INTERNATIONAL EDITION

USC School of Theatre faculty member Jonathan Sharp can really work a room. Put him in the middle of any party scene, and he’s, well, magical. Take, for example, the role he’s revising for the third season with Los Angeles Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker. As Uncle Drosselmeyer, Sharp mysteriously appears on stage shrouded in a full-length fur coat during the busy Christmas Eve party scene. With a single swoop of his arm, he arrests the chaos and soon all the party guests are swooning at his swagger.... His resume includes leading roles in five Broadway productions such as Fiddler on the Roof; performances with major ballet companies such as the Boston Ballet; and several television parts, including a recurring role on the soap opera Another World.

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In 1999, Sharp played Sergei on AW, a Russian con artist who got Felicia to marry him by claiming he was suffering from aplastic anemia as a result of Chernobyl, when he was really writing a tell-all book about her life. Felicia eventually forgave him the deception and they even shared a kiss on the last episode of the show.

The Mississippi-born Sharp (who nevertheless was once a member of the Backstreet Boys of Russia) briefly brought a different kind of diversity to the daytime scene.

When the word is traditionally bandied around, it refers to Americans of different skin tones, cultures and maybe religions. But aside from the occasional sexy Englishman (EJ! Zack! Shane!) or woman (Anna! Holly!) and a periodic smoldering Australian (Robert! Simon! Cyrus!), daytime dramas rarely feature foreign nationals in major roles. And the few who do manage to make an appearance are usually illegal immigrants desperate for a green-card marriage who tend to disappear as soon as their story point is completed (An Li! Ameera!).

Considering that in the last decade the United States welcomed close to ten million legal immigrants from primarily Latin America and Asia, with a smattering from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, there seems to be potential for a different kind of story to be told.

Would you like to see soaps introduce more than the token character from outside America's borders? (Heck, when was the last time you saw even a Canadian hit your favorite soap town for an extended stay - character, not actor?)

Let us know below!