(Photo courtesy Daniel Perez)
The Good Page features positive LGBTQ+ news in Central Florida and Tampa Bay, uplifting and inspiring stories highlighting locals in our community. Here, we meet AKA Cabaret Founder Daniel Perez.
He didn’t grow up thinking entertainment was a job. He thought it was just something people did for fun, right up until college, where he was double majoring in engineering and theater without fully admitting to himself why. That contradiction, the practical degree and the thing he couldn’t stay away from, is still doing work in how he builds shows today.
Now he runs AKA Cabaret, a live entertainment company popping up around Orlando with a specific, almost stubborn philosophy: no fourth wall, no suspension of disbelief, no passive audience. Just a room full of people feeling something together, on purpose.
Here’s what that actually looks like.
Perez moved to Orlando about two and a half years ago, after eight years working in entertainment in Japan. He didn’t grow up here. Asked whether Orlando’s queer history weighs on him as he builds something new, he doesn’t claim it as his own story. He talks instead about what he’s witnessed since arriving: the resilience and strength of the community, something he says has genuinely moved him and shaped the work itself.
Before any of that, though, there was engineering. Perez had always loved theater, but growing up, it never occurred to him that it could be a career, not a hobby, not something people actually did for a living. So, he went to college for engineering. Theater followed him there anyway, until he was double majoring in both, and it was during those years that something clicked: entertainment wasn’t just something he loved. It was an industry. A viable one.
Perez is specific about what he wants that openness to mean: a room where performers and guests, queer or not, feel like they can be themselves.
The name itself carries that same layered logic. “Aka” means red in Japanese, the color of cabaret and red curtains and Moulin Rouge. But it also reads in English as “also known as,” which is the part Perez leans into.
Come to a show and you might be a different version of yourself for the night. His drag performer, Daisy Dior, is also known as Ryan offstage. The name does double duty: it’s a color and it’s permission to transform.
The current production is a music-based cabaret called “Love Out Loud,” built around love songs by LGBTQ+ artists, hosted by Daisy Dior, backed by a violinist and two vocalists. Perez describes the show less as fixed choreography and more as a framework, scripted enough to hold together, loose enough to actually respond to who’s in the room that night. That looseness is intentional.
Perez talks about “immersive” as a word that’s gotten overused in Orlando, a city full of massive immersive entertainment companies, and he means something narrower by it: presence, not spectacle. No separation between performer and audience. No asking anyone to pretend the person on stage is really a character. Just a wink, an acknowledgment and a room full of people choosing to be there together.
He traces the company’s animating phrase, “entertainment as medicine for the soul,” to a collaborator in Japan. It’s stuck with him because it names something he says he feels every time he’s at a live show: a kind of collective euphoria when a room laughs or reacts together. That instinct, that shared emotion is something worth manufacturing on purpose, is the engine behind everything AKA does.
Perez credits a former boss and mentor, Mike Davis, with shaping how he thinks about the work. The lesson that stuck hardest: talent is the most important element of any live experience. A great performer can carry a show through bad lighting and a thin budget. Bad talent can’t be saved by anything. It’s why Perez says protecting and valuing the artists he works with isn’t nice to have, it’s the foundation.
He’s also explicit that the mission isn’t purely artistic. He talks about wanting AKA to be a sustainable business, one that can pay artists, technicians and production staff a livelihood, not just produce a good show and disappear.
AKA is currently developing an “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired cabaret called “House of Hearts,” premiering in a non-theatrical venue this fall, and taking “Love Out Loud” to Fort Lauderdale in September.
Interested in being featured in The Good Page? Email Editor-in-Chief Ryan Williams-Jent at Ryan@WatermarkOutNews.com in Tampa Bay or Central Florida Bureau Chief Bellanee Plaza at Bellanee@WatermarkOutNews.com in Central Florida.
