By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
© 2025 Vermont Standard, All rights reserved
Longtime community theater luminary and philanthropist Max Comins has purchased a well-known, 4.6-acre tract in Woodstock’s East End with the intent of constructing a state-of-the-art performing arts center in the highly visible location at the eastern gateway to the Woodstock Village center.
Comins’ plan is to construct a state-of-the-art performing arts center — potentially with a substantial visual arts component as well — on the site formerly owned by the Gerrish family, which in years past was the setting for an automobile dealership. In a real estate transaction inked on Aug. 1, Comins acquired the property from former owner Phyllis Gerrish for $1.4 million. The deal is set to close on Nov. 21, pending a new environmental assessment of the now-mitigated former brownfield site, where a substantial gasoline spill occurred in 1973.
Comins, a part- or full-time resident of Woodstock for nearly 40 years, was hugely successful during a brief, seven-year stint as an arbitrage trader with a Wall Street brokerage house in the late 1970s and early 1980s, turning that newfound wealth into a youthful dream that became a reality. Comins purchased the historic Kedron Valley Inn in South Woodstock, refurbished it with his own sweat equity, reestablished a restaurant there that was highly regarded by locals and visitors alike, and served as the innkeeper for the next 18 years. He eventually sold the inn in 2002 and turned back to a daily routine of independently trading stocks and bonds from a comfortable office in his cherished home on Blankey Cottage Lane in Woodstock Village.
At the age of 74, Comins now plans to turn the considerable wealth he has accumulated into a vehicle for his life’s other passions, much as he did when he left Manhattan to become a quintessential New England country innkeeper in his mid-30s. In the coming days, Comins will file all the legal paperwork necessary to fund and form the Max Comins Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational entity with which he is purchasing the Gerrish tract in Woodstock’s East End.
His newest dream? To erect a world-class performing arts center on the site, also known as Woodstock East, which was granted a Certificate of Completion by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation in 2012, certifying its successful remediation as a brownfield site. Funding, design, and construction of the proposed performing arts center will be the first major endeavor of the Comins Foundation, fulfilling Comins’ desire to use his life’s blessings to support the arts, community theater, and the Vermont village and town he has called home for the past four decades.
“The Max Comins Foundation will be based on my initial, first-year contribution of $15 million, plus $8-10 million now and another $7-10 million in 2026,” Comins noted in an email to the Standard. “It will be in an irrevocable trust so that I can never take the monies back. Ever. This will help secure the 501(c)(3) status after all the paperwork is approved, and it will allow others to donate and get a tax deduction. The initial goal of the foundation will be the purchase of the Gerrish property, finishing the remediation of the soil, and building a world-class performing and visual arts center as a non-profit for the benefit of the community.”
Max Comins
Following the project’s completion, Comins plans to endow the performing arts center so sufficiently that managers of the facility will be able to operate it on a break-even basis in perpetuity, obviating the need to worry about profits. He added that he also wants the Comins Foundation to support a range of community initiatives in addition to the performing arts center, with a particular focus on youth development.
Over the course of the past two weeks, Comins spoke with the Standard about his lifelong love of musical theater — the primary impetus of his vision for the future of the arts in the local area. His principal aim for the proposed performing arts center project is “creating a world-class theatre that is accessible to local children,” the community theater standout and philanthropist averred.
The roots of Max Comins’ passion for music run deep, commencing in grade school when he says he routinely attended legendary Broadway musical performances with his parents, and continuing into the early 1970s, when he performed with the fabled Harvard University a cappella ensemble The Krokodiloes. Comins then leapt enthusiastically into the musical theater world at the age of 26 in 1977, when he took on the lead role in “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” in a scaled-down performance in the dining room of Dunster House, one of the 12 undergraduate residences at Harvard. A short time later, Comins left his post-college job as a piano tuner in eastern Massachusetts and, via a family connection, landed an entirely different job as a trader at the Wall Street brokerage house of L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. In 1985, yearning to live in more bucolic climes than the madhouse of lower Manhattan, he parlayed his considerable Wall Street wealth into the purchase of the Kedron Valley Inn, reclaiming the South Woodstock landmark and operating it with elan for the next 17 years.
Coincident with his Kedron Valley run and on well into the new millennium, Comins also immersed himself in one of his earliest loves — community theater — taking on lead roles in shows produced by the former local favorites The Woolhouse Players, Pentangle Arts and BarnArts over the course of four decades, including iconic musicals such as “South Pacific,” “The Music Man,” “Cabaret,” and, in his last major role on a Woodstock stage, “The Producers” at Town Hall Theatre seven years ago. Now Comins hopes to turn his considerable wealth into a major cultural and socioeconomic plus for Woodstock area residents, their families, and visitors alike.
“I have tried, for the past seven years, to rebuild the Town Hall,” Comins said, referring to his own philanthropic tendencies and his largely behind-the-scenes work with a like-minded group of fellow local residents to restore the municipal building and its beloved Town Hall Theatre. “I have done everything in my power. I love the Town Hall. It’s where I’d done so many of the things that I would love to be able to see there again,” Comins noted, referencing the community theater outings he headlined over the years. But citing issues such as the difficulty in accessing the Town Hall stage via a cramped spiral staircase from the downstairs dressing rooms, the fact that the back portion of the Town Hall building needs substantial bolstering due to settlement, and the presence of an inadequate heating and ventilation system and antiquated, uncomfortable seating in the theatre, Comins says he came to believe it was untenable to simply renovate the old space. He has concluded that a complete rebuild of the Town Hall Theatre — and a thorough renovation and restoration of the entire municipal office building — was in order.
“My dear friend Jeff Dillon said to me, ‘Max, you really need to think about another location.’ And I didn’t think there was another location,” Comins told the Standard. “And Jeff mentioned the Gerrish property, which I thought was completely nuts. And then Jeff said, ‘No, it’s clean and it’s on the market.’ I thought it was a time for me to respond to the concerns the town had with an offer I’d made through Jeff and my lawyer, Lenny Easter, who was the leader of The Krokodiloes in my junior and senior years. I made the offer to fund half of the cost of the Town Hall renovations last winter during a lunch meeting with the new chair of Pentangle Arts, Stuart Matthews, along with the chair of the Woodstock Selectboard, Ray Bourgeois, and municipal manager Eric Duffy,” Comins continued. “Their concerns were that they wanted all the money up front. I was willing to put up half of what we now think would be a much higher price than was projected earlier — it was going to be $22 million, but with price changes and labor changes and so on, it would probably be $30-32 million now.”
Comins responded to the town leaders by telling them there was “no way I was going to give them that kind of money up front and then have no control over what happens.” He went on to say, “Number two, I hoped they would offer an abatement to adjoining neighbors of Town Hall to encourage them to give a small portion of their land — or even sell it to me and let me give it to the town — to serve as a right-of-way to access the stage area and loading dock. And number three, since the town had this fiduciary responsibility for the building and the need for town offices to continue in use, I suggested I temporarily buy Town Hall, find them a place to work temporarily that I would pay for, do all the work that needed to be done, and then when I finished, the theatre would be named after me and I would either lease the building back to the town for 99 years with an automatic renewal or my foundation would gift it to the town.”
Following ongoing discussions with town officials, mediated by Comins’ friend of 40 years, Woodstock selectperson Susan Ford, Comins’ vision for Town Hall did not bear fruit, causing him to shift his vision to the construction of the all-new, independent theater project he is now pursuing in the East End. On Monday afternoon, Ford wrote to the Standard about Comins’ vision from the perspective of Woodstock’s elected officials and community leaders.
“There was an effort by a lot of citizens a number of years ago to raise enough money to renovate Town Hall, which had Max’s financial support,” Ford said in an emailed statement. “About a year ago, he started working directly with the selectboard and our municipal manager to independently make this happen. Eric Duffy and Stephanie Appelfeller met with Max’s engineers and spent several hours discussing possible layouts for the town offices. In the end, we could not agree upon the timing and financing of the project. The selectboard is very appreciative of Max’s offer to fund half of the anticipated renovation cost. His love of Woodstock and his desire to bring an updated theater to this community are laudable.
“However,” Ford added, “there remain issues that made it impossible for the Town to go forward. As Max states, he offered to donate half of the funds for an anticipated $30-32 million dollar project. The selectboard did not feel that construction could start on that project in the way Max desired without all of the funding in place,” the selectperson continued. “When I met with him, I asked if it could be done in stages so that the disruption to town services would be minimized. That was not possible. Max’s plan involved the permanent relocation of the Town Clerk’s Office and vault, as well as prolonged disruption of all other offices presently in Town Hall. The selectboard previously looked into whether or not there was other space in Town in which all of the Town functions could be located. There is not. The concern is that if the other $15 million could not be raised, we would have a partially constructed building and displaced town offices. We believe that we owe the taxpayers fiscal responsibility, and this plan just did not meet that goal.”
In conversations with the Standard, Comins took pains to express his deep-seated support for the 50-year-old Pentangle Arts organization and the Town Hall Theatre it has operated for decades. He says he is, in fact, one of the largest donors to Pentangle, and he does not see his proposal to erect a new performing arts facility in the community as antithetical to Pentangle’s continued health and well-being as a beloved institution in the community.
“I love the Town Hall,” Comins offered. “It isn’t about that. It’s just that this town deserves to have a first-class, high-tech, anything-you-would-ever dream-of-theater, where we can have five or six of the first few rows seats vanish into the floor when somebody like the Drop-Offs are playing so that people can dance in front of the stage like they tried to do last year at Town Hall,” he noted. “I’m not looking to compete with Pentangle, right? The arts center, out of necessity and intelligence, will have a major screen in the theater for whatever purposes are needed, but it’s not going to be there to try to do film unless it’s part of a touring theater or musical group’s performance. There will still be the opportunity to have a film house and small performances at Town Hall, just as there are now.”
Comins said he is in the “very early stages” of working with nationally renowned theater designer Alec Stoll with Stages Consultants, a New Jersey-based company, to develop concepts for a “350-or-so-seat” performing arts venue with a small “black-box” theater, rehearsal spaces, administrative offices and a separate visual arts component, plus modest housing for visiting artists and summer stock theater and dance companies as well.
“I want to stress that while this performing arts center is for everyone in the community, it’s so much about the children,” Comins pointed out in an email earlier this week. “I’ve had a few folks say to me: ‘Not another theater — there’s just so many.’ Well, first of all, I don’t think there can be too many theaters and things focused on the arts in this time in the world, with funds being slashed for the arts by states and the feds. And second of all, while Artistree, Northern Stage and others are wonderful facilities doing great things, they are not in this town and this community — and therefore kids can’t walk there, but are reliant on adults to take them to these places, whereas, at a community performing and visual arts center, they will be able to safely walk to it and back home. They will be exposed to the annual shows as audience members or participants and make friends with folks they would never have met due to different socioeconomic circumstances, because these shows were a great equalizer.
“I’ve been very lucky and I’m humbled and grateful to be in this position — one where I can share that good fortune with the community that supported my attempt to create a vibrant and popular business at Kedron Valley Inn for 17 years and on the stage at Woodstock Town Hall over a 25-year period. I’d rather be lucky than smart is something I feel very strongly about,” Comins concluded.