Bill DeYoung

Vinoy Park is ground zero for this weekend’s 50th annual Mainsail Art Festival, in which more than 250 fine art and craft exhibitors show and sell their work, and compete for a total of $60,000 in juried cash awards. What does that mean for us, the art-appreciating public? Assuming the weather gods play fair, it [...]

Spring has officially sprung, and April is blooming with more concerts, plays and festivals than the last couple of months combined. To borrow from the Fab Four, you know that can’t be bad. What’s the biggest of the big this month? Hard to say – certainly that’d be a matter of opinion. There are, however, [...]

There’s nothing soft and fluffy about The Pillowman, onstage through April 6 in a production by Tampa’s Jobsite Theater. British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s tale, while it’s essentially just people in a room, talking, is a potentially unnerving experience for theater-goers. Which was most like the playwright’s point. On today’s Arts Alive! podcast, cast members Georgia [...]

After 26 years in the same cramped building at 719 Central Avenue, the Morean Arts Center is ready to move up in the world. The exhibition and education facility, which celebrates its 108th anniversary in 2025, received a gift Tuesday from Pinellas County Commissioners: $2.25 million in funding towards a new, state-of-the-art, five story structure [...]

Ubiquitous in jazz, the saxophone is also a valued tool of the musical trade plied by classical players. The twain meet, somewhere in the middle, at Sunday’s Florida Orchestra concert at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater. Second on the bill to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is a piece by French composer Guillaume Connesson, a concerto for [...]

When Mike Hazlett and his wife Sue relocated to St. Petersburg from Boston nine years ago, they asked themselves: Why doesn’t a city this cosmopolitan have an independent movie theater? So began the tale of Green Light Cinema, which opened in early 2020, just before Covid shut everybody down for a while. Green Light survived, [...]

Filmed over seven sold-out nights last summer at St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater, comedian Bert Kreischer’s fourth Netflix special premiered on the streaming platform Wednesday. Lucky finds the perennially shirtless Kreischer, a St. Pete native, riffing on weight loss (he recently dropped 45 pounds), his family, and taking parenting advice from Snoop Dogg. In 2024, Kreischer [...]

Synia Carroll, the Sarasota-based jazz vocalist who left a career as a schoolteacher and storyteller to devote herself full time to music, died Friday after a struggle with cancer. She was 67. Carroll was a frequent and popular performer in the bay area, particularly at St. Petersburg’s Palladium Theater, where she was awarded a Creative [...]

Craig Pittman has a new book out, his seventh. It’s called Welcome to Florida. Nor surprisingly, that’s also the title of Pittman’s successful weekly podcast, which now has 275 episodes in the can and is listened to, he tells us on this edition of Arts Alive!, in something like 74 countries. The book, like the [...]

A longtime film industry professional, Tony Armer has done more to attract attention to Tampa Bay – specifically, Pinellas County – than anybody else with a foot in Hollywood’s revolving door. As the St. Petersburg/Clearwater film commissioner from 2014 to 2023, he worked tirelessly on the area’s behalf, luring filmmakers, videographers and advertisers here to [...]

When Jarrett Wolfe decided to open a new regional office for his national telecommunications business, he settled on St. Petersburg as the ideal location. It was, he’s 100 percent sure, a smart choice. Wolfe is the founder and Managing Partner of SmartChoice LLC, which provides voice and data, security, software, infrastructure and support to businesses [...]

In the middle of its 19th season, St. Petersburg Opera Company (a.k.a. St. Pete Opera) finds itself firmly woven into the cultural fabric of the community. The faithful know that SPO productions are performed by professional singers from around the world, and are delivered with sets, costumes and a full orchestra, at the Palladium Theater. [...]

The Sarasota nonprofit Embracing Our Differences has installed its seasonal art exhibition in in St. Petersburg’s Poynter Park, 1000 3rd Street S. – between the University of South Florida campus and the Poynter Institute. Consisting of 50 billboard-sized works of art, submitted by amateur artists, educators, students and young children from around the world, it [...]

Let’s all say this at the same time: “How can it be March already?” Moving on with our advance peek at what’s going on in entertainment and the arts in this third month of 2025: It’ll come in like a lion - and go out like a lion. There’s wall-to-wall good stuff here for all [...]

Fifteen juvenile sea turtles were released into the Atlantic Ocean Thursday by staffers and volunteers from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, where the animals had been in rehabilitation quarantine since December. The nine green turtles and six Kemp’s ridleys had been cold-stunned, the result of frigid or quickly-lowering marine temperatures. Reptiles are cold-blooded and low temperatures [...]

Addison and Wilson Mizer, eccentric California-born brothers who created their own version of the American Dream at the turn of the (last) century, are the central characters in Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical now onstage at freeFall Theatre. Joey Panek and Robert Teasdale play “Addie” and “Willie,” respectively, in the production onstage through [...]

The Tampa Bay Innovation Center has launched its 10th accelerator program cohort for early-stage tech startups. Through its B2B (business to business) accelerator program, the center provides training and mentoring in customer discovery, market validation, product strategy and investor readiness. Navigating these waters can be daunting for a startup developing new products, said Ken Evans, [...]

Reba McEntire, whose situation comedy Happy’s Place was just renewed for a second season, is the biggest name on the music lineup at this year’s Florida Strawberry Festival, in agriculturally-rich Plant City (Hillsborough County). Ostensibly a small-town fair (circa 1930) that’s grown into something music larger – primarily because of its country music concert series [...]

Earlier this month, the members of Little Feat were in Los Angeles, playing at an all-star tribute to singer/songwriter John Hiatt. As they left the stage to rapturous applause, the emcee bellowed “Let’s hear it for Billy Payne and Little Feat!” Payne, 75, froze in his tracks. “I was laughing with the other guys,” Payne [...]

Today’s guest on Arts Alive! is Ray Roa, editor-in-chief of the bay area’s long-running “alt-weekly” newspaper Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. A mix of local news and politics, coverage of restaurant comings and goings and local arts events, Creative Loafing strikes a unique balance. Roa, who was the paper’s music editor (succeeding Leilani Polk) before moving [...]