From the
Winter 2008
UNO Alum

By Sonja Carberry  |  Photo by Tom Stanford
From the Winter 2008 UNO Alum

The script of UNO alum Pat Halloran’s life might open with a flashback to his parents’ north Omaha movie theater. That’s where the teenager and his friends – who always got in free – took in countless 1950s big-screen classics.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, Tenn., where Halloran worked with the luminaries of his youth – Yul Brenner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant and others — as theater president.

No doubt spotlights would shine on Halloran holding the Tony Awards he received in 2002 and 2005 for producing, respectively, “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Spamalot.” A comic vignette would show Halloran ending a dinner in Baltimore with actor Stacy Keach by tripping on the sidewalk and breaking his ankle. To which Keach would lean over to ask, “Does this mean we can’t golf tomorrow?”

It’s a pretty good story — and Halloran didn’t script a bit of it.

“None of the things I’ve done were planned,” he says. “I never intended to be in the Broadway show business. I’ve loved every single job I’ve had.”

Opening act
Halloran’s script begins in Omaha’s Fontenelle Park neighborhood. That’s where Halloran’s father, Patrick Jr., lived and worked as a distributor for Disney while running the Military Theater on 22nd and Military Streets with wife, Mary.

“They worked very hard with the theater they owned while trying to raise the five of us ‘Indians,’” Halloran says.

Firstborn Patrick III was itching to get a job and start life after graduating from Holy Name High School, but his father set him in a different direction: college.

Halloran agreed to give then-Omaha University a shot.

“I was going to do it for two years and then I’d bolt and do what I wanted to do,” he says.

Halloran’s father pressed the less-than-serious student to attend some fraternity rush parties. “He again encouraged me to open up my mind and consider ‘taking a look.’”

Enter Pi Kappa Alpha and a life rewrite.

“It turned me around,” Halloran says. “It took me to a whole new level I had not anticipated. I became a real college student.”

Halloran describes his college years as Animal House-esque with serious overtones.

He shared an apartment with frat buddies while working part time at WOWT-TV. There he was a production assistant, setting lighting before newscasts and pouring Storz beer into frosted glasses for live commercials.

On campus he was voted sophomore class vice president and was a KWOU radio announcer. As a senior he co-produced a half-hour special Christmas show broadcast from university studios by KETV.

With Pi Kappa Alpha Halloran served as intramural director, pledge trainer, then president. “We set out to be the No. 1 fraternity on campus,” Halloran says.

An impressed Milo Bail, OU president, asked Halloran to speak at a luncheon about his experience. It would be the first of many podium moments.

Presidential plans
Halloran graduated with a bachelor’s degree from UNO in 1965 and headed for the University of Miami to pursue a master’s degree.

“My plan was to be a university president,” Halloran says. “While I was doing all that, my college fraternity was having financial difficulties.”

Pi Kappa Alpha’s national office called Miami to offer Halloran its top post. He declined, but agreed to fly to the fraternity’s headquarters in Memphis to consider likely candidates.

“I was the only one they brought in,” he says.

Halloran moved to Memphis to take the Pike helm. Current PKA national president Ray Orians recalls working for Halloran in those red-ink days.

“Pat has a keen ability to raise funds,” Orians says. “He was able to influence and convince people to get behind him.”

It’s a role he’d reprise again and again.

Planting roots
After getting PKA into the black, Halloran founded Memphis’ Big Brothers/Big Sisters chapter in 1972. Three years later, he was elected to the Memphis City Council.

“I was doing all the things that meant a lot to me,” Halloran says. “I was a product of the Kennedy era.”

In 1979, Halloran quit his fraternity post to run for mayor. He finished a distant third, though comfortably ahead of Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, a self-claimed alien from the planet Zambodia.

The campaign was a rare defeat for Halloran. Not long after, though, Halloran took the reins of Memphis’ historic Orpheum Theatre, a sister theater to Omaha’s Orpheum and one in need of renovation.

“I’ve always been called in to be the turnaround guy,” says Halloran, who was hired as general manager.

To build interest prior to the theater’s 1983 renovation, Halloran committed to two large and challenging shows — Yul Brenner in “The King and I” and “Hello Dolly” with Carol Channing.

“I always figure out what it takes to make the big impact,” Halloran says. “I always go for the jugular.”

The productions provided a study in opposites.

Brenner was a quintessential prima donna, says Halloran. “He expected the world to grovel at his feet. When they did he was happy.”

Channing, on the other hand, happily signed autographs — surrounded by ladies undergarments at a local department store.

The shows’ successes rallied Memphis’ citizens around Halloran’s fundraising drive and the larger revival of the city’s downtown, of which the theater is an anchor.

The Orpheum’s dome and walls were reapplied with 23-karat gold leaf. Stage space was expanded, new lighting installed and the exterior upgraded. It was the first of two renovations that would total $20 million. A second renovation was accomplished in 1997.

The overhaul of what’s been described as the “crown jewel” of downtown Memphis helped transform the once-blighted district into a bustling entertainment destination with restaurants, hotels, a professional basketball team and a minor league ball park. Halloran was key to the district do-over, encouraging restaurant owners and entrepreneurs to open first or second locations downtown. He also invested in security and promoted daytime events, such as sidewalk art shows and outdoor concerts, to attract customers.

“It was a hard sell because all the people were leaving downtown,” he says. “The challenge was to try to reverse the trend. It took a lot of people.”

Back on stage
Halloran again brought people together in the mid-1990s, this time to form the Independent Presenter Network (IPN), a group of 35 independent theater owners in the United States and Japan.

The intention was “to get on the inside of the business and get involved and get vested,” says Halloran, who in 1997 authored “The Orpheum — Where Broadway Meets Beale.”

“Right now we are the most powerful group when it comes to tours in North America.”

The IPN, with Halloran as current president, produced “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Spamalot.” The group also is behind the current and well-received musical “9 to 5.”

Broadway producer Al Nocciolino (“Legally Blonde,” “Peter Pan”) calls Halloran a close friend who’s well respected in the theater community (the League of American Theatres and Producers named Halloran Broadway Presenter of the Year in 1999).

“Pat’s personality can really warm up a room,” Nocciolino says. “You don’t end up in the same place for as long as Pat’s been unless you’re doing something right.”

Closing act
For Halloran, 65, every plot twist has been a pleasant surprise — ending up in Memphis, his second marriage to wife, Anne, with whom he shares four children, but particularly landing in the theater business. In November he began a three-year extension of his contract as president and CEO of the Memphis Development Foundation, which operates the Orpheum; at its end, he’ll have been 30 years behind the curtain. He’s indicated plans to retire in 2011 and to focus on producing new musicals.

That’s a long way from those Saturday matinees at the Military Theater, which today houses a church.

But the script reads well.

“It’s just been the best thing I’ve ever done,” says Halloran, currently assembling producers in preparation for “9-to-5's” debut on Broadway in January. “It turned out to be a career that I never really planned and it fit like a glove.”