I walked over to Coligny one Tuesday evening this summer expecting the usual. Grab dinner, maybe catch a show at the old art-house theater if the timing worked out, listen to whoever was playing on the deck at Big Bamboo Cafe on my way back. Instead I found a line forming outside the Coligny Theatre for something with a cast, a set, and a live band. No screen in sight.
That theater has been showing something on that screen, in one form or another, since 1972, back when it was called The Island Theater and was the only movie house on the island. It got a full renovation in 2001 and reopened the following March as Coligny Theatre, an art-house spot built for independent films and a more grown-up crowd. For most of two decades, that was the deal. You went for a movie. This year, for the first time, you go for a play.
The Theater That Learned to Sing
The change is Sea Glass Stage Company, a local theater group that has taken up residence in that same historic building. This isn't a new business flipping a sign on an old storefront. It's a format change in a space Forest Beach residents have been walking past for fifty years. Coligny's owner, J.R. Richardson, put it simply when the company moved in, saying our north star has been giving our community a space they can call their own, and that Coligny has always thought of itself as more than shops and restaurants. Mark Erickson, who runs Sea Glass Stage, called the group the next caretakers of this historic space.
What that actually meant for anyone living here this year was a real season instead of a rerun schedule. In May, the company staged Steel Magnolias, which closed May 16. By July, the same building was running something entirely different in tone: The Toxic Avenger Musical, with a score from Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan and a book by Joe DiPietro, which ran July 9 through July 26. Two productions, two genres, inside four months, on a screen that used to just show whatever was playing that week. That's a bigger swing in programming than the theater made in the previous twenty years combined.
If you missed both, the venue is still worth bookmarking. Sea Glass Stage posts its lineup at sgstage.org, and given the pace of this year's turnaround, whatever comes next probably won't be a rerun either.
The Rest of the Week Hasn't Moved
Everything else at Coligny kept running on the same clock it always has, which is part of the point. If you live within walking distance of Forest Beach Drive, the week still looks like this:
- Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:30 to 8:30pm — Ben Hughey plays an acoustic set on the deck at Big Bamboo Cafe, same as he has for seasons now.
- Wednesdays, 9pm on — the same performer switches gears entirely, spinning 70s and 80s disco. This slot only started this spring, on March 25.
- Fridays, starting at 7pm — a Beatles tribute act, The Beagles, plays the deck.
- Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 5 to 7pm — Jevon Daly runs a storytelling show for kids at Coligny Center Stage, timed for the early-dinner crowd.
None of that is new information if you've lived here more than a season. What's worth noticing is how little of it has changed while the theater across the courtyard rewired itself completely. Big Bamboo added a second weekly slot for the same musician instead of hiring someone new. The plaza still throws its Souper Bowl of Caring fundraiser every February in the parking lot between FISH Casual Coastal Seafood and Skillets, with proceeds going to Second Helpings, the hunger relief group serving Beaufort County. The rhythm holds. The theater is the one thing that got rebuilt from the inside out.
What Actually Turns Over Here
Restaurants change hands constantly in this stretch, which is normal enough that it barely registers as news. The space at 5 Lagoon Rd, a short walk from Coligny Beach and Lowcountry Celebration Park, spent years as Rock Fish Seafood & Steaks before a Pittsburgh-based group opened Dive Bar & Grille there. That's an operator swap. The building didn't change what it does. It served food before, it serves food now.
The theater swap is a different category of change. A building that spent fifty-plus years doing one thing, screening movies, started doing something else entirely, and the neighborhood absorbed it without much fanfare. That's the kind of shift that tells you more about a place than a new restaurant ever will. Forest Beach isn't a static backdrop that occasionally gets a new coat of paint on its storefronts. It's a place where the anchor building on the main drag can quietly become something else, and the weekly rhythm around it barely skips a beat.
If you've lived here through both versions of that theater, you already know what I'm talking about. If you're newer to the neighborhood, it's worth understanding that the version of Coligny you're walking through this month is not the one that sat there for the two decades before it, even if the surf shops and the ice cream counter at The Frozen Moo look exactly the same as they always have.
Building a Week Around What's Actually Here
The easiest way to get the most out of Forest Beach isn't to treat Coligny as a tourist stop you pass through on the way to dinner. It's to build a week around the things that actually recur: Tuesday and Thursday evenings on the Big Bamboo deck, a Friday Beatles set, and now, whenever Sea Glass Stage has something running, an actual reason to walk into that old theater expecting a story instead of a screening.
That's the small, specific thing that changed here this year. Not a new business. A building that's been part of the neighborhood since before most of us moved in, doing something it has never done before.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually shifting in a neighborhood before it shows up in a listing description, that's the sort of detail Live in the Lowcountry tracks closely across Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry. Join the VIP List and we'll keep you posted, whether that's the next Sea Glass Stage production or whatever else changes shape next.
