Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
Life Is But A Dream: Sharon (Sharon Case) is the focus of a special, standalone Y&R episode.
Sharon Case (Sharon) was in for a surprise when she opened up her script for the episode airing on Friday, January 5 and discovered that Y&R was devoting the entire hour to her character. “I remember paging through every page and I kept seeing Sharon’s name,” recalls the actress. “ I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, ‘Still me,’ and then, ‘It’s still me. What? Wait, what is going on? This can’t be right. This is all me. I’m on every page of the script. Wow.’ So prior to reading about it, I had had no forewarning. I mean, we do get the scripts well in advance, so that’s fine, but how I found out was reading the script. I knew I had a lot to prepare.”
In the episode, Sharon will dream about her future, a concept her portrayer embraced. “I think dreams are fun,” she enthuses. “The episode that came straight to my mind when I read this script was when Sharon was sick with cancer [in 2020] and she had this dream that was sort of All That Jazz-skewed. I loved that because for decades, I’ve always wanted to do something that was just random and off-the cuff and then we finally did it!”
Because of that previous experience with a standalone episode, Case Sharon’s latest foray into dreamland. “It’s a great challenge for me,” she points out. “There’s a lot to figure out for the actor when they have a show like that — figuring out what’s happening, the dream and all these different beats because dreams shift, and you have a lot of different vignettes, so you have to put a lot together. What was really helpful to me was our director for the show was very interested in working together with me and going over all the details of it and he wanted to share his ideas and hear mine. We really worked closely together on this. I loved having a partner like that; it really made all the difference in getting the show together.”
This time, the special episode took two days to shoot. “The first day we really gave it a great try,” Case shares. “We were very ambitious and we got most of it done, but we went a second day. It happened before that I’ve been on stage all day and in nearly every scene or felt like every scene, but this show truly was me in every scene.”
Sharon’s dream derives from not knowing how to exactly plan for her future. Between her coffeehouse to run, a new company about to launch and her nonexclusive romance with Chance, there are a few balls in the air for her. “I don’t know if it’s a real crossroads, like one thing or another she’s trying to figure out exactly,” Case muses. “She is trying to just piece together where she’s come in her life and what she’s achieved and what else she now needs to do. She’s trying to figure out what the dream means in the dream and trying to sort her way through it and figure out, ‘What is the message here?’ ”
While Y&R is keeping specific details of the episode — including what other characters will appear in it — under wraps, Case offers, “The circumstances with each of those people were specific and there’s lot of fun stuff. This was really written like a dream where it goes from one wild thing to another and sometimes it’s quite non sequitur. The vignettes I was doing with the other characters, you would never imagine in a million years. It was just some really fun, off-the-wall stuff. We all had a great time with it.”
As for the impact the dream has on Sharon once she wakes up, the actress notes, “From a dream, there is one or two things you feel you’ve learned to grasp and you’re going to hang onto. But there are still a lot of questions, too. The questions that linger, that didn’t get answered for you, are still good because they set you on a track to solving those things.” Which lines up well with Sharon’s approach to life. “Sharon is ambitious and definitely an overachiever,” Case says.
