Sonnentag Theatre at the IceHouse

The Sonnentag Theatre at the IceHouse has been Mount Dora’s community theater since 1948, when a group of residents met to organize a little theater company and elected officers that same evening. Their first production opened the following February in a converted ice plant, the building that eventually gave the group its lasting name, the IceHouse Players. After a decade of staging shows out of that repurposed ice plant, the company moved into a newly built 270 seat theater in 1958, constructed on land donated by the city, a strong early signal of how much Mount Dora valued having a resident theater company.

The current name dates to a 2011 renovation of the lobby and surrounding spaces, funded in part by the Sonnentag Foundation, which is when the venue became known as the Sonnentag Theatre at the IceHouse. The building still sits on North Unser Street, a short drive or a longer walk from the shops along Donnelly Street and the lakefront, and it remains one of the few purpose built community theaters in Lake County still producing a full season of shows every year.

Programming leans toward musicals and comedies, with a season that typically runs from summer through the following spring and includes five or six mainstage productions. Recent seasons have mixed classic musical theater titles with contemporary comedies, giving both longtime subscribers and newer audiences a reason to keep coming back. The company offers several ways to attend, including single tickets, group rates for parties of fifteen or more, and subscription packages that let regular theatergoers lock in seats for the whole season at a discount, along with flexible flex pass options for people who cannot commit to fixed dates.

Like most community theaters, the IceHouse relies heavily on volunteers, from the actors and crew building sets to the ushers taking tickets on show nights, and the organization is always looking for donations, sponsorships, and new volunteers to keep productions running. The box office itself keeps a light footprint, opening about an hour before curtain on performance nights rather than maintaining a storefront with regular walk in hours, so anyone planning a visit outside of a show is better off calling or emailing ahead.

For a town of Mount Dora’s size, having a theater company with this much history, nearly eight decades and counting, is unusual, and it says something about how central the arts have become to the city’s identity. Visitors who plan a weekend around Mount Dora’s antique shops and lakefront dining can easily build in an evening at the IceHouse, catching a live musical or comedy in a theater that has been part of the town’s cultural fabric since well before most of downtown’s current storefronts existed.