Kevin Schon - Career

Career

Voice-over was his second career, begun in 1992 in Los Angeles, after 10 years as a Senior Advisory Systems Engineer for IBM, where he developed and taught Design Theory to IBM field engineers. He spent his last three years with IBM living in Tokyo, returning to the United States in 1990, where he left the company and began studying acting with Ivana Chubbuck and voice-over with Susan Blu.

For many years, he was Nathan Lane's voice double, taking over the role of Timon in The Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa and singing the title song as well. He appeared in over 120 episodes of that series. He worked on the ground-breaking animated series Teacher's Pet created by renowned artist and cartoonist Gary Baseman, playing the roles of Spot and Scott. In addition, he is known by cartoon "cultists" everywhere for his work on The Tick - voicing both villains and superheroes. Schon also voiced Snowbell in Stuart Little: The Animated Series and Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild, once again replace Nathan Lane. For 3 years, he was the "comedy voice" of the ABC television network, voicing all promos for their comedies (Home Improvement, Drew Carey, Roseanne, and Ellen, among others) and was the promo voice for Politically Incorrect when it moved from cable to ABC. Kevin's voice appears in over 40 episodes of Married... with Children, with two on-camera appearances.

In 1999, he help financed the start-up of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), then went into semi-retirement when the company's IPO skyrocketed (this was at the beginning of the Internet "bubble") and moved with his wife (actor, writer and film maker Suzanne Dudley Schon) and children from California to New Hampshire. In 2002, the couple purchased a house in Beverly Hills, the lengthy New Hampshire winters having produced symptoms of depression. In late 2003, he produced More, an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Yeardley Smith (voice of Lisa on The Simpsons), at the Union Square Theatre in New York City. The show was critically acclaimed, but financially unsuccessful.

He was co-producer of Bat Boy: The Musical in the United Kingdom, first in a limited run in Leeds, then in a full-scale West End production at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. Even though most press reviews were scathing, one notable exception - The Evening Standard - took up the cause for what became a ground-breaking cult classic which is now one of the most often-produced musicals in America. Film director John Landis was brought in to see the West End production and enthusiastically signed on to direct a film version. Though a film screenplay was written by the original authors under the guidance of Mr. Landis, the producers lost the rights to the property, the authors proved recalcitrant, vindictive and uncooperative, and the film remains unproduced.

The strain on Schon's marriage created, in part, by his extensive absences from his family, and the loss of several million dollars of his personal fortune in trying to keep his projects afloat led to the inevitable breakdown and ultimate breakup of his marriage. He and his wife divorced in October 2006.

Schon became interested in energy healing, holistic and alternative medicine and metaphysical phenomena in late 2007. He began an in-depth study of various alternative and complementary medicine techniques (CAM) - including Zero Balancing, Crystal Therapy, and Reiki. Under the tutelage of Master Teachers John Harvey Gray and Lourdes Gray (Gray is one of the original 22 Western Reiki Master teachers trained by Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to the Western world from its original home in Japan), he attained the level of Reiki Master Practitioner in December 2009. He also became a serious collector and distributor of crystals and minerals, and operates a private consulting practice which incorporates his various interests and life experiences.