Kim Thomas grew up in a musical family. Her father is a classically trained baritone, a jazz trumpeter, and for most of his professional career he has been a church music minister. During his long stint at the Lee University, Cleveland, TN, young Kim was immersed in orchestra, choirs, and music performances. “So many of the music students ended up being my teachers and mentors,” she says. “I was being babysat by singers and songwriters.” Naturally she grew up learning music and says that as the token preacher’s kid she had to learn one song on one instrument a week. But while she fiddled with drums, trumpet, baritone horn, keys, and … well, a fiddle, none of that took. But something that happened to her when she was eight years old sure did. “I was in the audience for a performance, and while everyone else had their eyes on the performers, I was looking around at the lighting and audio wondering how [the technical part] was all happening.”
That eight-year-old girl has since run monitors, been a stage manager for Parx Casino, and scored a coveted production manager gig for Princess Cruises. Since 2019 she’s been a production manager, second in charge of all live production aspects onboard the ship, and supervisor to teams of up to five production assistants. Responsibilities included audiovisual operation of various cabaret venues, television studios, piano/jazz bars, wedding venues, and multi-purpose piazzas.
And it seems like it’s all just getting started for her.
An Early Start
Thomas was born in England to British/Jamaican parents and brought to the States when she was two. She was bounced around a bit between Tennessee, Florida and Pennsylvania. At the age of 10, she found herself behind an audio console at the church. “I was always there for rehearsals, and it became a game: Find the tone — where is that coming from?” She figured out signal flow, EQ and the difference between volume and gain. “Luckily, I didn’t blow anything up,” she says with a laugh.
As a young teen, the family moved to West Palm Beach, FL. As she was “the child who couldn’t keep still,” her parents let her go out on weekend tours with Speaking Hands, an American Sign Language group who would put on music shows that were for both a hearing impaired and hearing audience. For nearly three years she headed out with the group on Friday afternoons traveling around the region, returning Sunday night. While she was performing in the group, she also took an interest in the all-around production and got her first taste of production managing. “I was pulled out of my shell — I felt happy.”
Next, the family moved to Harrisburg, PA, when she was high school freshman. It was a typical high school, and not the arts one she had been going to. It did offer a media class, but it was available only for seniors. “I made a deal with the principal and made them put me in that class all four years. It was the only way for me to get what I needed.” After that, she attended a local community college where she stage managed Agnes of God. Then she returned to Lee University to study and ended up working in the school’s production services department, helping with all the university’s video content. In charge of video recording and archiving all the recitals for the music department, she developed her audio, video and production skills further. “I enjoyed every minute crewing and coordinating,” she says. In 2014, she headed to Full Sail University in Winter Park, FL.
During her first few months at Full Sail, she got the opportunity to meet Ron Davis of Harvest Productions. She ended up getting her first international touring experience with Harvest while pursuing her education as a hybrid student. She returned to campus and graduated from Full Sail with her Bachelor’s Degree in Show Production. Through the school, she landed an internship at Orlando’s House of Blues, plus her contacts at the school led her to assorted other gigs along the way. “All the teachers there are working professionals, and you never knew what they would come up with. Once, I got a call for a bird watchers conference that needed A/V production, and it’s like, ‘Let’s go do it.’”
Dream Job (For Now)
Next, Thomas took a job as technical director for a local performing arts center near Nashville. “It was part Parks and Rec, part Mozart in the Jungle,” she says, laughing. After eight months of that, a call came from Nathan Powell at Philadelphia’s Parx Casino about their newest venue, the Xcite Center. She went up there to do monitors for their mid-sized concert venue, and her first day on the job was working with the band Chicago. Soon she was stage managing.
Then came the dream job. “I grew up in the age of Disney, and I saw the [1998] movie Parent Trap. While all the other girls my age were dreaming of falling in love on a cruise ship, I was the one asking, ‘How do I get a job on one of those?’”
From the earliest days of her live event career, she’d do research, determined to make it happen. It did in 2019, and impressively she was hired as second in charge, taking care of five to eight acts on any given day.
The Covid pandemic briefly marooned her in Singapore when the ship was heading into maintenance. She managed to get back home. There, she quickly became restless, so when a church in Tennessee (where she had previously interned) called her again, she returned helping however she could in a production capacity. “They moved to a hybrid campus, and we had to figure out what that would look like.” Meanwhile, she is completing a Master’s Degree in Entertainment Business at Full Sail University. She’s waiting to return to the ship or whatever else comes next.
“I like the hustle and bustle of being a production manager, but I enjoy everything on the ground level,” she says. “I’m happy pushing cases, too. I love stories and the details of that storytelling in a performance. Everybody has a story that needs to be told and my job is to make sure that that story is received.”
