Feature
Lookback
- The editors
- Fred Lopez
Role With It
Five years ago, Miguel Salas was impossible to miss.
There he was, dressed as Don Quixote and staring out from the very first cover of The Local, fresh off what he still describes as a dream role in the Garden Theatre’s Man of La Mancha.
“It was like a miracle,” Miguel says.
These days, the scene looks a little different. There’s a toddler in the background as we talk, occasionally pulling Miguel away from the conversation. One minute he’s talking about performing opera, the next he’s tending to his youngest son.
It’s a pretty accurate snapshot of life lately. “It’s been the busiest five years,” he says.
A vibrant mix of music, art, and family, to be exact.
Miguel has performed and directed with Central Florida Lyric Opera, including its production of La Bohème, taught choir and piano, and run bilingual summer music camps for kids with his wife, who is a painter and actress. The family also has a business providing entertainment, games, face painting, and other activities for children’s parties. And their own family has grown, too. Their oldest son is now 10, while their youngest turns 3 in November.
On top of all that, Miguel recently returned to writing plays and music, including a fully bilingual musical called The Wizard Astronaut, which he created with his 10-year-old son.
“I have been reactivating that part of myself, and it has been amazing,” Miguel shares.
They performed the play at the Orlando Fringe Festival and hope to bring it to California soon.
In fact, nearly everything Miguel does these days seems to involve his family in some way.
“There’s no daycare. They come with us. They’re a part of it,” he says of his two young boys. Other opportunities have continued to come his way, too. In August, Miguel performed as part of the Timucua Arts Foundation’s Songs of the Hispanic Diaspora. The concert featured a series of poems set to music by Central Florida and American composers, exploring themes around the immigrant experience.
Like Man of La Mancha five years ago, it’s material Miguel connects with deeply. Finding his way in a new country hasn’t always been easy, but 10 years later, he has built a life filled with performing, creating, and sharing it all with his growing family.
“I live a happy life, and this is a lovely city to live in and raise kids,” he says. “I count my blessings.”
The Garden Theatre’s Next Act
With one eye on its storied past and another on what comes next, Dennis Morgan and Alina Williams are bringing fresh energy, familiar stories, and a community-first vision to Garden Theatre on Plant.
The first thing you notice is the noise.
The orchestra is warming up beneath the stage. Conversations bounce around the lobby as friends spot one another from opposite sides of the room. Someone leans over the balcony railing for a first look at the stage below. Volunteers greet guests at the front doors, and everywhere you look, people are smiling like they’ve been waiting for this moment longer than they realized.
After years of uncertainty, Garden Theatre on Plant has its energy back.
“We were asking ourselves, ‘Will they come?’” Dennis Morgan says, laughing at the memory. “And then they came.”
He isn’t exaggerating.
The Rocket Man Show sold out almost immediately, leaving more than 160 people on the waiting list. DNA Productions expected a few dozen people to wander through a recent community open house. Instead, hundreds streamed through the theater, peeking into the auditorium, exploring the lobby, and imagining the performances to come.
Spend five minutes with Dennis and his business and life partner, Alina Williams, and it becomes clear they’re completely, unabashedly in love with the idea of what a theater can do.
Dennis is already answering the next question before you’ve finished asking the first. Ask about the season and, within minutes, he’s talking about 1935 movie houses, Broadway licensing, live orchestras, downtown restaurants, rescue dogs, community partnerships, and why actors deserve to be paid. In Dennis’ mind, none of those ideas exist separately. They’re all part of the same story.
Alina lets him go for a while. Then, with perfect timing, she says, “We had six weeks.”
Four words explain everything. While Dennis is already imagining opening night spilling into dinner reservations, holiday programming, and the theater’s long-term legacy, Alina is remembering licensing deadlines, production schedules, and the color-coded calendars that made those dreams possible.
They finish each other’s sentences. They interrupt each other. Dennis dreams out loud. Alina quietly figures out how to make it happen.
Somewhere between those two instincts, Garden Theatre on Plant found exactly the leadership it needed.
Places, Please
Long before they stepped into theater management, Dennis and Alina built careers creating live experiences. Dennis performed professionally before moving into creative direction with Disney and later corporate event production. Alina’s background blends theater, production, and operations. Together, they founded DNA Event Creative, producing large-scale events for clients around the world.
Running a historic theater wasn’t necessarily the next step.
Then again, neither was launching a production company during a global pandemic.
When the opportunity arose to submit a proposal to manage Garden Theatre on Plant, they didn’t simply see a building.
They saw possibility.
“We really wanted this to be community first,” Dennis says. “This isn’t a money venture. This is a passion project. This is something that we wanted to be in to raise up our city, raise up our children, and raise up everybody to understand that art is a part of the community.”
Spend enough time with Dennis, and you realize every conversation eventually finds its way back to community. Ask about the season, and he’s talking about live orchestras because he wants musicians to have work. Ask about the productions, and he’s talking about paying actors, building partnerships, and creating reasons for people to gather.
That’s exactly how the inaugural season came together.
Winning the city’s RFP was exhilarating. It lasted about 30 seconds. Dennis still laughs remembering the city meeting when Mayor John Rees announced DNA Productions had been selected to manage the theater. Then came the next question. “So… what’s the first show?”
The room laughed. Then reality set in.
Most theaters have more than a year to secure rights, build a season, and announce programming. DNA Productions had six weeks. Sticky notes soon covered the office walls. Dennis compares it to a Saturday Night Live writers’ room. One show would be approved, another denied. Rights disappeared. New ideas replaced old ones. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, the season introduced itself.
Dennis describes it as “a love letter” to the original theater that opened in 1935.
“The theater originally started as a cinema house; those are its roots,” he says. “We wanted to celebrate the fact that it is now a cinema house and a live-events theater.”
Instead of assembling unrelated productions, Dennis and Alina built a season that reflects the building itself, connecting its history as a beloved movie house with its future as a destination for live entertainment.
“You don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”
Now Playing
If Dennis dreams in big ideas, Alina is already thinking about the audience.
Who will come? What will they want to see? How do you convince someone who’s never set foot inside a theater that this place belongs to them, too?
Those questions shaped the inaugural season.
Rather than programming for seasoned theatergoers alone, Dennis and Alina built a lineup around stories audiences already know: Footloose: The Musical, Come What May: A Tribute to Moulin Rouge & Other Movie Musicals, The 39 Steps, Josie & Grace, and 9 to 5: The Musical.
“What’s cool about the theming is that people might not have that whole interest in theater, but they’ll know these titles,” Alina says. “They’ll know Footloose. They may have seen the movie… hopefully that will encourage some new fans of the future.”
The concert series follows the same philosophy, welcoming fans of Elton John, Jimmy Buffett, The Beatles, and country music through the theater’s doors with the hope they’ll come back for something unexpected.
Ask Dennis what success looks like, and he isn’t talking about sold-out performances. He’s imagining Plant Street filled with theatergoers grabbing dinner before the show, lingering over cocktails afterward, and discovering downtown along the way.
“Every time we have a show, you’re anticipating a full theater,” Alina says. “The spillover of that is, they’re going to go to dinner before the show, they’re going to go have a cocktail before the show, they’re going to grab coffee before the show. We want to see them spilling into the streets to support the restaurants, the stores, everything around the area.”
That same thinking extends to the season itself.
One of Dennis’ favorite productions isn’t a Broadway musical at all. It’s Mutts Gone Nuts, a nationally touring canine comedy featuring adoptable rescue dogs in partnership with Polka Dogz.
“We want to help the shelter in our community,” Dennis says. “We want our productions to dig deeper and find those connections with components of our city where we really can make a difference, and Mutts Gone Nuts is a really fun one.”
That’s the thing about spending time with Dennis. Just when you think you’re talking about theater, you’re suddenly talking about animal rescue. Or downtown restaurants. Or live orchestras. Every conversation circles back to the same belief: a theater should make the community around it stronger.
For all of Dennis’ enthusiasm, though, he keeps coming back to one idea.
“There is nothing like the shared experience of theater,” he says. “You all walk out having gone through something together.”
The productions will change. New artists will take the stage. Seasons will come and go. But if Dennis and Alina have their way, every performance will end the same way: hundreds of people walking back onto Plant Street carrying the same story home.
Next Level Ninja
““““““““Four years ago, Aaron “The Big” Deal made a prediction.
At 11, the Horizon West athlete had already competed on American Ninja Warrior Junior. He didn’t win, but he walked away with a bigger goal. “I can’t wait to compete with the adults at 15,” he told us back then.
Turns out, he wasn’t dreaming. He was making a plan.
Today, Aaron is no longer watching the grown-ups tackle the world’s most famous obstacle course. He’s one of them, competing as an American Ninja Warrior national finalist against athletes ranging from teenagers to seasoned veterans in their 50s.
Last year, Aaron submitted a three-minute audition video, answered pages of questions and waited.
“It was almost like a shock,” he says. “I didn’t really expect to get on. It was my first season submitting.”
A month later, he was in Las Vegas.
Filming stretched from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m. Somehow, Aaron kept up with coursework while advancing through the competition.
“I’m not super emotional,” his mom, Beth, says. “But I kept looking at him thinking, ‘Whose kid is this?’ He handled everything with such grace.”
“The first buzzer was the one I really wanted,” Aaron says. “After that, everything else just felt like a bonus.”
He still trains three to four days a week, adds climbing for grip strength, and has already applied for next season. But ask what keeps him motivated and it isn’t television. It’s the people. “It’s still the community,” Aaron says. “They help push you. I’m competing against my coaches now, so practice has gotten harder, but that’s what makes it fun.”
Four years ago, Aaron couldn’t wait to compete with the adults. Now he’s one of them. And something tells us The Big Deal isn’t done making plans.
Flock Star
Somewhere in John and Karen Blonn’s home sits a LEGO set that doesn’t technically belong to either of them. It belongs to Lady Blue.
A 7-year-old boy received the blue-and-gold macaw set for his birthday and decided the real blue-and-gold macaw in his life should have it instead. So he gave it to Lady Blue.
That’s life when your family includes a local celebrity.
Long before Lady Blue became one of Winter Garden’s most recognizable residents, though, John and Karen were simply bird people. Both grew up with them, and birds remained part of their family after they married. For their 25th anniversary, they decided to go bigger.
They found a breeder who treated the process more like an adoption, requiring several visits to make sure everyone was a match. Then, at six weeks old, Lady Blue fell asleep in Karen’s lap. That was that.
Nearly two decades later, the bond between the three has made Lady Blue’s world increasingly bigger. John and Karen have spent years training and socializing her, building the trust that allows them to take her into the community. Recently, that has meant visits to senior care facilities and hospitals, where Lady Blue seems to have an instinct for people who need a little extra gentleness.
“We didn’t start out looking for a superstar bird,” Karen says. “But she loves people.”
“And people clearly love her back,” John adds.
Five years after we first introduced Lady Blue to readers, she hasn’t changed much. At 19, she’s a little older, a little mellower, and even a little wiser, adding “Bye, Blue” to her vocabulary. And yet, her flock just keeps growing.
Doughing Great
Danielle Perera cries at bagel shops now. Not every day, mind you. But often enough.
It happened in Nashville when she spotted a woman wearing a T-shirt from the Kickstarter campaign that helped Jeff and Danielle open their first shop. “How do you have that shirt?” Danielle asked.
Turns out, she’d been buying their bagels since the COVID-19 porch pick-up days.
Those days feel almost impossible now. Jeff and Danielle were about to open their first brick-and-mortar shop in Ocoee when we featured them in 2021. This week, Jeff’s Bagel Run opens No. 39. Thirty nine!
But ask Danielle what she loves about the life they accidentally created, and she doesn’t talk about numbers. She talks about people.
People who serve Jeff’s bagels at weddings. Families who make a bagel run their Sunday tradition. A woman undergoing cancer treatment who tracked them down in Raleigh to thank them for making her daughter’s birthday special.
“We just want to bring joy to people,” Danielle says. “That hasn’t changed from store one to store 39.”
“We raised over $20,000 to get our first shop open,” Danielle says. “And so we’re always like, how do we pay that community back?”
They’ve been answering that question ever since, supporting local schools, feeding teachers and students and, soon, opening in Hamlin.
“It’s where it all started,” Danielle says. “Feeding our friends and neighbors, who are still our favorite people.”
She pauses. “What is this life? How did we get so lucky?
“Being part of the first issue was incredibly special. We built Jeff’s Bagel Run as a place to build community and being part of The Local felt like we had begun to accomplish that mission.”
—Danielle Perera, Jeff’s Bagel Run
Petals to Power
A lot can happen between a bouquet of flowers and a seat at City Hall. Just ask Chloe Johnson-Brunson.
In 2022, she was handing out blooms and handwritten notes to strangers around Winter Garden, each carrying a simple message: You matter. The flowers were part of I AM HER, Chloe’s mission to encourage women, create connection, and strengthen her community.
Today, the mission looks a little different.
In April 2024, Chloe was sworn in to represent District 3 on the Winter Garden City Commission. At 36, she made history as the youngest woman ever to serve on the commission.
The leap from flowers to public office may seem like a big one, but Chloe was already laying the groundwork. Even then, she was involved in East Winter Garden improvement efforts and looking for ways to make a difference in the community she calls home.
Now she has a seat at the table.
As commissioner, Chloe has traded one-on-one acts of encouragement for the complicated work of representing a district, weighing competing priorities and casting votes that help shape Winter Garden’s future.
At 36, she made history a the youngest woman ever to serve on the commission.
Five Years Grown
Want to know what five years looks like? Meet Kennedy and Leilani.
We first photographed them as newborns for our very first issue, tiny humans with no idea who they might become. Five years later, we invited them back. And, well, they have opinions now.
Kennedy is “the boss of kindergarten.” She knows all seven continents, plans to build houses someday and belts Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Britney Spears from the car with serious attitude. She’s also fearless, recently conquering the Fahrenheit Drop at Blizzard Beach without hesitation. These days, though, her biggest obsession is her 6-month-old sister, Perry, whom she happily supplies with things to chew on. And after years of insisting on dresses, Kennedy now allows shorts into the rotation, but only with pink shoes.
Leilani’s mom calls her a “force of nature,” obsessed with dance, shoes and sparkly eyeshadow. She wants to be a police officer “because she wants to save people” (last month, firefighter) and believes 5 is plenty old enough to drive the golf cart. Also fearless, she rarely hesitates when adventure calls. She randomly breaks into the tap and ballet routine from her recital, fights “tooth and nail” over outfits she doesn’t approve of and, when the situation warrants, declares, “You are Coo Coo in the Coco.”
Back then, they were babies we could hold in our arms. Today, they’re brave, funny and very much their own people.
Now look at them.
