WILLIAMSTOWN — When customers sit in Mandi Parker’s salon chair at the Clip Shop, the talk lately has turned to summer — and what Williamstown will look like without its signature theater festival.

The Clip Shop, on Spring Street, sits just blocks from the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, where the Williamstown Theatre Festival typically fills seats each summer. The salon has a steady, year-round local clientele, said Parker. But oftentimes during the festival's height in the summer, actors stop by asking for specific haircuts for their characters, or visitors seeing performances would stop in.

Stylists work on clients at The Clip Shop in Williamstown. Mandi Parker, manager of the shop, said while business is steady all year for the Spring Street salon, it will miss the walk-in crowd that traditionally swells in the summer due to Williamstown Theatre Festival.

“It’s that walk-in influx that we are definitely going to be missing,” said Parker, who is manager of the shop.

The uncertainty among residents and business owners follows the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s decision to skip its traditional summer season this year while transitioning to a new, long-term artistic model. Officials announced Jan. 20 that the festival will return in 2027 on a biennial schedule, but for now, business owners say its absence is likely to reshape both the economic and cultural landscape of downtown Williamstown.

The summer festival will remain a cornerstone of the institution's programming, said officials, but it will no longer be its sole focus. Its new model will now include year-round programming outside the Berkshires — short-run performances, pop-up events and exclusive events in cultural hot spots worldwide, as well as a new digital streaming membership.

While it's been years since the festival — considered one of the nation’s most highly regarded summer theaters — mounted a full eight-week summer season with performances running in tandem on multiple stages, the complete absence of it physically in the town it's named for will be hard to miss, business owners say.

Ken Gietz, the owner of Where'd You Get That? in Williamstown.

For Ken Gietz, owner of Where’d You Get That!? Inc. on Spring Street, the festival’s absence will represent a “huge” number of people who won’t be stopping by the game and gift store Gietz owns with his wife, Michele.

The first quarter of the year is typically slow for businesses, Gietz said, but they have historically relied on a summer rush driven largely by the festival.

“It’s going to bring less people to town,” he said. “The people who help support the festival, that’s extra shoppers.”

Business owner Amy Ward said she is scared for the coming summer. The longtime owner of the Spring Street boutique, Amy’s Cottage, said she normally relies on the busy season to recover from winter and spring months that often operate at a loss. She said the festival’s pivot is forcing her to rethink how she runs her business.

Amy Ward, owner of Amy's Cottage boutique in Williamstown, said her business will be impacted by Williamstown Theatre Festival's decision to pivot to a biennial model.

“I’d love to hire an extra employee,” said Ward, who had just bought more stock for her store in anticipation of the summer rush. “But we may have to keep limping along with what we have if we can’t depend on people coming in.”

During the summer, festival-goers come in and buy the thousands of Berkshire-themed souvenirs, home goods, knickknacks and boutique clothing that Ward offers. This summer, those customers will largely be absent from the town of just under 10,000 residents.

“However many seats are in those theaters, those people are going out to dinner and shopping beforehand,” she said. “That is huge ... and it brings in however many workers and they all shop and have coffee, breakfast and lunch."

Some business owners said the pause would affect them financially, but still supported the festival’s decision to test a new model.

Other business owners didn’t think the pause would have much economic impact.

Mixing up energy drinks on a recent weekday in her store, Logan Lamphere, who owns the downtown beverage shop Unlimited Nutrition, didn’t think there was much overlap in festival-goers and those who come to her shop.

“That is not our clientele, ours is mostly local,” Lamphere said of her Spring Street shop.

Kathleen Tooey Carbone said she wasn't worried about the festival’s impact since her nonprofit secondhand clothing store, ABC Clothing Shop, attracts customers from all over.

“We have a lot of transient people coming in from other areas,” she said.

Nature’s Closet, an outdoor clothing and gear shop, saw a rush of customers during the recent winter storm that swept much of the country, as people stopped in for base layers and other cold-weather essentials, manager Katie McKay said.

Katie McKay is the store manager at Nature’s Closet on Spring Street where year-round outdoors enthusiasts shop. But McKay expects to see a drop this summer in customers without the annual theater festival in town.

In the summer, when people come for the festival, they inevitably forget something that McKay sells.

“It’s ‘I forgot my sunglasses,’ or ‘I need a sun hat,’” said McKay, who grew up in town and said that the festival traffic historically creates a substantial amount of business.

But it's not just about the economic impact, Parker said, the culture changes when the festival returns each summer.

“You notice when they arrive in town,” she said. “The people working the theater arrive, and the vibe changes; you are seeing totally different people walking on the street. It is a totally different Williamstown.”

With the festival gone this summer, Parker and Ward wondered how that energy would come back. Many businesses see a seasonal influx with ski season and leaf peepers in the fall, but without the festival in summer, the vibe is a question mark.

Nature's Closet employee Kerrie Brenner has lived in town for only a few years, but she’d been to outdoor events that the festival hosted with local businesses. She noticed how many more people were out and about because of the festival.

Kerry Brenner, an employee at Nature’s Closet in Williamstown, said the Williamstown Theatre Festival is about more than just its economic impact to the town its named for — it's also about the "vibe" the people create.

“There’s just more people around, and it’s nice to see,” she said.

Since around the time of the pandemic, some businesses said, the festival’s presence in town has fluctuated in capacity. Attendance in 2024 was 11,552. In 2025, ticket sales were 16,035. Those numbers are still low in comparison to 2011, when the festival announced box office sales of 40,000 tickets for a season that included three mainstage productions, five shows on the Nikos Stage and some 200 other public performances, including its free theater, works-in-progress, readings, cabaret and student performances.

When the festival started putting on fewer stage productions in the last few years — as a response to right-sizing itself after complaints about its workplace practices — Gietz had already noticed a negative impact on his business, but said "nevertheless, we get an influx."

He remembered when the festival attracted troves of A-list celebrities to the area, many of whom would walk around downtown and even get a sandwich named after them at Pappa Charlie’s. It wasn’t just theater lovers that the festival attracted, he said, it also brought in celebrity-hunters who wanted to see the likes of Christopher Reeve, Dick Cavett and Blythe Danner walking around Spring Street.

While the future is uncertain, Ward optimistically wondered who or what would create more events to draw people into town.

And for Parker, the festival has been around so long that it was hard to imagine its absence.

“What is summer without the theater festival?” she said.