, scripts for popular television serials, satirical revue and he has directed musical theatre and cabaret. He is one of a number of performers of his generation to have worked in a wide variety of styles, and one of a growing number of actors of his generation to achieve success beyond Australia.
The young Sheldon became a regular performer on Graham Kennedy’s television program for two years, performing songs, simple dances and short comedy sketches. Every fortnight on a Wednesday he would set off from primary school to the television studio for rehearsals for the evening show. In Melbourne Tonight was filmed live and so there was no room for mistakes. Sheldon always appeared in the first half an hour of the program to comply with regulations that only allowed children to perform before ten pm.
Sheldon’s entire family worked on In Melbourne Tonight; his father Frank was a producer and his mother, Toni, was a regular performer, appearing four nights a week. Even Sheldon’s grandparents Max Reddy and Stella Lamond sometimes appeared on this popular program in ‘Bring back the Tivoli’ nights, when Frank invited in all the old stars. The Tivoli was the Australian equivalent to British music hall. Frank had been a dancer himself, and was a member of the chorus when he met Toni Lamond at the Tivoli in Melbourne, where she was the leading lady to the English comedian Tommy Trinder.
Tony Sheldon made his first theatrical tour as a toddler, with his parents, who were both performing in a new American musical called The Pajama Game (1956-8). The Australian production of The Pajama Game was a huge success: the show ran for two years. Lamond played the union leader Babe and it made her name. It also propelled Jill Perryman and Tiki Taylor to stardom. To promote the show in Melbourne the cast frolicked in brightly coloured pyjamas on a gigantic bed atop a truck that rolled along the streets in the Moomba Parade. Tony, looking like a miniature Pierrot, clad in a pair of cut down pyjamas with a large diamond pattern, waved and smiled to the crowds for the duration of the two-hour parade.
The little boy had only just started talking, but he could already sing fragments of ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’, having heard it so many times. The company travelled by train on the tour and railway porters would greet them at each town demanding to meet ‘the kid’ as soon as the train pulled in. They would shout out to Toni Lamond: ‘Where’s the kid who sings?’ One of Tony’s earliest memories is watching his father dance one of the big numbers of the show, called ‘Steam Heat’, dressed in stovepipe trousers and bowler hat – a soft shoe shuffle of considerable difficulty, with a rousing jazz tune.
I HATE HAMLET (Marian Street Theatre, 1992)
After his father's death by suicide in 1966, Tony and his mother made a new start in Sydney. Sheldon attended Cranbrook School where he met Terence Clarke who encouraged him to perform. He left school before finishing and a week later he auditioned successfully for The Fantasticks, and moved out of his mother’s house. He played Matt in the exuberant musical, with lyrics by Tom Jones and catchy tunes such as ‘Try to remember’, presented at the Intimate Theatre in Neutral Bay. His appearance led to a series of invitations to perform. Sheldon was seventeen years old, six foot tall, with long legs and short, cropped light brown hair. He had a large and gentle, oval-shaped face with generous features and high cheekbones, a broad smile and animated hands.
In 1973, John Bell cast the eighteen-year-old Sheldon as Joe Cassidy in the premiere of what has become an Australian classic, A Hard God, written by Peter Kenna. The play is a raw, intense, realist work with some comic elements and when Sheldon first read the script he was stunned by the power of the role of the young male character Joe Cassidy, and its personal resonance. It was as if the character of Cassidy had been written for him in its exploration of the struggle of a young man with his sexuality. Kenna, who had begun his career as an actor, made the character of Joe semi-autobiographical since Kenna was also a devout Roman Catholic. John Bell had an Irish Catholic background and the world of the play was his world too. Although Sheldon had no experience of Catholicism he recognised the young man’s struggles, which meant that he played Joe with an authenticity that was exceptional.
with Andrew Sharp in A HARD GOD (Nimrod, 1973)
After the stage production of A Hard God, Sheldon was invited to appear in a television film adaptation of the play to be produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which was broadcast in 1974.
It was in the rehearsals and production seasons of Inner Voices (1977), Twelfth Night (1977) and Much Ado About Nothing (1977) that John Bell taught Sheldon acting techniques. Sheldon recalls that Bell was full of ideas and enthusiasm for the text and all dimensions of the performance, and keen to help anyone who felt anxious about playing the work of Shakespeare. In 1976 Terence Clarke invited Sheldon to join a new theatre company, the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, based in Newcastle, and he leapt at the opportunity. It was not only a chance to contribute to a new venture but Clarke promised Sheldon roles that would help to extend him. In the first production presented by the fledgling Hunter Valley Theatre Company Sheldon played the comic entertainer in John Romeril’s radical new play, The Floating World. The play is now regarded as an Australian masterpiece, with its incisive exploration of the long shadow of the war in the Pacific, its haunting satire and its quirky vaudeville elements. The action takes place on a ‘Women’s Weekly Cherry Blossom Cruise’ to Japan. Sheldon appeared in the role of the ship’s comic, inside one of two large rotating funnels on stage playing a drum set. After each of his jokes he played a tune on the drums.
Sheldon appeared in a range of roles after the Romeril play, cast by Terence Clarke as Tom in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie; the young boy Alan in Equus; and in other plays such as Michael Boddy’s Hamlet on Ice, Barry Oakley’s Bedfellows and John O’Donoghue’s A Happy and Holy Occasion. It was a productive year for him as a member of an ensemble. Over the next few years Sheldon consistently put his instinct for comedy, developed since he was a child, to excellent use in a number of productions: as Antipholus of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors alongside Drew Forsythe and as Dromio in 1978 and later in the ground-breaking production of Nick Enright’s The Venetian Twins in 1979.
But it was his appearance in the new American set of plays The Torch Song Trilogy in 1983-4 that in his view ‘put him on the map’. Sheldon played the closeted bi-sexual called Arnold Beckoff, a family-minded Jewish drag queen and hero of the play. Sheldon was nervous about the role because it was a lead role in which the character is on stage for nearly three hours. But he was also anxious because of the conservative views of so many Australians with regard to homosexuality, and towards homosexuals raising children. He had good reason to be apprehensive. Homosexual acts were still a criminal offence in New South Wales in 1983, the year of this Australian production. Homosexual acts were not decriminalised until 1984.
For the first time the name Tony Sheldon appeared above the title when the play opened at the York Theatre at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, in the spring of 1983. Critics praised the show. Harold Kippax marvelled at Sheldon’s star quality: his ‘exceptional stamina and virtuosity, his emotional depth and his ‘comic but indomitable’ humanity. Sheldon’s authentic and ‘irresistible’ New York Jewish accent also impressed the Sydney critic.(1)
TORCH SONG TRILOGY (J.C. Williamson's, 1983)
But the houses were small and the trilogy of plays that had been a major triumph on Broadway under the same director (Peter Pope), closed after a few months. Undeterred the two young publicists on the show, John Frost and Ashley Gordon purchased the rights and decided to produce the show in Melbourne. They transformed the marketing campaign, ditching the poster of Sheldon alone in drag, in favour of a photo that featured the couple in the show played by the golden-haired Deborah Lee Furness and Robert Alexander, alongside Sheldon and his mother in the play, the actor Myra de Groot. The new message was clear: not only is this a show about gay life but it is a show about families.
Tony and the other cast members never looked back. Torch Song Trilogy broke box office records for the longest running play in Melbourne. It was a major achievement for Sheldon, and a joy to be so celebrated in the city of his childhood and the place where many people remembered his parents with affection.
Sheldon went on to play in musical theatre productions and spoken word drama, and he won a Helpmann Award for his portrayal of Roger De Bris, the flamboyant theatre director in The Producers in 2005. Shortly afterwards he participated in a summer workshop with Simon Phillips to work on adapting the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for the stage. He enjoyed it immensely and hoped to be offered the role of Bernadette. The transformation he made in playing this role was one of the highlights of his career. Sheldon knew that the whole love story of the musical hinged on his credibility in playing a woman, a once glamorous star, and that it could not work if the audience thought for a second that they were looking at a man. He also recognised that for this kind of role to work an actor needs to be fearless and not to be worrying about losing all expressions of their own masculinity. For Sheldon it was important to embody in Bernadette that ‘old school star glamour’ he had observed in some of the characters who regularly attended his mother’s shows such as the members of Les Girls, who were loyal followers of Lamond.
By the time the stage show of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert opened in Sydney in 2006, the production was ‘tight as a drum’, Tony told me. It had a creative integrity of its own that seemed to grow out of the film but was not overly obedient to the screen version. It was clean but not chaotic, brilliant in its swirling colours but not kitsch, whimsical in its costuming without being garish, simple rather than slick. In one magical song number the performers glided around the stage in massive cup cake dresses decorated with huge smarties of purple, carmine and deep blue discs, fastened on to the stiff tulle skirts, each actor balancing a hat with a single two-foot long candle towering above their head, and a parasol in one uplifted arm. The cast was exceptional and included Michael Caton as the mechanic Bob, and Genevieve Lemon as the pub owner Shirley. Caton brought an understated laconic Australian touch to the spectacle and Lemon a bawdy and gritty charm to her character.
Sheldon appeared in the stage musical production of Priscilla in the West End with Jason Donovan playing Tick (Mitzi) in 2009, and reprised his role of Bernadette in the Broadway production in 2011 with Will Swenson as Tick and Nick Adams as Felicia. By the time the show opened at the Palace Theatre on Seventh Avenue and West 47th Street, Tony Sheldon had performed the role 1200 times. He was well positioned to advise the other lead actors to take vitamins and glucosamine pills for their joints, and was heartened when he learned that the Broadway cast members would work with a physiotherapist to help them adapt to dancing in heels, platforms, boots and outsize flippers, without damaging their spines.
INNER VOICES (Nimrod, 1977)
Priscilla opened at the magnificent Palace Theatre on Seventh Avenue and West 47th Street, on 20 March 2011. With some 1,740 red plush seats, gilded art deco features and curved balconies, the theatre had been the premiere house of vaudeville throughout the 1920’s, a fitting venue for Sheldon with his family background in variety and musical theatre. The cast had to negotiate a maze of basement corridors to access the stage, often strewn with all manner of coloured wigs on mannequins, orange lizard costumes, and trollies laden with extravagant headpieces. But Sheldon’s dressing room was quiet, neat and suitably glamorous, decorated with elegant rows of posters featuring actors from years of Broadway shows, all of them familiar to him after some 45 years as an avid student of American musical theatre. He was most at home in this room, and felt comfortable, contented and welcome.
Sheldon’s performance of Bernadette on Broadway brought him much praise from critics and accolades: he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical, a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award for Best Actor. He has continued to live and work in New York City since he achieved this success in Priscilla.
Tony Sheldon is an actor of extraordinary breadth and talent. He learned to act through working with directors and actors and through his own assisted study of other actors. His physical agility on the stage, economy of movement, vocal and dancing talents, and the overall warmth of his acting are special strengths that he developed over many years on the stage. He is dedicated to the ideals of ensemble acting although he has only experienced membership of an ensemble once in his career when he was a member of the Hunter Valley Theatre Company. Sheldon has excelled in both the musical and the spoken word theatre, and has appeared in works that bring high art and popular cultural forms together. He is an unrepentant theatre animal who has dedicated his life to live performance for more than fifty years.(2)
Footnotes
(1) H.G. Kippax, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 1983.
(2) For an extended analysis of Tony Sheldon's development as an actor see Anne Pender, 'Learning to Act: Tony Sheldon's Emotional Training in Australian Theatre', Humanities 2016, 5(3), 72; doi:10.3390/h5030072
Image Credits
Header image: Inner Voices, Nimrod, 1977. Courtesy of Tony Sheldon.
Image one: I Hate Hamlet, Marian Street Theatre, 1992. Courtesy of Tony Sheldon.
Image two: with Andrew sharp in A Hard God, Nimrod, 1973. Courtesy of Tony Sheldon.
Image three: Torch Song Trilogy, J.C. Williamson's, 1983. Courtesy of Tony Sheldon.
Image four: as header.