The marquee on Ingersoll Avenue sat dark for more than a decade. Not dim, not flickering, just off, the kind of off that makes a building start to look like a rumor. Then late last year the lights came back on at 3711 Ingersoll Ave, and if you live in Waterbury, that building is close enough to matter. Grand Avenue marks the neighborhood's southern edge, and Ingersoll runs one street south of Grand. This is not a downtown outing. It is a short drive, or on a nice evening, a genuinely walkable one.
Here is the part worth knowing before you book a table: this exact idea, dinner and a show under this same roof, has been tried before. It worked for a while. Then it didn't. Understanding why the first run ended is what makes the current one worth paying attention to, because the people behind it built something structurally different this time, not just a fresh coat of paint on the same plan.
Three Lives, One Building
The building started as a movie theater in 1939, built specifically for sound films at a time when that was still a novelty in Iowa. Its original price tag was $35,000, a figure that would run past $800,000 today. It ran as a movie house until 1977, when it closed for the first time.
Two years later it reopened as the Ingersoll Dinner Theatre, and for most of the 1980s and 90s that model worked. Musicals, comedies, tribute performances, all paired with a meal in a cabaret-style room. By the early 2000s business had slowed enough that the operators tried pivoting, first to a straight restaurant, then to a nightclub. Neither stuck. The building closed for good in 2014 and stayed empty until 2022, when Des Moines native Connor Delaney, founder and principal of White Oak Realty, bought it.
| Era | Years | What It Was |
|---|---|---|
| Sound-film theater | 1939 to 1977 | One of Iowa's first theaters built for sound film |
| Dinner theater | 1979 to 2004 | Musicals, comedy, and tribute acts paired with a meal |
| Restaurant, then nightclub | 2004 to 2014 | Two short-lived attempts to reposition the space |
| Vacant | 2014 to 2022 | Sat empty until purchase by developer Connor Delaney |
| The Ingersoll | 2025 to present | Reopened as a touring-content dinner theater |
What Actually Changed
The dinner theater model that ran from 1979 to 2004 relied on locally produced original shows, the kind of operation where the venue itself was writing, casting, and staging its own productions night after night. That is an expensive, labor-intensive way to fill a calendar, and it is a common reason small dinner theaters fade once the novelty wears off and the production costs catch up.
This time, Delaney brought in a different kind of partner. In 2024 he teamed with Steve Peters, founder and CEO of VenuWorks, a company whose business is booking touring content into historic venues rather than producing original shows in-house. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Instead of one theater carrying the full cost of writing and staging its own material, The Ingersoll now slots into a circuit of touring acts, national tribute bands, comedians, and packaged productions that already exist and are already touring somewhere.
"This is more than a renovation, it's a reinvestment in Des Moines," Delaney said. "This historic tax credit allows us to protect an irreplaceable piece of the city's history while breathing new life into the Ingersoll Avenue corridor."
Peters framed the partnership similarly, saying theater occupies a place where history, art, and community converge, and that the goal was preserving the past while curating experiences for future audiences.
The restoration itself leaned on public money built for exactly this kind of preservation. The project received a $728,818 state historic tax credit, part of a larger $1.75 million package of combined state and federal historic tax credits that Delaney used to fund the restoration. That is public money tied to a legal requirement to preserve the building's historic character, which is part of why the green brick exterior and the original marquee location survived the renovation instead of getting replaced with something more generic.
What a Night There Actually Looks Like
The Ingersoll reopened with a grand opening ceremony on December 28, 2025, followed by its first ticketed public show on New Year's Eve. Renee Crowell, the venue's executive director, described the goal as giving the community a place to gather and celebrate, calling it an elevated blend of dining and live performance meant to strengthen the neighborhood's culture.
A few practical details, if you are weighing whether to go:
- The room seats roughly 200 to 225 guests across the main floor and mezzanine, an intimate scale compared to a typical concert hall.
- There is no fixed menu. Each show gets its own chef-curated dinner built around the theme of that night's performance, with entrees that have included a grilled Iowa-raised hanger steak, ginger teriyaki salmon, honey herb roasted chicken, beef Wellington, and a vegan roasted root vegetable and mushroom ravioli.
- The ticket price includes the meal. Cocktails, wine, and beer are separate.
- Parking is available at 609 38th Street or on nearby streets, an easy stretch for anyone coming from the Waterbury side of Grand.
- Early in 2026, the venue ran an introductory promotion pricing tickets at $60 for dinner and a show through the end of February. That window has since closed, so current pricing should be confirmed directly with the venue before you plan a night out.
What's Actually on the Calendar
The programming mix leans intentionally broad rather than betting everything on one genre. Jazz orchestra nights sit alongside Broadway revues, stand-up comedy, tribute bands, and a recurring drag brunch. That range is itself part of the strategy the touring-content model makes possible. A single in-house production company would struggle to stage a jazz orchestra one week and a Broadway revue the next. A venue booking already-touring acts can rotate genres without retraining a cast or rebuilding a set.
For a neighborhood that has watched storefronts along this stretch of Ingersoll turn over more than once, that kind of built-in flexibility is worth noting. It is a different bet than the one the building made in 1979, and different from the one that ran out of momentum by the early 2000s.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Live Nearby
None of this changes anything about home values or listing timing, and that is sort of the point. If you already live in Waterbury, the useful thing here is not a market signal. It is that a building you have probably driven past dark for years now has a lit marquee, a professional booking partner instead of a from-scratch production model, and a public preservation dollar behind its restoration. Whether that adds up to staying power is something the next few years will answer. But the difference between this attempt and the last one is real, not cosmetic, and that is usually the thing that decides whether a reopened building becomes part of a neighborhood's routine or just another quiet closure a few years out.
If you are weighing a move into Waterbury or thinking about what your own home here might be worth in a neighborhood where a few blocks can mean the difference between a quiet porch and a walk to dinner and a show, Martha Miller Johnson knows this stretch of Des Moines block by block. Let's Connect.
