8 hours Ago By TODD VON KAMPEN [email protected]
A budding Ogallala nonprofit group wants to secure the future of the city’s 1936 Prairie Theatre — and much more. They’re hoping not just to save the Keith County seat’s lone movie house but also to restore it to its Art Deco origins as a single-screen theater and uncover the stage and back rooms covered by twin screens for 45 years. That could lead to a downtown community theater and arts center offering live performances as well as movies, said Kaelyn Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the group.
“What we have zeroed in on is (that) this is a community theater,” she said. “And it’s going to take the entire community to really make it thrive and continue. I think that’s what the community wants.
” Armstrong said organizational efforts remain in early stages for the group, which first met in August and has met about once a month since then. Dustin Holstein of Ogallala and his wife, Hillary Hromas-Holstein, pose in front of the 1936 Prairie Theatre soon after they bought it in December 2021. They've had it up for sale again since December, prompting a nonprofit effort to buy the two-screen theater and restore it to its single-screen, live-stage Art Deco origins.
But concerns for the fate of the South Spruce Street landmark have been percolating since just before 22-year owners Andy and Lisa Byers sold it in December 2021 to local Valentino’s Pizza owners Dustin Holstein and Hillary Hromas-Holstein. The Holsteins put the Prairie back on the market last December, mainly because family time with their combined seven children has been difficult to find. “It’s gone great.
We’ve loved having the theater,” said Dustin Holstein, also an Ogallala City Council member. “But with our kids getting older, it’d be nice to have our weekends back and not always have to stay in town to keep the theater open.” Dustin Holstein said he and Hillary have had “a couple” of private parties investigate buying the theater, “but nothing that panned out.
” If the burgeoning effort to save and restore the Prairie develops, “my wife and I are fully on board to have a nonprofit and have it be a community-run theater so the community itself can be proud of it.” Armstrong said she, group President Hannah Flaming and other organizers already have received encouraging calls and offers of advice from cities and towns across the region and Nebraska that have successfully saved their theaters and kept them going as community ventures. They include the North Platte Community Playhouse, which received and restored the Canteen District’s 1929 Fox Theatre starting in 1980; the Majestic Theatre in Hebron; and the Hippodrome in nearby Julesburg, Colorado.
Among other notable examples are Scottsbluff’s Midwest, Kearney’s World, Grand Island’s Grand, Gothenburg’s Sun and Arnold’s Rialto. The Chateau Theatre in Wauneta marks its 30th anniversary as a restored, operational community theater this year. Lexington’s Majestic Theatre was saved, remodeled and reopened in 2015, with middle and high school students responsible for its operation.
The Prairie Theatre opened Jan. 13, 1936, as the crown jewel of Ogallala entrepreneur Albert F. Kehr.
He bought the Gem Theatre across Spruce at the start of 1914, then moved it to Ogallala’s main First and Spruce intersection in 1916. Rechristened the Princess Theatre in 1918, it operated there until 1956. Kehr, whose later West Fifth Drive-In Theatre operated from 1953 to 1984, built the Prairie for $85,000.
Its 608-seat auditorium and balcony boasted a 600-square-foot stage, with the entire theatre resembling the Fox that former Gov. Keith Neville had built and opened in North Platte in November 1929. Some of the surviving Art Deco features in Ogallala's 1936 Prairie Theatre can be seen in this 2015 photo, including the stairs to the currently closed balcony and the multicolored light fixtures installed by original builder Albert F.
Kehr. Though motion pictures always were the Prairie’s main attraction, the theater hosted the Miss Keith County beauty pageant in August 1937. Teachers from Arthur and Keith counties held a teachers’ institute there a month later, according to Keith County News stories at the time.
With its seats wearing out and other signs of aging evident, later managers split the theater into 225-seat and 175-seat auditoriums in the summer of 1979. Except for four dark years from 1988 to 1992, the Prairie has endured as a twin movie house. It survived fires on both sides that destroyed four Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co.
buildings to its north in 1952 and the three-story Duchess Hotel to its south in 1974. Despite the twin-screen conversion, it also retains original features like multicolored light fixtures and the Prairie’s original box office. This original 1936 multicolored light fixture in Ogallala's Prairie Theatre was rehung in one of the smaller auditoriums built during a 1979 twin-screen conversion.
Armstrong said posts by Flaming this summer on an Ogallala community Facebook page helped spur the meetings that led to the nonprofit group’s formation. It next will meet Nov. 17.
The Byerses are part of the seven-member interim board that includes Armstrong and is led by Flaming. Other members are Vice President Amber Lutz, Treasurer Stephanie Reed and Rob Nimchuk. Armstrong said the Keith County Historical Society has lent its advice in how to organize as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
The new group has its own Prairie Theater Community Facebook page, which originally bore Ogallala’s name. But then “we had people reach out from Grant and Paxton and Imperial and Arthur and Chappell saying, ‘We want to be part of it too,’” Armstrong said. It didn’t take long for members to aim toward restoring the theater to its original 1936 configuration, she said.
“There’s a lot of (grant) funding available if we take it back to original.” The Byerses confirmed that not only the old Prairie stage but also “even the pulleys and the curtains and that sort of thing are still up. .
.. Everything’s there.
The bones are there.” Ogallala’s sole performance stage of significant size has long been the Ogallala High School Performing Arts Center, known as the “Lecture Hall” for decades after it opened in 1964. It hosts the Ogallala Regional Arts Council’s annual concert schedule, in addition to school district productions and community events.
A restored Prairie would offer another location for performances as well as visual and performing arts classes, Armstrong said. Organizers also have hopes of launching a live community theater group akin to the North Platte Community Playhouse. But she said a restored Prairie stage likely would remain dark during the summer so as not to compete with the annual Crystal Palace Revue at Front Street, which marked its 60th anniversary Aug.
7. To make it all happen, the fledgling nonprofit group needs volunteers among both adults and youths, Armstrong said. “You need to have people at least thinking that this is something that really can happen and how you can be a part of this,” she said.
Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly! Special projects reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items..
