|
 |
SUPPORT XLNC1 |
 |
|
|
Site Navigation |
|
|
|
|
|
|
MARCUS OVERTON
In a 40-year career that has crossed disciplinary lines with impressive ease, Marcus L. Overton is an Emmy Award-winning television producer, radio commentator, arts administrator, writer, and actor. Trained at Northwestern University's famed School of Speech - where he was a student of Alvina Krause, joining such luminaries of both stage and films as Charlton Heston, Patricia Neal, Walter Kerr, Robert Reed, and Paula Prentiss - he made his professional debut in the title role of Richard III at the Southeastern Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta, where he was also a member of the Academy Theatre resident company during the summer and fall of 1965.
After a season in repertory with the Eagles Mere Associates repertory company, he joined the staff of Lyric Opera of Chicago in April 1966, eventually working in every department in the company under the tutelage of its founder Carol Fox and Assistant Manager Ardis Krainik, who was later to head the company, as well as public relations legend Danny Newman. Rising through the ranks, Overton moved from the mail room and ticket office to the posts of Production Stage Manager and Executive Assistant to the General Manager (both posts held at the same time), teaching himself usable Italian and utilitarian German along the way. In the mid-1970s, Overton was also a staff stage director for Lyric Opera, in charge of mounting revivals of standard repertory, including productions of Madama Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Bohème (in the Giorgio de Lullo production that was the occasion of Luciano Pavarotti's house debut), La traviata, Fidelio and Elektra.
This detour into arts management did not stand in the way of Overton's continuing career in legitimate theatre. For the North Shore Theatre company in suburban Chicago, he directed their first forays into musical theatre, with productions of She Loves Me, Kiss Me, Kate and (in association with the Wilmette Children's Theatre) Oliver, as well as that company's first classic, Moliere's Imaginary Invalid.
Overton joined the Ravinia Festival staff in 1973, first as Assistant Manager to Executive Director Edward Gordon and Music Director James Levine, later as the Festival's Managing Director. Working in close association with Gordon and Levine, he implemented the Festival's Chicago Symphony Orchestra schedule, and oversaw presentation of major popular artists, such as Barry Manilow, Joni Mitchell and John Denver, as well as many return engagements by Judy Collins and others. He was instrumental in creating Ravinia's first Festival of American Dance, in which the Martha Graham company began its re-emergence as a major force in American Dance. He was also associated with the Ravinia Festival's first education program, which has now grown to international status.
Re-locating to Washington DC in 1980, Overton worked at the Washington National Opera, and for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the Library of Congress, before accepting an invitation to become Program Manager for Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution. For the next eight-and-a-half years, he exercised artistic and managerial supervision over nearly 1000 presentations covering the complete range of the performing arts: chamber music (Emerson and Smithson String Quartets, and authentic-performance ensembles such as the Smithsonian Chamber Players), dance (with special emphasis on presenting Washington-based companies), cabaret (Eartha Kitt, William Bolcom and Joan Morris), an important jazz series, and world music ensembles from every corner of the globe including Mongolia, Russia, Thailand, China, Japan, Africa, as well as presenting debuts of young artists such as Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and soprano Anne-Lise Berntsen.
Just before joining the Smithsonian Institution, Overton was called to Los Angeles by the Philharmonic's then-General Manager Ernest Fleischmann to oversee the production of a fully-staged mounting of Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, for which LA Philharmonic Music Director Carlo Maria Giulini was to return to opera conducting after a long absence. This production later moved to London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and was recorded by EMI.
In December 1991, composer Gian Carlo Menotti invited Overton to become Executive Director of Spoleto Festival USA, a post Overton assumed in February 1992. Overton continued to hold the festival together after Maestro Menotti withdrew from the Festival in late 1993, and assumed the title of Producing Director for the 1994 season.
In 1995, while working as an adjunct professor of theatre at the College of Charleston, Overton began a long, productive association with South Carolina's public broadcasting network, a renowned public broadcasting and educational television/radio network which actually predated CPB and PBS. His half-half hour interview show, "Who Do You Know?" was broadcast weekly, eventually supplemented by daily reports for ETV Radio from the Spoleto Festival. These daily bulletins eventually lengthened into a half-hour program that is about to celebrate its 15th year on the air, Spoleto Today, now known to many as "the voice of Spoleto." From 2002 to 2007, Overton also produced half-hour television specials for SCETV, all of them focused around that year's Spoleto Festival USA, and the third of which was honored with an Emmy Award.
In December 1997, Overton made his home in San Diego, a city that had long been his destination for (semi)-retirement. Since then he, has been an active member of the San Diego music and theatre communities. He served as Board Chairman of the Actors Alliance of San Diego for seven years, and continued his acting career in widely-praised productions of Edward Albee's Zoo Story (Renaissance Theatre), Arms and the Man (Moonlight Playhouse, Vista), and Oedipus Rex (6th @Penn Theatre).
Overton has enjoyed a long association with La Jolla Music Society, including a stint as the company's Artistic Administrator in 2006-07. At present, he frequently serves LJMS as a consultant for special projects.
During the late 1970s and the entire decade of the 1980s, Overton crossed the country as an On-Site Evaluator for the Opera/Music Theatre program at the National Endowment for the Arts, visiting over 114 opera companies to conduct evaluations of both their artistic and administrative elements.
Overton's current activities are focused primarily on radio (primarily in service to San Diego's only classical music radio station XLNC1) and various writing projects, as well as continuing to prepare three weeks of annual broadcasts focused on the Spoleto Festival for SCETV/Radio.
|
|
|
|
