Doctor in the house

If a "Golden Girl" takes a perilous plunge during her Guthrie show, who you gonna call? If a visiting rock star has a throat so sore that his concert might need to be canceled, who do you want on your speed dial?

Dr. Jon Hallberg.

When illness or injury threaten to derail a play or concert in the Twin Cities -- as happened with "Golden Girl" Bea Arthur and saxophonist Kenny G, among many others -- panicked producers usually breathe easy once they reach Hallberg.

He's the on-call doctor for the Guthrie, the Ordway Center, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Hennepin Theatre Trust. For more than a decade, he also has been the go-to guy for injuries and ailments afflicting the cast and crew of movies shot here and for touring performers.

"I've not had a primary-care doctor who has been like him before," said Osmo Vänskä, music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. Hallberg has been his main doctor since Vänskä moved here in 2003. "His understanding of art carries over into his practice of medicine so that it's not just a science for him but also an art."

Hallberg co-founded and is medical director of the Center for Arts and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He is involved in creating a clinic with an arts focus to be located near the Guthrie.

Those who know Hallberg say that while he's an expert physician, it's his appreciation of the unique challenges faced by performing artists that sets him apart.

After Bea Arthur fell off the stage during a Guthrie show in 2001 -- a fall that left a thousand-plus theatergoers gasping -- company manager Cindy Berg called Hallberg, who was at a movie with his son. Hallberg caught up with Arthur at the Monte Carlo restaurant. He examined her ankle and treated her in a back room of the restaurant. She incorporated a joke about her spill in subsequent performances of the show, which went on a 26-city tour.

Saving many a day

A medical problem that's an inconvenience to a civilian can be catastrophic to a performer. The show, after all, must go on.

"For dancers, musicians, performing artists, if you injure a limb, that's not just your livelihood, but your psyche and soul," said Mary McColl, vice president of operations for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with which Hallberg traveled on a European tour. "He's somebody who gets that. He's got the heart and spirit of an artist."

Artists often arrive with health issues ranging from lower back pain to eye infections to stomach flus and bad colds, not to mention issues with vocal cords, said Michael Pelton, executive assistant to the music director at the Minnesota Orchestra.

"Dr. Hallberg understands the situation of someone being here for maybe a week," Pelton said. "If he needs to come to the office, the hall or a hotel room, he'll do it. In my 13 years of working here, we've never had to cancel a show because of illness. That's a tribute to him."

That's not to say there haven't been close calls. Vänskä remembers cutting his finger with a sharp knife the morning before he was to play clarinet in a Prokofiev quintet at Orchestra Hall.

"I was panicking and wondering what I could do with my clarinet after that," he said. "I went to see Jon, and he was very professional, very calm. He put tape on my finger, and he came the next day to listen to the performance."

As a kid, he played the medic

Hallberg was born in New Ulm, Minn., but traces his interest in medicine to the three years he spent in Brussels, Belgium, where his engineer father, a plant manager for 3M, had been transferred. He lived in Europe from age 7 to 10.

"Our house was near Waterloo, and there was this overlay of all the wars that had been fought there," he said. "You would go to the flea market and see all kinds of weapons. But even when we [kids] played Army, I never wanted to hurt anyone. I was always playing the medic, wanting to heal people."

The elder of two boys, Hallberg also had a fondness for the arts. He met his wife, Diane, in the St. Olaf College band. He played alto sax and she played flute.

"We used to gaze longingly across the band at each other," she said. They have a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.

"Jon has always been a very curious person, with an insatiable appetite for learning," said Diane Hallberg, who teaches music at Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis. "Nothing seems to bore him, which is kind of fun and frustrating at the same time."

Getting started

In 1995, not long out of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Hallberg was working with Minneapolis rheumatologist Gerald Mullin. Mullin's son was an assistant on the set of "Beautiful Girls," a film that was being shot locally. Hallberg was asked to see a cast member with a runny nose. The gruff actor with a New York accent turned out to be Michael Rapaport.

"I saw one person, word got out and the next thing you know, I'd developed the film piece [of my practice], the Broadway piece, the local theater," he said.

Much of his arts-related work is semiformal and pro bono. His consultation with Bea Arthur at the Monte Carlo, for example, did not generate a medical chart. And how does one bill for something like that?

Hallberg, who is also the employee-assistance doctor for the Minnesota Twins, hopes to remedy that with the clinic, slated to open in October across from the Guthrie. He hopes to draw performers there, instead of making so many on-set or backstage visits.

Medical ambassador

Hallberg's doctor colleagues see him as being good for medicine, both in terms of teaching physicians how to better interact with patients and warming up the impersonal reputation of doctors.

While doctors usually write for medical journals, Hallberg seeks to communicate with a general audience. As the attending doctor with the SPCO for their last tour, for example, he sent reports back from Europe that were printed in the Pioneer Press. He also appears regularly on Minnesota Public Radio, commenting on health and medical issues as well as broader interests.

But he'd be the first to tell you that he is not a celebrity doctor. And performing artists only account for about one-tenth of his practice.

"The patients give you symptoms and you address those," said Hallberg. "But when you talk to a person, you're finding out the physical symptoms and how they may play out emotionally. You get so much more information when you talk to someone. That's a holistic concept of doctoring, treating the whole person as opposed to treating the symptoms."

'A calling'

At their Minneapolis home on the Mississippi riverfront, Hallberg can be quiet sometimes as he seeks to decompress. His wife of 17 years gives him a pass. "His work is so much a calling rather than something he does because it's employment, so it's really hard to turn it off," said Diane Hallberg. "And he married someone who is the same way. Being a teacher is totally a calling."

Still, she has moments of frustration with his selflessness. "When [our son] was 6 months old, Jon took him to this Kenny G concert," she recalled of the time he went backstage to treat the famous sax player for an illness. "I asked him when he got back, 'Was Andrew with you the whole time?' It turned out that he handed him off to unknown stagehands."

For every memento he has received from the likes of Kenny G (autographed framed picture), for every kiss from the likes of Ann-Margret (the former lover of Elvis Presley put him "half-a-degree from the King"), there is also disappointment and heartbreak. He once delivered a diagnosis to an HIV-positive performer.

"Talk about being away from home, on the road, with no family, no support -- that's tough," he said.

And he was given the royal brush-off by one of the stars of the movie "Joe Somebody." "It was a rainy day and I was with my wife and kids, waiting for the guy to be finished with a scene," he said. "Finally, after an hour, I was taken to this guy's trailer and was introduced as 'Dr. Hallberg is here to see you.' And he said, 'Yeah, what do you want?' There was a slight apology when he realized I was there for his pre-production physical. But, in all the years of working, this guy was the only first-class jerk."

No matter, it didn't dim his passion for his work. "I've always loved the arts but I never thought that medicine, my profession, would be a path to feeding my curiosity about the world," he said. "That's the real gift."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390