It takes a special combination of skills to run the Orpheum Theatre. Raising more than a million dollars every year is one of them. Being a risk-taker is another. For 35 years, Pat Halloran made an enormous impact on the institution. Along with restoring and expanding the building, he helped turn regional theaters like the Orpheum into New York producers, giving them leverage in an industry once dominated by a small coterie of Broadway investors. When Halloran steps down next week, he will leave both a proud legacy and a formidable challenge.
If you’ve attended a Broadway touring show at the Orpheum, you’ve probably seen Pat Halloran give one of his curtain speeches. For nearly 35 years, Halloran has been President and CEO of the nonprofit Memphis Development Foundation. He’s best known as the man who runs the Orpheum.
Next week, Halloran exits stage right in more ways than one. He’ll step down as president and, literally, exit stage right, where he’ll take up residence in the theater’s new center for arts education that Halloran built next door to the theater. He’ll work in the aptly named the Halloran Centre temporarily, until its fundraising efforts are on track.
To get a sense of how the Orpheum's new management will fill his shoes, it helps to know what Halloran has accomplished over the years, employing a combination of aptitude and risk.
For starters, it's in his blood. His father owned a movie theater in Omaha.
“I was the janitor in high school and the manager when I was in college during the summers,” Halloran said.
As a kid, he loved theater and movies. He especially enjoyed the big-budget movie musicals, even as his friends were jumping on the rock-and-roll bandwagon.
Halloran never pictured himself going into the entertainment business, except maybe to emulate one of his role models, Johnny Carson, another Omaha native.
“I do a mean Dean Martin (impersonation) after about three Beefeaters on the rocks, but after that my talent goes right down the old tube,” he jokes.
After moving to Memphis in the early 1970s, he tried his luck on the political stage. While serving one term on the Memphis City Council, he put his business acumen to work on the budget.
That business sense proved prove useful in 1980 when the Memphis Development Foundation hired him to raise $5.2 million, the cost of turning a smoke-stained Malco movie theater back into the Orpheum, in all its 1928 vaudeville glory. He would later raise another $8.5 million to double the size of the stage. Broadway musicals had been getting not only more expensive, but larger in size.
It wasn’t until 1997 that a show such as “Phantom of the Opera,” with its enormous chandelier that swings out over the audience, could play at the Orpheum. The effort to update the theater for the 21st Century was a highlight of Halloran’s tenure.
“Here we were seeing ‘Phantom’ on the Orpheum stage,” Halloran said. “I had worked so hard to get that show here. I was emotionally wrung out.”
A major part of Halloran’s position is deciding which Broadway tours should play in Memphis – a matter of taste that can make or break the theater. Is this the part of the job that requires a certain artsiness?
“Artsy?” he asks. “No, not me.”
Halloran attributes his success at the box office to a different kind of talent.
“I’m a gambler,” he says. “I like to play cards at the casinos.” He’s also been a partial owner in a dozen racehorses.
Producing a Broadway show is nothing if not a gamble. Only about one in five New York productions makes a profit. Halloran sees a familiar business model.
“The thing that’s interesting about my business is that I’m a lot like a casino,” he says. “We sell liquor, we gamble on every show, and that’s part of the attraction.”
What Halloran didn’t like was a stacked deck of New York producers calling all the contractual shots. So while serving as president of a group called the Independent Presenters Network, Halloran teamed up with theaters like the Orpheum around the country and started investing in shows.
“We got together and we said, ‘You know, if we became a producer we would get to see the financials.”
That gave theaters like the Orpheum more negotiating power later on when the tours were launched. Plus, if a show did well, there could be a return on the investment.
One investment made separately by both Halloran and the Orpheum was in the hit Broadway musical “Memphis.” It won the Tony Award for Best Musical. And since that prize goes to the producers, Halloran rightly calls himself a Tony-winner.
He also made sure that the musical’s national tour was launched in Memphis, which turned out to be a great financial success for the Orpheum.
Halloran’s final act was building a $14.5 million theater education building next door to the Orpheum. That doubles the amount of money that incoming Orpheum president Brett Batterson will have to raise annually, to about $2.5 million every year.
At a recent Orpheum board meeting, Halloran didn’t mince words.
He said: “Hey guys and girls, you all have got a major challenge on your hands.”
After a successful tenure of raising upwards of $60 million and helping the Orpheum to become a major entertainment destination, Halloran takes his final bow, next week while leaving a big gauntlet in the spotlight for the future president.
