By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
Following nearly a year of due diligence concerning wetlands and other environmental issues, longtime community theater luminary, financial investor, and philanthropist Max Comins has purchased a well-known, 4.6-acre tract in Woodstock’s East End. The successful acquisition of the property formerly owned by the Gerrish family is a major step forward in Comins’ vision of bringing a world-class “cultural hub” and performing arts center to the local community.
Comins closed on the purchase of the East End property from former owner Phyllis Gerrish on May 6 for $1.4 million. He has assembled a project management and consulting team, predominantly drawn from the local area, Vermont, and New Hampshire, to begin bringing his ambitious vision of the Max Comins Performing Arts Center to fruition. Site preparation on the property is already underway, even as Comins and his team move forward with ongoing environmental, engineering, and design phases of the project while preparing to apply for local and state Act 250 zoning and land-use permits later in the year.
Max Comins
Comins, 75, has had a successful career in financial investing and consulting, as well as in the hospitality world as the former owner/operator of the Kedron Valley Inn in South Woodstock from 1985 until 2002. He is also well known regionally as the lead performer in celebrated musical theater productions at Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre, the Little Theater at the Woodstock Recreation Center, and with the locally beloved New Woolhouse Players over a quarter century from 1993 until 2018, starring in such iconic Broadway works as “South Pacific,” “Cabaret,” “The Music Man,” and “The Producers.”
The creation of the proposed cultural hub in Woodstock is being funded through the Max Comins Foundation, a recently formed, 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational entity. Charlie Rattigan, the nonprofit organization leader and multimedia director/creator who has called Woodstock home since 1992, is serving as the project director for the cultural center proposed for 450 Woodstock Road (Route 4), across from East End Park, the Maplefields convenience store, and Farmer and the Bell eatery at the eastern entry to Woodstock’s village center.
Comins and Rattigan sat down together last Friday in Comins’ Woodstock Village home for an exclusive interview with the Standard regarding plans for designing, permitting, building, and opening the state-of-the-art performing arts venue in the East End by the spring of 2029. The pair said they hoped to break ground on the expansive project in the spring of next year, following the successful completion of permitting processes before local and state, quasi-judicial regulatory authorities.
Rattigan projected that construction of the project will take an estimated 18 months to two years to complete, once ground is broken at the former Gerrish automotive dealership site. Rattigan, who transformed the Vermont Institute for Natural Science (VINS) in Quechee during his decade-long executive directorship there from 2014 through his retirement in 2024, kicked off the Friday conversation by summing up the work he and Comins have done with Vermont environmental officials and a regional wetlands specialist to determine where the footprint of the proposed performing arts center will be located.
“There’s a complex permit process that goes on both locally and with the state, and there are a number of things that you have to satisfy in each case, so we wanted to be confident that we could build the vision within the allocated available space, and that required some analysis of the terrain,” Rattigan explained. “Some wetlands were discovered on the terrain. We needed some assurance from the district wetland specialist that we would be able to work within what is traditionally considered to be the boundary between the wetland and where activity can happen.” Rattigan met with state regulators multiple times over the past several months. He and Comins also engaged the services of Audra Klumb of the Canterbury, N.H.-based consulting firm A&D Klumb Environmental to conduct a site assessment of the Gerrish property to determine where the performing arts complex could best be situated.
Beyond its cultural contributions to the local area, the new performing arts center will be devoted to environmental stewardship. The Max Comins Foundation intends to transform the historically disturbed and ecologically challenged site into a “green-engineered campus,” modeling sustainable development while protecting and restoring local riparian ecosystems and stream buffers, Rattigan and Comins each averred. When the Standard visited the East End property in the mid-afternoon last Friday, excavation equipment was on hand, and crews had already begun breaking up the former parking lot of the one-time auto dealership to prepare for recycling of the asphalt according to Vermont state regulations. And although “brownfield” contamination at the site was certified as mitigated under state and federal environmental guidelines several years ago, Comins is committed to fully excavating and removing any limited, remaining fuel-contaminated soils on the property before construction of the performing arts center gets underway next spring.
In a vision statement that Comins and Rattigan provided at the outset of last week’s interview, the pair offered an overview of what the theater-going public in the region can expect to enjoy once the cultural hub is completed. “The [cultural] Hub is designed as a multi-disciplinary campus where the process of art making is as celebrated as the final performance,” Rattigan wrote in the one-page prospectus for the proposed Comins Performing Arts Center. The main theater in the complex is projected to be a 400-seat venue equipped with a full fly loft, designed to hoist and store scenery, curtains, and high-tech lighting out of the audience’s view. The state-of-the-art, 21st-century facility will be equipped to host community, regional, and national touring theatrical, dance, and music productions, noted Rattigan, who was an award-winning and Emmy-nominated multimedia producer, director, and writer in addition to his years at the helm of VINS.
The Comins-backed cultural facility will also include visual arts and movement studios for professional and resident artists, featuring specialized infrastructure for a wide range of media. An “educational wing” in the complex will include specialized classrooms and studios to support year-round workshops, summer arts camps for area youths, and residency programs for nationally touring theater and dance companies. Comins is especially committed to the social, cultural, educational, and artistic development of area youths and views the proposed performing arts facility as the crux of that commitment.
“This is the beginning of a long-held dream of mine to create a community space for the performing arts, professional theater, and an arts educational space for residents of the community, particularly children,” Comins said last week in discussing the cultural facility that will bear his name. “One of my main goals for this is to make community theater something that’s real for all children, two or three times a year, where they see their friends, their family, their parents, their friends’ parents, or themselves in theater. “I want to inspire them to be performers. They could be on the other side of the counter at the bank or the grocery store or the farmers’ market, and that’s as close as they get — they don’t know each other, many of them, until they come to the performing arts center. And then eight to ten weeks later, they’re like a family. They would never have met if it weren’t for that [theater experience] and I think [that bond] is incredibly important for a community.”
In an email follow-up to the Friday interview, Rattigan confirmed that Comins is seeding the creation of the performing arts center with a gift of “approximately $50 million,” which is projected to cover all the permitting, design, and construction costs for the facility. In addition, community benefactor Comins will also establish an endowment for the permanent operation of the proposed cultural hub, contributing additional funds from his own coffers and seeking financial support from others in the local, regional, and national philanthropic and grantmaking communities to assure the successful operation of the Woodstock-based performing arts center in perpetuity.
Local, regional, and national contractors, consultants, and organizations involved in the early engineering and design phases of the Comins Center project include New Hampshire-based wetlands consultant Klumb; Cliff Harper, a hydrogeologist, civil and environmental engineer from Windsor; Stages, a renowned theatre design firm from New Jersey that offers full-service, expert guidance for planning, designing, and constructing performing arts venues; and architects Black River Design of Montpelier. Mechanical engineer Roy Swain from the Keene, N.H.-based firm Kohler & Lewis will assure the new facility’s compliance with the highest levels of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Once the entire project has moved through local-, state-, and federally mandated screenings and permitting processes, competitive requests-for-proposals (RFPs) and bids for general contracting services will be sent out by Rattigan.
“We envision the Hub’s gallery and community spaces as a vibrant ‘living room’ for Woodstock,” Comins said in a Monday press release that also followed up on last week’s interview. “A place where neighbors gather to connect, learn, and celebrate our collective spirit.”
For more information on the Max Comins Performing Arts Center project, contact Rattigan at [email protected].