LOS ANGELES — Even to intro duce a stage show in which he does not appear, Mr. Dan sure knows how to make an entrance.

Not long ago, to the sounds of “Fat Bottomed Girls,” by Queen, he hustled out from behind a tattered curtain onto a makeshift set made to look like the Miami living room of “The Golden Girls.” He played air guitar, strutted and finally twerked: leaning on the coffee table, his man-caboose high in the air, like a middle-aged exotic dancer unleashed upon thrift-shop rattan.

It was a lot to take in on a Thursday night in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. But at the Cavern Club Celebrity Theater in eastern Los Angeles, a hotbed of drag performance that is actually as well as figuratively underground, it was just business as usual. Week in and week out, Mr. Dan is the well-rehearsed host and Svengali of this speakeasy in Silver Lake.

“Am I the producer? Am I the director? Am I the ingénue?” he wondered rhetorically in an interview . Officially, he is the artistic director, and this month is his 25th year in a position that sometimes has required him to be all three.