There’s an oft-quoted line from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
As founder and executive director of three live theaters along the St. Clair River, Kathy Vertin, from the riverfront town of St. Clair in St. Clair County, is making dreams come true in her hometown and neighboring Marine City. She firmly believes the riverfront between St. Clair and Marine City should be home to Michigan’s version of Ontario’s Stratford Festival.
In pursuit of her dream, Vertin is promoting Thumbcoast Live Theaters, three regional stages that are just one step below equity houses like Detroit’s Fisher Theatre and the Detroit Opera House. Thumbcoast is home to musicals, plays, and year-round events that feature paid actors and staff, and it also runs an academy for young actors.
After her husband, Tom, sold his business in 2007, they semi-retired to nearby Harsens Island. But it seems the acting and producing bug she was bitten by in college still needed scratching; she discovered her love of the stage was still calling.
We got a little restless and we went to this theater (The Encore Musical Theatre Co. in Dexter). The town was hopping, so I wanted to do the same thing in our community. My question was, How do we jump-start this to make it a reason more people want to come here?” Vertin says.
Her efforts began in a vacant storefront, which became what is now Marine City’s Snug Theatre in 2013. In one year, the word was out and the little 100-seat house, she says, was bursting at the seams. Just down the street, she found a historic bank building that they transformed into the Riverbank Theatre, with 180 seats, the following year.
“In 2015, we added an academy for students in K-8th grade (they now serve students through 12th grade). Students normally don’t get exposed to theater until high school. Tom and I sustained the theaters to get them launched. By the end of 2015, they were self-sustaining and we put them into nonprofit status,” she recalls. Still, her dream hadn’t reached its final scene.
“With our board of directors, we did some higher-level visioning. I thought this could be the same kind of modeling as the Stratford Festival in Ontario,” Vertin says. “With community theater, you tend to audition within your community. Often everyone who auditions gets cast, in order to draw a bigger audience. At the other end of the spectrum is equity theaters and professional touring groups. We’re a regional non-equity house and we audition and cast actors from all over Michigan and out of state. We audition, we cast, and we pay our actors. Most of the actors have day jobs but really love to act. It gives them an outlet for their craft, or (an opportunity) to discover latent skills,” she says.
In 2023, her dream expanded yet again. Thumbcoast landed $4 million in mostly local donations and, before long, a third venue was on the way.
“We built a new 370-seat venue, The Boardwalk. It’s a dream come true for all of us. The community really got behind us. It was like they were saying they’re glad to have this in our community and want more of it,” she says.
