The Bower Theater, designed by renowned Flint architecture firm McKenzie, Knuth & Klein, has served as a community mainstay since 1957. The traditional, proscenium-style theater building was home of the Flint Youth Theatre (FYT) until 2018 and originally housed arts classes for Mott Community College.

In 2022, the theater experienced a flood which saturated the entire stage and left two feet of standing water in the basement. This unfortunate event sparked conversations that reimagined what a restored space might look like. With its long-awaited transformation now imminent, art and community are being freshly forged out of challenging circumstances, as is often the case.

Growing into the Community

Bower Theatre sits adjacent to Elgood Theatre, a 130-seat black box theatre that has been the home of Flint Repertory Theatre since 2018. With the use of Elgood limited during Bower construction, the innovative Flint Rep team got creative and sought a new temporary home for the season.

“What better way to find new connections and make new friends than when we need to be out of our building?” said Nicole Samsel, the interim artistic director for Flint Rep.

Samsel partnered with Shelby Newport, chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Michigan-Flint, to utilize the UM-Flint theatre for Flint Rep’s 2025-26 regular season productions. The season will be especially unique in featuring a ‘first’ for the two programs, a co-production with UM-Flint students and Flint Rep professionals.
“It’s a very impactful theatre program … we have a lot of alumni who regularly work here, so it felt like a no-brainer. Students having access to professional theater gives them more opportunity to develop into young theater professionals. It’s mutually beneficial,” said Samsel.

UM-Flint and Flint Rep have always been active collaborators in varying capacities, like a faculty member performing or costume designing for a Flint Rep production, explained Newport.

“This co-production and having Flint Rep in residency is the first large scale collaboration of this kind and it means a lot for UM-Flint,” said Newport.

“Having a professional theatre company less than a mile away has always been great for engaging with professional work, but to have them in our space means more opportunities to witness the work being created and collaborate as equals on a piece together. It also means that we will be able to finally mix our audiences — I’ve always wanted to share the UMF theatre with the Rep audiences and now we get to do that,” she said.

Leslie Hull, a Flint Rep associate artist, is an alumna of UM-Flint’s Theatre program and said that she would have benefitted from the educational-professional pipeline between the two organizations when she was a student.

“It’s beneficial whole-system-wide … The more we support artists as a thing that we need to have in communities, the more people believe professional artists are something viable and good and should be respected,” Hull said.

Flint Rep’s presence will also bring some energy to UM-Flint’s largely commuter campus.

“I think the activity of a three-week run for four productions, as well as rehearsal time, will build some fun buzz around the theatre building and French Hall,” said Newport.

There are endless opportunities to partner with UM-Flint and other community organizations, even after the Bower’s eventual renovation is complete.

Newport believes the partnership will draw more community awareness about the outstanding arts work happening within both organizations.

“We hope that it opens up a lot of doors of collaboration that are going to benefit everybody,” said Samsel.

Click here to learn more about The Rep’s 25-26 season.